Our Life in the Lord Part Nine: The Church Born from His Side
The Lord left behind the Church, born from the spear’s wound when the second Adam slept on the cross. He founded her himself as he died, before his scattered disciples had understood what had happened to him. She is mother, bride, and Body.
Mother, Bride, and Body
As mother, the Church brings forth children at the font and feeds them at the altar. No one baptizes himself, and no one consecrates the bread he receives: the life of grace comes to each of us as natural life does, through a mother. As bride, the Church is loved first. The prophets describe the covenant at Sinai as a marriage, with Israel as the wife who strays and God as the husband who takes her back; Christ is that Bridegroom, who loved the Church and handed himself over for her, to make her holy and present her to himself “without spot or wrinkle” (Eph 5:25-27). Her holiness is his gift; when she is unfaithful, he keeps the covenant she broke. The marriage of a baptized man and woman is a sign of that marriage. As Body, the Church lives by the life of her Head, Christ, who directs the whole; baptism joins us to her as limbs to a body. God saves us as members of this one Body, each with all the rest. What one member does, even in secret, affects every other member: his holiness strengthens the Body, and his sin harms it. A member who cuts himself off from the Body on his own judgment has cut himself off from the Head.
We treat our ordinary grievances differently once we know we are members of one Body. Refusing to forgive another member is like nursing a grudge against our own elbow, and writing off a fellow sinner is like amputating a limb for being injured. What one member does, the whole Body feels, since our salvation is bound up together, and a private feud inside a parish is a body quarreling with its own limbs.
One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic
The Creed gives the Church four marks. Each mark states what Christ did, not The Body’s member’s achievements. The Church is one, for there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism. The Lord prayed the night before he died “that they may all be one” (Jn 17:21); the shattering of Christendom into thousands of communions is therefore a family wound, and not a marketplace of options (the desire is to return to being one). The one Church of Christ subsists in the universal Church, governed by Peter’s successor and the bishops in communion with him, while many elements of sanctification and truth are also found outside her visible bounds. The Church is holy, wherewith the word “holy” means set apart: her Head sets her apart and his Spirit animates her, so her holiness comes from him. Her members on earth are sinners, Mary alone excepted, who by the grace of God remained free of every personal sin through the whole course of her earthly life. The Church is a field hospital for sinners.
The Church is catholic, a word meaning according to the whole (universal): she teaches the whole of the faith, trimming nothing a given century finds inconvenient, and she is sent to the whole of the race, every nation, every era, every kind of soul, the vocation of Abraham now having been universalized. She is apostolic, built on the apostles and governed by their successors, and she teaches what they handed on. The Holy Spirit kindled one fire at Pentecost, bishops have handed that fire on by the laying on of hands; it is burning still.
Peter’s Keys
The Lord gave Peter a particular charge, one God had described centuries earlier through Isaiah. Isaiah tells how God took the key of the House of David from the unworthy steward Shebna and set it on the shoulder of Eliakim: “I will place the key of the House of David on his shoulder; what he opens, no one will shut, what he shuts, no one will open” (Is 22:22). The Lord renames Simon, as God renamed Abram Abraham and Jacob Israel, and when God renames, things come to pass: “you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church” (Mt 16:18). The Lord hands Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven in the next breath. The office is stewardship over the household of God, whose holder is the servant of the deposit, not its master: he judges with authority what belongs to what was handed on, and he discards nothing, for the Magisterium is not above the Word of God but serves it, teaching only what has been received. The Pope is head of the college of bishops, and holds full, supreme, and universal power over the whole Church as pastor, which he can always freely exercise, while the college of bishops has no authority apart from union with him. A title the office inherited from Rome tells its nature: pontifex, bridge-maker. Christ gave the keys for opening.
Infallibility and the Servant Office
The Holy Spirit protects this office, and he protects the bishops who teach in union with it. When the successor of Peter definitively proclaims a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, or when the bishops together with him definitively teach one, the Holy Spirit preserves that teaching from error. The Church calls this preservation “infallibility,” a promise Christ made to his Church, not an intelligence the men themselves possess; it adds nothing new, subtracts nothing that was handed on, and guarantees that the deposit arrives intact at every generation.
Scripture, Tradition, and the Church’s Pace
The scriptures themselves come to us through the Church. The canon is a library which the Church gathered and canonized, and which only the community that received it reads rightly; the Holy Spirit inspired every word of it. Christ prayed the Psalms, which are fulfilled in him, and the Church has long heard them as Christ speaking to his Church through the Spirit. Scripture reveals the truth of God’s relationship with us on many levels and across many centuries; All of it is one narrative of salvation. It is never trivial, though it speaks literally in some places and figuratively in others. The apostles handed on a consistent interpretation of the scriptures, wherewith the Church has handed the same interpretation on ever since, alongside scripture; this is Tradition. The Magisterium serves scripture and Tradition both. The Church moves slowly on purpose, deciding over decades and centuries, for, as Chesterton is said to have put it, we want a Church that moves the world and not one is moved by it.
The Liturgy and the Year
The Church has a liturgy because of our relationship with God. What the Church does at the altar is older than the Church, for she inherited worship. The liturgy is the offering of our lives to God, and nobody stages it for God’s benefit as though he wanted a parade to review. The race had been attempting that offering from Abel’s field onward, with poor success, and every rite of the long pursuit remedied the last. In Christ the attempt finally succeeds, for the High Priest offers himself and, through Baptism, offers his members with him; the Mass is that success, into which Christ invites every generation. When children ask why there are so many rules and rubrics (properly, standards and canons), the Church gives a plain reason: we have shown that we need them, for Israel tried worship without them, at length, in the field and on the plain and under every tree and on top of every high place, yet that worship failed. The guardrails remain until God writes the law of love they guard on the heart, wherewith at that time nobody feels them as rails at all.
In her worship the Church remembers the same expansive history. In the Liturgy of the Word the Church carries the book of the gospels in procession, lifts it up, acclaims it, reads it, and then breaks it open in preaching, a sequence found from Ezra reading’s the Law to the returned exiles, through Jesus unrolling the scroll in the synagogue at Nazareth, to the ambo of every parish church this Sunday. The Church keeps time the same way: in the liturgical year, Advent through Christmas and Lent through Easter and back into the long green weeks of Ordinary Time, a forgetful people walk the whole of salvation history once around every year and rehearse who they are, a living remembrance for which the tradition’s word is “anamnesis.” The Church teaches in her pauses too: sacred silence around the readings, the Mass sung and unhurried, a deliberate slowness in a frantic age, by which she trains the ear for a God who speaks in a tiny whispering sound, as with Elijah in the cave.
Every Christian needs that training, whose school is the repetition of the sacraments, for a sheep knows its shepherd’s voice from hearing him again and again, and a sheep that has never met its shepherd, or met him only in an indistinct way, cannot recognize his voice. And so the Church puts the same words in our ears week after week, the words of absolution, the words of institution, the greeting and the blessing, because repetition builds recognition.
Seven Signs, Pointing to Reality
Above all as a way to live, the Lord left the sacraments. The Church calls them signs that contain what they signify. An ordinary symbol points at something absent. A sacrament points at something and delivers it, for the words spoken in the sacraments are the words of the Word, through whom all things were made, and when he speaks, what he says is what is so. That is, a sacrament does what it shows. Christ himself works the sacraments by his own power, and not the holiness of the priest or the worthiness of the recipient, so that a coward’s baptism and a saint’s baptism are equally baptism. The Church’s Latin for this is ex opere operato, by the working of the work itself. The grace Christ gives is fruitful in us according to our disposition, so that the same Communion that sanctifies a recollected soul profits a distracted one little. Christ gives wholly; our hands vary in how far they open.
The same is true of each sacrament:
The water of baptism shows cleansing, and it cleanses.
The chrism shows strength, and it seals and strengthens.
The bread and wine show a body given and blood poured out, and they become his Body and his Blood.
The words of absolution encourage, and they absolve.
The oil on a sick body comforts, and it fortifies and forgives.
The consent spoken between spouses announces a partnership, and it binds a bond God himself joins.
The laying on of hands commissions a man, and it configures him to Christ forever, bishops and priests to Christ the Head, deacons to Christ the servant of all.
The Word through whom the world was made by the God who speaks things into being has never stopped working that way.
Baptism
Baptism is the door. In its waters we die to death and rise to life with Christ, plunged into his Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension. God gives four gifts together:
Forgiveness entire: every sin, original and personal, with every punishment due to them.
Sanctifying grace: a share in the divine life, with faith, hope, and charity folded inside it.
An indelible mark: God sets it on the soul once and never repeats it, even when we squander the grace.
Membership in the Body: God grafts us in and gives us the family offices of priest, prophet, and king.
The Church hands over a white garment, to be carried unstained into eternity, and lights a candle from the Paschal fire, to be kept burning.
Confirmation
Confirmation completes what Baptism began by giving strength for mission. By the laying on of hands and the anointing with chrism, God pours out the gift of the Spirit at full strength, an anointing in Israel’s long line of anointings for deployment.
The Eucharist
The Eucharist is the center, the source and the summit, for it is the Lord himself. His offering of himself constitutes the Eucharist. The one sacrifice of Calvary cannot be repeated and needs no repetition; Christ makes that one sacrifice present, drawn forward whole into this hour, through the priest standing in his person, and the whole Body offers themselves along with the priest, united with Christ, to God the Father. In the words of institution the word “remembrance” means what it means in scripture: a proclamation of what God has done, in which the deed itself becomes present, and not a recollection of something over and done. Paul learned that logic of remembrance as a Jew keeping the Passover, and he carried it over to the true Passover, which is Christ.
At the words of consecration the whole substance of the bread becomes the substance of his Body, and the whole substance of the wine becomes his Blood. The appearances alone remain, and the Church names this change transubstantiation. He is present whole and entire in each species, and whole and entire in every particle and every drop, so that the breaking of the bread leaves him undivided and the smallest fragment contains him as fully as the contents of the whole altar. What the priest lifts up at the altar is a He, and not a thing: he is food, true food, food for the journey. This food reverses the direction of every other eating: at every other table we take the food into ourselves; here he subsumes us into himself and makes us members of the Body we receive.
The Mass is inseparably sacrifice and sacred banquet, and the order within that unity has import: sacrifice first and meal second. Christ’s offering of himself spreads the table, so the banquet takes its meaning from that offering; the celebration of that sacrifice is wholly directed toward our union with him in communion. The Mass is also our offering: the contrite hearts, the labors, and the sufferings of the whole Body go onto the paten with the bread, the Son joins them to the one offering he makes to the Father, and he returns them to us as grace. And so the last word before Communion, Amen, commits the whole moral life in one word. We either let that yes mean yes, or it is a lie.
Everything else the Church does leans on the Eucharist. It is the source, because every grace flows from the sacrifice it makes present, and the summit, because nothing higher happens on earth. The Eucharist happens in heaven as well: the Mass in the plainest parish church is happening at the same time in the heavenly temple, the one liturgy of the Lamb standing as though slain, with angels and saints in attendance whether or not the rest of the choir arrives, so that heaven and earth meet in the middle at every altar. It remains “what it is” regardless of numbers, moods, and music, a sign of God’s fidelity whether we are worthy or not, whether we receive or not. All the earlier breads were rehearsals for it: the manna, Elijah’s hearth cake, the loaves on the hillside, every one of them directing the hungry to the Bread of Life.
Penance
The Lord left Penance for the wounds we deal after baptism. On Easter evening he breathed on the apostles and gave them what no man had ever received: “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained” (Jn 20:23). The prodigal’s walk home shows the sacrament in a story, and the Church distinguishes three acts in it:
Contrition: the turning, sorrow for the sin and the resolve to leave it.
Confession: the speech long rehearsed and mercifully interrupted, grave sins told in kind and number.
Satisfaction: the penance given, which begins to repair what the sin damaged.
Sin wounds in different degrees, and the Church’s precision here is a kindness. A sin is mortal only when three conditions meet together:
Grave matter: the commandments and capital sins narrow it down, not our own assessment.
Full knowledge: the one acting knew what the act was.
Deliberate consent: the one acting said yes, without coercion.
When any one of the three is absent, the sin is venial, wounding the life of grace without killing it. God ordinarily forgives mortal sin through the sacrament, and he forgives venial sin there too. Absolution removes all guilt and the eternal punishment. The temporal punishment remains, the disorder and debris sin leaves behind in the sinner and the world; penance in this life begins that repair, and God finishes what remains later. The confessional is the place where the Father, watching the road, is permitted to run to meet his son. It has never been a tribunal for the condemned.
More people stay away from this sacrament out of fear than out of doctrine. Confession makes us nervous, but whatever blocks the way between a soul and God belongs in the confessional, and the priest on the other side of the screen has heard it all before and has been forgiven of plenty himself. The sacrament is for ordinary weeks as much as for crises, because sin accumulates quietly: stressors pile up, health and relationships fray, and a person slips into a preservation mode, talks himself into small untruths and easier paths, and stops noticing what he is missing. Regular confession keeps a man noticing, even when it seems there is nothing to bring. The conviction of having nothing to bring is usually the first thing worth examining.
The power to forgive and to retain sins works on the men who exercise it, for a priest who spends years absolving the sins penitents tell him is schooled by what he hears, and priests who sit there testify that the work makes a man dramatically more merciful.
The Anointing of the Sick
The Lord left the Anointing of the Sick for the failing body. James gives the practice in two sentences: “Is anyone among you sick? He should summon the presbyters of the church, and they should pray over him and anoint [him] with oil in the name of the Lord” (Jas 5:14). The sacrament is for the seriously ill, and not only for the dying, and a sick person may receive it again as illness deepens or returns. It does what the whole economy does in miniature: it unites the sufferer to the Passion of Christ, so that suffering which would otherwise only happen to a person becomes his offering. It strengthens, it steadies, it forgives sin when confession is no longer possible. At the edge of death it joins Penance and Viaticum, food for the journey given at the trailhead of the last stretch of the road.
Matrimony
The Lord left two sacraments of mission for the two vocations that build the Body. Matrimony he raised from the order of creation, where it had existed since Eden. A man and a woman make the bond by freely exchanging consent. In the Latin Church the spouses themselves are the ministers of the sacrament; the Eastern Churches require the priest’s blessing as well; and God is the necessary third party to the bond. The love marriage requires is faithfulness, which romance may attend. Fidelity is the vocabulary scripture uses for God’s own covenant love, bounded on one side by the dignity of two persons and on the other by the Cross. By its nature marriage is ordered to the good of the spouses and to the procreation and education of children. No human power can dissolve a sacramental marriage once the spouses have consummated it. The Church’s tribunals judge whether a valid marriage came to exist at all, and above all whether the spouses gave valid consent, and never whether an existing bond may or may not have been what it seemed. The Lord’s word for the failure is hardness of heart.
Holy Orders
In Holy Orders Christ configures certain men to himself, in three degrees:
Bishops receive the fullness of the sacrament, succeed the apostles, and ordain in turn.
Priests are their co-workers, and with them act in the person of Christ the Head.
Deacons are ordained not unto the priesthood but unto the ministry, configured to Christ who made himself the servant of all.
Christ imprints an indelible character, and it marks the man forever. Still, the priest at the altar stands in persona Christi, in the person of Christ, for there is only one High Priest and one sacrifice, so that no one of these men is irreplaceable at the altar, since the one who offers through any of them is Christ, and that is the office’s glory. They stand where Peter stood after the charcoal fire: redeemed sinners, carrying the sacrifices of their people to the Lord and carrying back graces none of them earned.
The Lord said, “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest” (Mt 9:37-38). His instruction about the shortage was prayer, and not recruitment drives or lowered standards. A parish that never asks its sons whether God might be calling them, and never asks God to call them, has decided, without saying so, to be the last generation, whatever its bulletin says. Vocations are the Body’s own circulation, and they come from families, from an altar server’s summer, from a word spoken about priests at a kitchen table.
Mary in the Church
Mary is present in all of it. At the cross the Lord gave her to the beloved disciple and gave the disciple to her: “Behold, your mother” (Jn 19:27). The Church has always heard herself addressed in that disciple. She is mother of the Body because she is mother of the Head. God took Mary up body and soul into glory when her earthly course was complete, and in her the promise is already kept in a wholly human creature. Christ is the firstfruits of the world to come by his own power, and Mary, a mere creature raised by his power, is the particular proof that the promise reaches us. She reflects her Son the way the moon reflects the sun, borrowing and lending light without diminishing the star at all.
Her care continues in glory. Across the centuries and in many lands the Church has recognized apparitions of Mary, private revelations that add nothing to the faith once delivered. Mary often comes in the appearance and idiom of the people she visits, and she says in a hundred accents what she said at Cana - “ do whatever he tells you” (Jn 2:5). Mary is sinless (by her son’s gracious gift) and had nothing of her own to repair, and so her whole occupation, in life, in death, and in glory, has been the good of her Son’s brothers and sisters. The Magnificat has never stopped being true of her: her soul magnifies the Lord, enlarging him and never herself.
The Communion of Saints
No one in this Body is ever alone, for the communion continues through death in both directions. One Church exists in three states:
The Church Triumphant: the saints who see God face to face, and intercede for the rest.
The Church Expectant: the souls being made ready, helped by our prayers.
The Church Militant: the Church on the march through this world, for a pilgrim people is a people on the move.
Saints are regular people who acted with heroic virtue because they doubled down on their life with God, and their feasts celebrate the life of the Lord blooming in a soul. The world rarely notices them, because the devil draws its attention elsewhere by a sleight of hand as old as Eden.
Rome had a word for what the saints do for us, which the Church kept: patronage. A patron in that world was a person of standing who spoke for those who had less and steadied them, out of the generosity of abundance; a patron saint does exactly that for a parish, a trade, a country, or a soul, by example and by intercession. The family the saints make crosses space and time, which matters more as earthly families scatter. A believer kneeling in a parish named for a saint is a grandchild in a household older than every nation on a map.
The Church Militant on the Move
The Church on earth is called Militant because she is moving, and not because she is angry. The word Mass itself comes from the Latin of the dismissal, the sending. The people fed at the altar are a people deployed from it. Her plain structure serves the movement: the Church divides the world into dioceses and the dioceses into parishes, each parish a station on the pilgrim road, where the priest carries the sacrifices of ordinary lives to the altar and everybody carries graces back out the doors. The parish is the place the world is entered from, on purpose, and in formation.
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