FAITH OF OUR FATHERS

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 51, 23 December 1925, Page 51

FAITH OF OUR FATHERS

(By the Right Rbverb.ni) -Mokbignob Power, V.F., for jthe N.Z. Tablet.)

The Catholic Church is the one, unbroken Church of Christ that has come down to us from Apostolic times; therefore, she is holy in her Founder. Nothing could be holier than her purpose, which is the sanctification of the souls of her children. The means which she uses in carrying out this purpose are holy. Holy are the sacraments with which Christ dowered her, and which she has preserved in all their purity. These she has at all times defended and protected, it is by means of these she produces holiness in her people. History attests her struggles in the days of her infancy with lustful kings and a licentious soldiery, how she overcame them all, and gained her greatest victory by turning many of them into saints. In the view of history she has been the constant upholder of a high morality, never swerving from her path, defying alike both bribes and threats. The world still admires and wonders at her high moral standards. Indeed, a chief complaint of the world is that those standards are in their essence above the powers of human nature. But she will never lower them, for she has forces within herself to raise her children above nature. To each several child of hers, her constant cry is "ascende superius," higher still! History marks the sound principle upon whi?H ail her sanctity is based, that faith without good works is dead. History declares that it was she who taught the purity of marriage and the sacredness of the home; that it was she who gave birth to the virgin-bands that fellow the Lamb whithersoever He goes, tha + it was she who produced the priesthood that has girdled the earih with the Holy Mass. And what history attests for the °arly and succeeding ages, the current news in the daily press witnesses to in this adulterous and sinful generation. Who stands by the fount of the race to-day? Who is the defender of marriage? Who confronts tyranny in high places, and in defence of marriage braves imprisonment and fine? Who has Christian schools to mould her youth to sanctity? Who but the Holy ' Catholio Church alone? No wonder she should have saints, no wonder she alone should be the mother of saints, no wonder that those outside her fold, when they would honor sanctity realised in holy lives, must come to her to borrow the names of her heroes, the athletes of Christ! She alone has been able to produce and hold up to the admiring gaze of the world men and women, and children who have been eminent for holiness in all ages. Thus she manifests herself to the world as the unspotted Bride of Christ, the Blessed Vision of Peace, the Holy Mount of Sion. The names of her saints are "sweet as honey in every mouth, and as music at a banquet of wine." In their lives they show the beauty of the life of Jesus, and make it easy for us who love them to walk in the way of perfection. They make us ashamed of our sloth and stimulate us to better things. They

(24) THE CATHOLIC CHURCH HAS THE OTHER MARKS. THE MARK OF HOLINESS.

keep the power of Jesus Christ still with us to strengthen human life, and foster in us the love of God. They are the light of the world and the salt of the earth. They teach us that holiness does not depend on circumstances of place, of birth, or education, but, under God's grace, on our own individual will fortified by prayer, discipline, and the Sacraments. Their bead-roll has the names of men and women from every walk and condition of life. Kings and queens, soldiers, statesmen, lawyers, physicians, merchants, domestic servants, peasants, slaves, beggars, are found in the court of the King of Kings, taking precedence by the degree.of holiness they had attained. Some of them wrought the conversion of nations. Some of them cultivated desert wastes, unhealthy swamps, rugged heights, and taught the principles of agriculture to barbaric men, whom they later made the civilised fathers of many of our present European races. Some guided the Church through great trials, some set the world ablaze with intellectual light, some devoted themselves to the poor, to the slave, to the outcast, to the incurable and to the else deserted dead. Some saved the people from the tyranny of cruel oppressors. But the litany would be unending. They were all children during life of the Catholic Church. It is she who trained and matured them, who inspired, directed, and supported them, and finally, setting the aureole of sanctity on their brows, raised them to her altars. The Catholic Church ha the mark of sanctity: she is holy in her Pounder, in her great purpose, in the holy means she uses to carry out this purpose, and in the number of her children who have been eminent for holiness in every age. SHE HAS THE THIRD MARK OF CATHOLICITY. The Catholic Church teaches all the doctrines of Christ. She makes no distinction between "fundamentals and non-fundamen-tals." She claims and exercises the right to go everywhere and teach all men. This is Catholicity, and she, therefore, is Catholic. She was Catholic even when she was a small body, a mere mustard seed in Jerusalem, she had a capacity for growing, and expanding, and filling the whole earth. She was not a century old before she had passed the limits of the great Roman empire and converted barbarous peoples; and in each succeeding century since, her power of expansion and her actual fruitfulness are the wonder of those outside her fold. In her the name Catholic and the thing Catholicity are in harmony. Such is the claim of Cardinal Newman: "Christianity is not a matter of opinion, it has a bodilv occupation in the world. It is one continuous fact or thins. Where is this thing in this a<?e which in the first age was the Catholic Church? The answer is undeniable: the Church called Catholic now is that very same tiling, in

hereditary descent, in organisation, in principles, in external relations which was called the Catholic Church then. The name and the thing have ever gone together." : > Her growth may be traced in historical works from the days of Pentecost to postApostolic days, through the centuries immediately following, through the time' of the dispersion of the Roman empire, through the middle ages, and the sixteenth century and the centuries since. It may be all read in the glowing pages of Mr. Belloc's Europe and the Faith, or in the writings of other reputable historians. That Catholicity is necessary for the due performance of the Church's work, Cardinal Newman illustrates by the victory of St. Thomas of Canterbury over Henry 11. "Of course: a branch Church, with the Catholic dogma and with saints, cannot be; but supposing the English Church had been such at the time of that contest, it would, humanly speaking, have inevitably been shattered to pieces, or else its saints got rid of, its Erastianising bishops made its masters, and, ultimately, its dogma corrupted, and the times of Henry VIII anticipated; this would have been but for its intercommunion with the rest of Christendom and the supremacy of Rome.

Indeed, who could ever entertain such a dream as that a circumscribed religious society, with the awfulness of a divine origin, the sacredness of immemorial custom, or the prestige of many successes, while standing on its own ground, and simply subject in its constituent members to the civil power, should be able to assert ecclesiastical claims which are to impede the free action of that same sovereign nower, and to insult its majesty?—a native hierarchy, growing out of its very soil, challenging it, standing breast to breast against it, breathing defiance into its very face, striking at it, full and straight —why, as men are constituted, such a nuisance as they would call it would be intolerable. The rigid, elastic wooden contrivance would be shivered info bits by the very recoil and jar of the first blow it was rash enough to venture. But matters would not go so far; the blandishments, the alliances, the bribe's, the strong arm of the world, would bring it to its senses, and humble it in its own sight ere it had opportunity to be so valiant. The world would simply overmaster the presumptuous claimant to divine authority, and would use for its own purposes the slave whom it had dishonored. It would set her to sweep its courts, or keep the line of its triumphant march, who had thought to reign among the stars of heaven." Thomas of Canterbury won because he had the Universal Church with him; but modern English religion has fallen into the sad state described by the Cardinal because it is not one thing with Catholicism.

THE CATHOLIO CHURCH IS APOSTOLIC From the Apostles she clearly traces her unbroken descent: the Pone succeeds St. Peter, and the bishops in union with him are the legitimate successors of the Anostles, who themselves were bound to Peter in unbreakable bonds. The parent trunk remains while

the sectaries are wrenched and broken branches. History gives the birthdays of the &IL; founders of the sects: it also marks the unbroken lines of the Popes from Peter to Pius. ;. The Professions of Faith, the liturgies, the /i writings of the Fathers, the decrees of CounL writings of the Fathers, the decrees of Coun'\j cils, all attest the unbroken continuity of Catholic teaching: and our opponents attest the same, seeing in it a reproach. But truth is always one, in the twentieth century as in the first. She alone has been able to preserve

its unity inviolate, who shows that her authority to teach is derived from the Apostles themselves. "The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday," writes Macaulay, "when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. . . (The Catholic Church) saw the commencements of all- governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the - world, and feels no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of

the all. She was respected before the Saxon had set foot in Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished in Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca; and she may still exist in undiminished vigor, when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand upon a broken arch of London Bridge, to sketch '.the ruins of St. Paul's."