Sermon VIII. Unity in Diversity the Perfection of the Church
When you desired me to take a part in your great Festival, I answered that I would with much willingness do your bidding, as a token of my love and veneration for the Religious Orders of the Church, and especially in England; and in printing this Sermon at your request, I do so as offering to you and to them, a tessera charitatis, and that we may obtain in return a share in your charity and your prayers.
Believe me always Your affectionate servant in Jesus Christ,
HENRY EDWARD MANNING.
ST. MART OF THE ANGELS, BAYSWATEK, feast of the Guardian Angels, 1860.
PERFECTION OF THE CHURCH.
" We being many, are one body in Christ." Rom. t xii, 5.
On such a day as this, it is easier to find many topics on which to speak, than to choose one alone on which to dwell. The consecration of this stately and beautiful i/ church, raised by the munificence of one person, with the august Catholic rites, would alone be enough to make a festival; but it is more than this. The Catholic Church in England adds this day one more to the rising order of its cathedral churches, and restores another of its centres of unity and authority; renew ing its ancient loss, as nature, with its ever fresh and reproductive life, heals its wounds and reclothes its wastes. This beautiful church is henceforth to be numbered with the cathedrals of Salford and South-wark, Nottingham and Plymouth. In this, again, we might find an adequate subject for to-day.
But other thoughts still arise upon our solemnity. To-day, St. Benedict receives the restitution of a portion of his ancient glory in England. Once more he is found, as of old, amid the woodlands and the rivers, and the waving harvests, and the fruits of the earth. Once more in the solitudes of our land he comes, with the staff of discipline and the finger on his lips, to take possession of his home. Once more, after three hundred years, he goes forth with the Patriarch " into the fields to meditate" at eventide. Here he has reared his walls, and here he has renewed somewhat of his old majesty and splendour. And to-day we have heard the same sweet solemn chants, the same antiphons and responsories, which sounded through the roofs of Westminster and Glastonbury, of St. Alban s, Bardeney, and Croyland. They are sung, too, by the sons and lineal descendants of the same men of old, who are now before the Throne, in token of the un dying vitality of the Church of St. Benedict.
This, too, would give us a worthy topic for our festival.
But I seem to see in it something still more singular and proper to this day s solemnity. We are met for the consecration of a Monastic Cathedral. He who rules in this see, with the unction of the Episcopate, is a son of St. Benedict. The canons of his chapter are monks; the seminary attached to the Cathedral Church is also the noviciate of a religious order. To-day is the first and singular example, after three hundred years of this union of the Hierarchy in all its manifestations with the life of religion, so glorious in the Catholic history of England. In the celebration of to-day, then, I seem to see a betrothal of the two great ministries of the Church the Secular and the Religious. It is the festival of their espousals; and the invitation which has brought together the Hierarchy and the Secular priest hood with our brethren of the Religious Orders is a o bidding to union and to mutual joy. This morning, the right reverend Prelate who spoke to us of the glories of St. Benedict, and of the interior life of God in the soul of which he was the patriarch, told us that he spoke as a Benedictine; and though I have received no delegation, and am not worthy of the charge, nevertheless I trust that the secular Hierarchy and priesthood gathered here will not disclaim what I say, when, as a secular priest, I accept this invitation in testimony of the love and veneration which we all bear to the great Saints of God the founders of the religious life, and to their families the Religious Orders of the Church, and especially in England. We and they are united by every bond of charity, by the ties of brother hood, by the union of our forefathers in faith and patience, by the glory of their memories, and by the fellowship of their martyrdom. When the storm swept over the Church, three hundred years ago, Seculars and Religious witnessed and suffered side by side. They stood in one array, and mingled their blood on the same scaffolds. We may take up for them with an emphatic truth the Responsory which the Church puts into the mouth of her priests on the Feast of Many Martyrs: u Hsec est vera fraternitas, quae nunquam potuit violari certamine: qui eff uso sanguine secuti sunt Dominum;" and renewing the Confession which the Saints of old bore in the basilicas and palaces of Imperial Rome: " Contemnentes aulam regiam, pervenerunt ad regna coelestia. Ecce quam bonum etquam jucundum habitare fratres in unum." This subject, then, seems to be especially seasonable to-day, when we celebrate the union of these two great orders of the Church in the person, as it were, of St. Benedict and of his sons; for the large, loving, and benign spirit of the great patriarch of the religious life has always been especially dear to the Priesthood of the Church in all lands, and above all in our own. I know no passage in ecclesiastical history more touching than the long confessorship and the closing act of F. Buckly, the last whom the tempest of the Reformation left to St. Benedict. When exile and martyrdom had swept off his fathers and brethren, he was left alone, the only lingering witness of the family and the apostolate of St. Benedict in England. After forty years of imprisonment, when he was ninety years of age, and the hour of death drew nigh, and all hope of a lineage in England seemed to be cut off, two secular priests came to him to ask for the habit of the Order. After due trial he clothed them; and on the day when he had transmitted the spirit of St. Benedict to his sons, he became blind. He had seen his heart s desire upon earth, and his eyes longed only to see the King in His beauty, on whose glory they soon were opened.
We claim, therefore, a peculiar tie of spiritual consanguinity with the Father and Brethren of this monastery, and on this subject I would ask to dwell for a while to-day. My object will be to speak of a theme trite in itself, and yet ever new in its application the intimate and indivisible unity of the Secular and the Religious in the Church of Jesus Christ.
The Apostle, then, in the Epistle to the Romans, tells us that the Church or mvstical Bodv of Christ, is
*/ f so fashioned and organised, that, though manifold in its members, it is absolutely one. He goes on to say: u And having different gifts, according to the grace given to us, whether prophecy, to be used according to the proportion of faith; or ministry, in minister ing; or he that teacheth, in doctrine; he that exhorteth, in exhorting; he that giveth, with simplicity; he that ruleth, with carefulness; he that showeth mercy, with cheerfulness."
As in the living body are many members, offices, and perfections, and all designed and wrought by the Divine wisdom and power, so also in the Church. All the integral members of the Church are ordained of God, and all its manifold activity, its harmonious unity of life, is directly created and ordered by Himself.
He chose out and united the twelve into one body, and bestowed upon them the presence and inhabitation of the Holy Ghost, whereby the Church received its Divine gift of twofold infallibility the passive, whereby the whole body was pervaded by aluminous consciousness of the Revelation of God, as the light of the sun diffuses itself throughout the waters of the o great deep: the active, whereby the Church, with unfaltering voice and the precision of a supernatural intelligence, propounds the dogma of faith and the law of morals in every land and in every age. The whole mystical body received the effusion of this flood of light, and with it the exuberant communication of all the gifts and graces of the Holy Ghost, not in its intelligence alone, but also in its moral powers. The charity of God was poured out into its heart by the Holy Ghost, who was given to it. An interior fountain of charity was opened in the mystical Body; the two precepts of love were fulfilled in it; and by the presence of the Sanctifier and the inheritance of His created graces, the soul of the mystical Body was constituted, adorned, and assimi lated to the image of God. The likeness of the Divine perfections of the unity, sanctity, and beauty of Gad was seen in reflection; and the image of the Word incarnate, its Divine Head, in the perfection of our humanity, was shadowed forth in its life on earth. It was for this the Apostle prayed when he asked for the Ephesians, that He may grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened by His Spirit with might unto the inward man. That Christ may dwell by faith in your hearts: that, being rooted and grounded in charity, you may be able to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth, and length, and height, and depth: to know also the charity of Christ, which surpasseth all knowledge, that you may be filled unto all the fulness of God."*
It was this that the Apostle described, when he said: " We all, beholding the glory of the Lord with open face, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the spirit of the Lord."f
And in this complex perfection and manifold fulness * Ephes., iii, 16-19. f II Cor., iii, 18.
of the mystical Body there are various and almost in exhaustible powers and perfections of light and love, of order and activity, vitally necessary to each other and to the whole Church. As in the individual soul there are its three natural powers, and its three supernatural graces, and the seven gifts and the twelve fruits, and the manifold endowmentsoftheHoly Ghost, intimately combined with and vitally necessary to the body, which again bestows upon the soul its instrument of power and motion and action and perfection so with the Church. Its unity, solidity, visibility, expansion, coherence, and universal action depend upon the organisation and perpetuity of its Hierarchy. The college of the Apostles was the condition of the diffusion of light and charity through the world, as its succession and continuity is of its preservation. The world was filled with its operations, and by it the presence of the invisible God is manifested. For eighteen hundred years, in all lands, the visible Church has j witnessed for the invisible kingdom of God; ever renewing its organisation, and extending itself into new regions of the world. As it has receded in the East, it has reproduced itself in the West; as the North has withered, it has put forthitslife under the Southern sun. And in the continuous evolving of its successions, from age to age, the end and functions of the Hierarchy are manifest. The college of the Apostles is, as it were, the point of rest and firmness, from which the vast activity of its visible structure and jurisdiction takes its spring.
So also from the earliest consciousness of the mystical Body the science of Theology began to arise. The intellectual conception and expression of the great dogma of the faith, full-orbed and perfect from the beginning in the mind of the Church, assumed perpetually a more definite and explicit form. The light which, from the day of Pentecost, dwelt in fulness in the intelligence of the Church, exhibited more and more its exquisite precision and distinctness. The Creed of the Apostles, expounded by the definitions of the first four great Councils, became a foundation and a structure of Theology, which has been ever rising to its perfection. It was first committed to the Saints of the East to order and elucidate the science of the Church. The line of St. Athanasius and St. Basil and the two Gregories ends in St. John of Damascus, the forerunner, as he may be called, of the Scholastic method. Next it passed to the doctors of the West, to your own St. Anselm, to St. Thomas, St. Bonaventure, and to the constellations of illuminated intelligences which shine in succession through the families of St. Benedict, St. Dominic, and St. Francis. By them the interior gifts of light were elaborated into the luminous science of God, which rules, as Queen in the Hierarchy of sciences, over the intellect of the world.
And in this world of interior light, there is still an inmost region into which only the most illuminated can enter: the centre in which God dwells with special intimacy, and manifests Himself by His operations in the soul. The science of dogma is the avenue to the science of the Saints, to the theology of the mystical life and its perfection. It is here the chosen ministers of the Spirit have their field of toil. They watch and record the interior experience of the life of God in the mystical Body, and describe the ways of God, the transient motions of His feet upon the waters as with the pencils of the solar light.
What, then, are these three powers and operations of the Church but those of which the Apostle speaks when he says that the external Hierarchy of Apostles and Doctors was instituted for " the work of the ministry, for the perfecting of the Saints/ and by reaction of their vital influence, for " the edifying of the Body of Christ?" And these three operations have been ever working, never stayed or hindered, but always accomplishing their own laws, and attain ing always to their own end, namely, the perfection of the whole Body of the Church.
It is God Himself, then, who so ordained the essence of His Church, and implanted in it these vital and necessary faculties and powers, that has distinguished them within themselves, and in their elaboration and exercise, so that they can never be confused.
The Apostle says: " There are diversities of graces, but the same Spirit; and there are diversities of minis tries, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but the same God who worketh all in all But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man unto profit. To one, indeed, by the Spirit, is given the word of wisdom: and to another, the word of knowledge, according to the same Spirit: to another, faith in the same Spirit: to another, the grace of healing in one Spirit; to another, the working of miracles: to another, prophecy: to another, the discerning of spirits: to another, divers kinds of tongues: to another, interpretation of speeches. But all these things one and the same Spirit worketh, dividing to every one according as He will." "And God hath set some in the Church, first Apostles, secondly Prophets, thirdly Doctors, after that miracles, then the grace of healings, helps, governments, kinds of tongues, interpretations of speeches."*
According to the same law, by which He committed
*I Cor., xii, 4-1 1,28.
the pastoral commission and the twofold jurisdiction over His natural and mystical Body, together with the custody of the Seven Sacraments, to an order specially chosen out and anointed by Himself, so He has singled out and distributed to individuals among His servants the special custody, exercise, and elaboration of the several gifts of His Spirit. As the Hierarchy, by its world- wide and continuous action, in its tribunals and councils, and its supreme Legislator and Sovereign, has built up the structure of the Pontifical law, by which the wills of nations and peoples are harmonised and combined in the obedience and unity of the Church; so He has committed to His servants, specially chosen and called, the trust and development of particular gifts. Every several perfection of the mystical Body has been, as it were, incorporated: the interior life in St. Benedict, the power of preaching in St. Dominic, poverty in St. Francis, spiritual asceticism in St. Ignatius, love of the sick in St. Camillus, of the Sacrament of Penance in St. Alphonsus, the Passion of Jesus in Blessed Paul of the Cross, and a thousand more besides.
The Blessed Sacrament alone has I know not how many guardians and special witnesses; the Sacred Heart, the five Sacred Wounds, the Precious Blood, each has its Saint and its special manifestation.
What is this but the same great law of diversity in unity and harmony in multitude; every several gift, distinct from any other, and intrusted each one to the special care of its own Saints and children? And all that the Spirit of God has wrought in and through these chosen Saints, He has perpetuated in the families of their lineage. In order to give intensity and perpetuity to their work on earth, He has created round them those who, being penetrated by the same Spirit, and conformed to the same work of grace, sustain, and even unfold to greater breadth of manifestation and application, the special work of their lives. What are these but the great orders of the Church, which in leisure and retirement and mutual help and continual accumulation, fill up the work of their founders, and perpetuate it from age to age?
And God has so knit them together in the unity of the same Body, that, though they be distinct, they are indivisible. They are united together by inhering in the same essence of the Church; they are interwoven by the mutual influence of their operations; they are inseparably combined by their action and reaction, which, as it operates, "perfects the Saints and edifies the Body of Christ." " For the Body is not one member, but many. If the foot should say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? And if the ear should say, because I am not the eve, I am not of the body; is t/ 7 / it there fore not of the body? If the whole body were the eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where would be the smelling? But now God hath set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased Him. And if they were all one member, where would be the body? But tt now there are many members indeed, yet one body. And the eye cannot say to the hand, I need not thy help: nor again, the head to the feet, I have no need of you. And if one member suffer any thing, all the members suffer with it; or if one member glory, all the members rejoice with it. Now you are the body of Christ, a,nd members of member."
And our Divine Lord, in committing to Peter, His Vicar upon earth, the two keys of jurisdiction and of knowledge, made him the supreme head and uniting bond of all these interior ministries of His Church. To St. Peter was said, "Allpoweris given to me in Heaven and on Earth. Going, therefore, teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and be hold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation1 of the world;"* and again: "Feed my sheep."t To him was committed the toil and the burden of an apostolic life; and to all his successors, and to the Secular Hierarchy united with them is appointed the outer life of warfare and government, of jurisdiction and of judgment. But I may say that the key of knowledge has been entrusted by St. Peter himself to the Orders of Religion; to those who, withdrawing from the dust and the glare of the outward toils of the Church, mature in secret the interior life, the spirit of counsels, the science of God and of His Saints. As in the old law there were in the Temple many courses of ministers, some to beat out the oil, and others to trim the lamps in the house of the Lord, so now it is to the Orders of Religion that we come for the toils and fruits of theology matured in rest and silence. It is from them we draw the secrets of the interior life, and the spirit which must sustain and sanctify us in the overtoil of our daily labours. And yet God has so tempered all things together in His Church, that to the apostolic authority, to the episcopate sitting in its consistories and its councils, all, even the doctors and teachers of the religious life, must come, as to the fountain of jurisdiction and of light, of discernment and of judgment On the heads of the Apostles and their suo2 cessors rests the gratia veritatis, the special gift and unction of the Faith. And they sit as judges on the illuminated labours of all; for they rule the Church, and are the guardians of the Faith, and with them in its fulness is the grace of Pentecost, as St. Irenseus writes: " God has poured out His Spirit into the Church as into a pure vessel. Where the Spirit is, there is the Church, and where the Church is, there is the Spirit and all grace." All the theology of the Church, dogmatic and mystical, passes at last under the judgment of the Church in its Hierarchy, and of its Supreme Pontiffs, and is corrected by its discernment, and stamped with its authority. Now in this the whole body is bound together by the bonds of universal communication of its lights and gifts, and by the reciprocation of its distinct and various opera tions. Though the members be many, yet they are, in their vital action, one living whole.
But this beautiful harmony and unity of the body, in St. Benedict is carried even to an identification of orders and operations, otherwise distinct. As an exuberant vine, with its running branches and broad leaves, overspreads the massive structure of a wall, and hides all beneath with the richness of its foliage and the multitude of its clustering fruits, so was the family of St. Benedict. It seemed at one time to take possession of the Visible Church. Its interior spirit entered into the line of Pontiffs. The twelve degrees of humility ascended the Holy See, and sat upon the Apostolic throne. Fifty Pontiffs of the family of St. Benedict have reigned over the Church of God. St. Gregory the Great, and St. Gregory VII, no less great than he, and four successors, who lifted the Pontificate to its highest fflorv, were all sons of St. Benedict.
A writer some four centuries ago told us that the Order numbers up more than twenty thousand Arch bishops and Bishops. It was a Benedictine Pope who sent St. Augustine, a Benedictine monk, to England. For six hundred years every Archbishop of Canter bury, with one exception, wore the monastic habit. The English Hierarchy was chiefly Benedictine. The English cathedrals were half, at least, Benedictine. The schools and universities of England were founded by Benedictines. Catholic England was so predominantly Benedictine that it has been called the Apostolate of St. Benedict; and from England, again, he sent forth his sons into France and Germany, and the countries of the North and of the Alps. Never in the history of any Order, or of the Church in any age, was the union of the religious and secular ministries carried to such an identity. We may well, then, rejoice to-day in the return of these times of mutual joy. A Benedictine cathedral, with a seminary by its side, is a type of what once was, and if the Church of England is to do its great work of grace, of what, whether by this same identification, or by the harmonious unity of our two great ministries, must be again.
We are here, indeed, as I have said, for a great festival; and the law r and truth it teaches us is this that Secular and Religious are but names of distinction for those who are vitally necessary each to the other, and in all their diversity of action indivisibly one. We are one in the interior life and spirit which is common to all; we are distinct in the diversities of instrumental gifts, and of special ministries intrusted to us.
God has variously enriched us with divers gifts, and distinguished the ministries of His Church with a diversity of instruments for the accomplishment of one only end. To some He has given the power of jurisdiction, and placed them on thrones to be the judges and rulers of men; to some, the pastoral commission, to feed, to fold, and to give account for souls; to some, the lights and distinctions, the angelic illuminations, and the seraphic unctions of scientific theology; to some, the gifts of prayer, the ways of meditation, contemplation, andrecollection; to some, the gifts of spiritual tact and intuition to guide us to perfection; to some, the burning zeal of apostles, the activity of evangelists upon the mountains, and their insatiable thirst for souls; to some, again, the gifts of silence and of prayer, of vision by faith, and of great power with God. But all these worketh the self-same Spirit, reaching from end to end through the centuries of the Church, and sweetly ordering all things in absolute unity and love.
Such, then, is our festival to-day. We are come to rejoice with our religious brethren in this day of their joy, and their joy is ours.
There are two lessons taught us by all the Saints of God. The one is, that they and we, Religious and Secular, as our names may be, are bound by law of our supernatural existence to love each other s perfection; the other, that we ought to rejoice in each other s works. Rome, our mother and guide in all things, is especially so in this. For round about the throne of the Supreme Pontiff, the head and father of the apostolic Hierarchy in the world, are gathered, as for protection, the great families of the Saints. St. Benedict is there, and St. Francis, and St. Dominic, St. Ignatius, and St. Alphonsus, and St. Vincent, and Blessed Paul, and a multitude beside. It is the law of their very life and perfection that they should gather round the Rock, from whose foot these living sources of the manifold perfections of the Church pour forth their streams.
It has ever been a mark of the Saints, whether of the Secular or of the Religious life, that they have re joiced in the sanctity and fruits each of the other. All who would prosper must, like them, be large in charity and generous in their joy.
I know not where a better example can be found than the great Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, the light and glory of the Secular clergy, who is pictured to this day on the walls of the house of the Chiesa Nuova, with St. Philip and St. Ignatius, his friends and familiars, one on either side; and in the corridor of the great Capuchin con vent in Rome, sitting beside St. Felix Cantalicius, a poor lay-brother, to whom he sub mitted the rule of the greatest work of his life. In Milan, to this day, in token of his intimate love of the Religious and of their perfection, there are still shown, in the houses of the Capuchins and of the Barnabites, the cells to which he was wont to withdraw to unite himself more closely with them and with God.
My Religious brethren will then forgive me, if I seem over-bold to say that not only we have apart in them, but that they are ours. In the name of the Holy See, and of the whole Hierarchy of the Church, we claim them as our own. Their works are ours.
THE PERFECTION OF THE CHURCH. 30J and ours theirs, and our joys are common, because in the unity of the one body of Jesus we are indivisibly united. And all the variety and beauty which adorn the two great ministries of the Church; all the power of intellect and speech, the energy of will, the greatness of heart; all the supernatural perfections of the Spirit by which they are elevated and enriched; all the graces and ministrations, operations, and gifts, with all their intricate diversity of action, which are incorporated and clothed by the Hierarchy, in all its degrees, in the Religious Orders and in all their branches, these all are the counterpart of the glories of the first creation of God, in which fruit, and flower, and leaf, and the harvests of the field, and the trees of the forest, are all beautiful but all diverse; no two, even within the same kind, alike, but all in harmony: and a prelude of the new creation, when the jasper, the crystal, the sapphire and the emerald, the sardonyx, the chrysolite, the beryl and the topaz, and the splendour in the walls of the heavenly city, are all distinct, but all harmonious in the light of the glory of God and of the Lamb; and the many accents of the many languages and nations and peoples and tongues are mingled in the one acclaim of praise, which day and night goes up, as one voice from one heart, before the Eternal Throne.
Footnotes
Chapter 9 of 14