The Church And The Catholic
by Romano Guardini

1. THE AWAKENING OF THE CHURCH IN THE SOUL

A RELIGIOUS process of incalculable importance has begun--

the Church is coming to life in the souls of men.

This must be correctly understood. The Church has, of

course, been continuously alive in herself, and at all times

of decisive importance for her members. They have accepted

her teaching, obeyed her commands; her invincible vitality

has been their strong support and the ground of their trust.

But, with the development of individualism since the end of

the Middle Ages, the Church has been thought of as a means

to true religious life--as it were a God-designed framework

or vessel in which that life is contained--a viaduct of life

but not as life itself.[1] It has, in other words, been

thought of as a thing exterior from which men might receive

life, not a thing into which men must be incorporated that

they may live with its life. Religious life tended

increasingly away from the community and towards the

individual sphere. The Church, therefore, came to be

regarded as the boundary of this sphere, and perhaps even as

its opponent. In any case the Church was felt as a power

fettering personality and thereby restricting the religious

life. And this external regulation appeared either

beneficent, or inevitable, or oppressive, according to the

disposition of the individual.

This is inevitably a one-sided presentation. Actually there

were very many exceptions; transition and development made

the picture far more complicated. Nor was this attitude to

the Church without its greatness. To-day all the catchwords

of the age are against it: but we should ask nevertheless

what valuable contributions it has made to religious life as

a whole. Perhaps it is the right moment to do so, just

because we inwardly stand apart from it and can therefore

look at it objectively.

What was the basis of this attitude? The answer has already

been indicated--the subjectivism and individualism of the

modern age.

Religion was considered as something which belonged to the

subjective sphere--it was simply something within a man, a

condition of his soul. We are not speaking of conscious

scientific theories, but of the spiritual tendency of the

age. Objective religion represented by the Church was for

the individual primarily the regulation of this individual

and subjective religion; a protection against its

inadequacies. That which remained over and above--the

objective religion in its disinterested sublimity, and the

community as a value in itself often left the individual

cold and aroused no response in his heart. Even the

acceptance and the enthusiasm which the Church evoked were

largely external and individualistic, and psychologically

had a strong affinity with the earlier "patriotism." When we

look more closely we see that often enough there was no

genuine belief in the existence of objective religious

realities. This subjectivism dominated religious life all

through the second half of the nineteenth century and during

the beginning of the twentieth. Man felt imprisoned within

himself. That is why from Kant onwards, and particularly in

the more recent idealism, the problem of knowledge became so

urgent--indeed for many it constituted the whole of

philosophy! The man of this age considered the very

existence of an object as doubtful. He was not directly and

strongly conscious of the reality of things, at bottom

indeed not even of his own. Such intellectual systems as

consistent solipsism did not rest upon logical conclusions,

but were tentative interpretations of this personal

experience. It is impossible to explain on purely

intellectual grounds such philosophies as the new idealism

for which the subject is a mere logical entity. They arose

from the attempt to replace the objective reality of things,

which had become doubtful, by a logical reality. Thus

originated the conception of the a priori as having

objective validity logically, although its subjective

validity was only empirical; and the doctrine that

experience is based upon the subject and not upon the thing,

and similar forms of philosophic subjectivism. The primary

experience of reality was lacking. Sometimes this fact would

suddenly dawn upon a student of philosophy when a leading

representative of the new idealism declared, in a University

for example, that "Being" is a "value"! It would be

impossible to express more shortly or more bluntly how

impossible this attitude was, and how it could only have

originated in a profound spiritual impotence. Reality as

experienced had no longer any solidity or force. It was a

lifeless shadow. And in this philosophy did but translate

into its formulas and its idiom what all felt in one way or

another. In spite of the much vaunted "realism," in spite of

natural science, technical achievement, and a realist

politics, man could not see the real object, the finished

article, nor even himself. He lived in an intermediate

sphere between being and nothingness, among concepts and

mechanisms among formulas and systems, which sought to

represent and control objects, but which were not even

coherent He lived in a world of abstract forms and symbols,

which was not linked up with the reality to which the

symbols referred. We are reminded of a wholesale

manufacturer, who knows exactly what workmen, officials,

buyers, and contractors he employs, and has particulars of

the whole in his register, including descriptions of all his

raw materials and goods, labeled in the most accurate

methods of physico-chemical research--but who knows nothing

of his employees as human beings, and has no innate feeling

for fine material or good work.

This attitude was also making its influence felt in the

religious sphere. Nothing which was not an immediate

experience or a logical datum had power to convince, was

accepted without further question. The individual was sure

only of that which he personally experienced, perceived, and

yearned for, and on the other hand of the concepts, ideas,

and postulates of his own thought. Consequently the Church

was of necessity experienced not as a self-justified

religious reality, but as the limiting value of the

subjective; not as a living body, but as a formal

institution.[2]

Religious life was thus individualistic, disintegrated, and

unsocial. The individual lived for himself. "Myself and my

Creator" was for many the exclusive formula. The community

was not primary; it took the second place. It no longer was

a natural reality which existed from the first by its own

right. It had to be thought out, willed, and deliberately

set up. One individual, it was believed, approached another,

and went into partnership with him. But he was not from the

outset bound up with a group of his fellows, the member of

an organic community, sharing its common life. There was

indeed no community, merely a mechanical organization, and

this in the religious sphere as in every other. How little

in Divine worship were the faithful aware of themselves as a

community! How inwardly disintegrated the community was! How

little was the individual parishioner conscious of the

parish, and in how individualistic a spirit was the very

Sacrament of community--Communion--conceived!

This attitude was intensified by another factor--the

rationalistic temper of the age. That alone was admitted

which could be "comprehended" and "calculated." The attempt

was made to substitute for the properties of things, as

given in indissoluble unity of the concrete object,

mathematically defined groups of relations; to replace life

by chemical formulas. Instead of the soul, people talked

about psychic processes. The living unity of personality was

viewed as a bundle of events and activities. The age was in

direct contact only with that which could be demonstrated by

experiment. That something lay behind what was perceptible

to the senses had first of all to be made credible by a

distinct process of reflection. Already the mysterious

depths of individual personality whatever moved and lived in

the soul, was being questioned. And the supra-personal unity

of the community was not seen at all. The community was

regarded as a mere aggregate of individuals, as an

organization of ends and means. Its mysterious substance,

its creative power and the organic laws governing communal

growth and development, remained inaccessible.

All this naturally exerted its influence upon men's

conception of the Church. She appeared above all as a legal

institution for religious purposes. There was no limit

perception of the mystical element in her, everything in

fact which lies behind her palpable aims and visible

institutions, and is expressed by the concept of the kingdom

of God, the mystical Body of Christ.

This entire attitude, however, is now undergoing a profound

change. New forces are at work busy in those mysterious

depths of human nature where the intellectual and spiritual

movements which now shape the life of a human culture

receive their origin and direction. We are conscious of

reality as a primary fact. It is no longer something dubious

from which it is advisable to retreat upon the logical

validity which seems more solid and more secure. Reality is

as solid, indeed more solid, because prior, richer and more

comprehensive. Proofs are accumulating that people are

willing to accept concrete reality as the one self-evident

fact, and to base abstract truth upon it. We need not be

astonished at this new Nominalism. The consciousness of

reality has burst upon mankind which the force of a new and

a personal experience. Our age is literally rediscovering

that things exist, and moreover with an individuality

incalculable, because creative and original. The concrete,

in its boundless fullness, is being once more experienced,

and the happiness of being able to venture oneself to it and

enter into it. It is experienced as freedom and wealth--I am

real, and so also is this thing which confronts one in its

self-determined abundance! And thought is a living relation

between myself and it--perhaps, who knows, also between it

and myself? Action is a real communication with it. Life is

a real self-development, a progress among things, a

communion with realities, a mutual give and take. That

extreme critical aloofness which was formerly considered the

acme of rationality, is becoming more and more

incomprehensible to us, a stupefying dream, which imprisoned

man in an empty, dead world of concepts, cut off from the

luxuriant life of the real world. Modern idealism--against

which the assaults of logic were so long delivered in vain,

because the foundation of the system was not proof, but a

dogmatic foundation of the mental attitude of the entire

age--no longer needs to be refuted. The bottom has fallen

out of it. Its spell is broken, and we ask ourselves how it

is that we endured it so long. A great awakening to reality

is in progress.

And it is an awakening moreover to metaphysical reality. I

do not believe that any man who is not tenaciously

persisting, is not clinging to an attitude adopted long

before, any man who is living in the age or even in advance

of it, any longer seriously doubts the reality of the soul.

Already there has been talk of a "world of spiritual

objects," that is to say, the psychic is experienced as

sufficiently real to necessitate our acceptance of an entire

order of being beyond the sensible. The more difficult task

for the scientist is now to make the transition from the

former denial, which had become a scientific article of

faith, to the inevitable admission of the self-evident fact

that the soul exists. And the existence of God is equally

self-evident. Spiritualism and anthroposophy--in themselves

so unsatisfactory--prove how powerful the consciousness of

metaphysical reality has already become. In the face of such

movements we find ourselves obliged to defend the pure

spirituality of God and of the soul, while upholding the

reality in their own order of empirical objects. And the

revival of a Platonic type of thought points in the same

direction. Spiritual forms are again viewed as metaphysical

forces, and no longer as merely involved in the logical

structure of consciousness. And many other signs of the same

tendency could be adduced.

Community is admitted just as directly. The attitude of

withdrawal into the barred fortress of self no longer

passes, as it did twenty years ago, for the only noble

attitude. On the contrary, it is regarded as unjustifiable,

barren and impotent. Just as powerful as the experience that

things exist and the world exists, is the experience that

human beings exist. Indeed, the latter is by far more

powerful, because it affects us more closely. There are

human beings like myself. Each one is akin to me, but each

one is also a separate world of his own, of unique value.

And from this realization springs the passionate conviction

that we all belong one to another; are all brothers. It is

now taken as self-evident that the individual is a member of

the community. The latter does not originate through one man

attaching himself to another, or renouncing part of his

independence. The community is just as primary a fact as

individual existence. And the task of building up the

community is just as primary and fundamental as that of

perfecting personality.

And this consciousness of interdependence assures a most

significant expression; it develops into the consciousness

of nationality. "The people" does not mean the masses, or

the uncultured, or the "primitives," whose mental and

spiritual life, and whose system of facts and values are as

yet undeveloped. All these uses of the term derive from the

ideas of liberalism, the "Aufklarung" and individualism. An

entirely new note is now being sounded; something essential

is being born. "The people" is the primary association of

those human beings who by race, country, and historical

antecedents share the same life and destiny. The people is a

human society which maintains an unbroken continuity with

the roots of nature and life, and obeys their intrinsic

laws. The people contains--not numerically or

quantitatively, but in essential quality--the whole of

mankind, in all its human variety of ages, sexes,

temperament, mental and physical condition; to which we must

add the sum total of its work and spheres of production as

determined by class and vocation. The people is mankind in

its radical comprehensiveness. And a man is of "the people"

if he embraces, so to speak, this whole within himself. His

opposite number is the "cultured" man. He is not the people,

developed and intellectualized, but a malformation, a one-

sided, debased and uprooted being. He is a product of

humanism, and above all of the "Aufklarung." He is a human

type which has cut itself adrift from the ties which make

man's physical and mental life organic. He has fallen away

on the one hand into a world of abstraction, on the other

into the purely physical sphere; from union with nature into

the purely scholastic and artificial; from the community

into isolation. His deepest longing should be to become once

more one of the people; not indeed by romantic attempts to

conform with popular ideas and customs, but by a renewal of

his inmost spirit by a progressive return to a simple and

complete life. The Youth movement is an attempt in this

direction.

And already a new reality is beginning to appear above the

horizon. Here also the use of the word needs to be purified.

It need not denote the rationalist conception of "humanity,"

but the living unity of the human race, of blood, destiny,

responsibility, and labor; that solidarity which is

postulated by the dogma of original sin and vicarious

redemption, mysteries which no rationalist can understand.

The individual self is conscious of enrichment not only by

the experience of real things, but also by the community,

which expands its self-consciousness into a consciousness of

a communal self. By direct sympathy, what belongs to another

becomes mine own, and what belongs to me becomes his.

The fully-formed community owes its existence to a

combination between the awareness of objective reality and

the communal consciousness. Law, justice, and the order of

society are seen to be the forms by which the community

exists and operates and maintains the ground of its

stability. They are not limitations of life, but its

presuppositions. They do not petrify it, but give it force

and enable it to energize. They, of course, in turn, must be

really genuinely alive. And profound changes will occur in

the Social Structure, legal changes for example, as soon as

the realization becomes more general that a matured national

community needs not an individualistic but a communal system

of public law; not a system of abstract principles existing

merely upon paper, but a system shaped by the vital growth

of the community; that its constitution cannot be the

product of abstract reasoning but must grow out of the real

being and life of this people.[3]

In like manner the stream of life has burst its dams. Side

by side with reason and on an equal footing with it stand

the will, creative power and feeling. Being is given equal

importance with doing, indeed greater. Development and

growth rank with or above action; personality whose very

reality was once called in question is accepted as the most

obvious or familiar object of experience. Its

incomprehensibility is a datum as primary as the logical

comprehensibility of its abstract concept. And the problem

to be solved is that of the relations between concept and

intuition, theory and experience, being and action, form and

life; the way in which one depends for its existence upon

the other, and unity is achieved by the conjunction of all

these factors.

This life is also stirring in our consciousness of the

community. We are as immediately and acutely conscious of

the communal life bearing us on its current, of those

creative depths from which the being and work of the

community arise, as we are of the form it assumes and the

logic that form expresses. A biology and, moreover, an

ontology of the community are being disclosed--laws of its

physical and mental nature, its organic rhythm and the vital

conditions which determine its growth, usages and culture;

the essential significance of its moral phenomena; the

nature of such institutions as the family, the township the

State, law and property.

Those revolutionary changes must necessarily have their

repercussions in the religious community. The reality of

things, the reality of the soul and the reality of God,

confront us with a new impressiveness. The religious life

alike in its object, content and development is reality; the

relation between the living soul and the living God; a real

life directed towards Him. It is neither mere emotion nor

mere theory; it is imitation, obedience, receiving and

giving.[4] In the Youth movement in which the springs of the

new age must be sought, the fundamental question is no

longer "Does God exist?" but "What is He like? Where shall I

find Him? How do I stand towards Him? How can I reach Him?"

It is not "Should we pray?" but "How should we pray?" not

"Is asceticism necessary?" but "What kind of asceticism?"

In this religious relation our fellow men have a vital part.

The religious community exists. Nor is it a collection of

self-contained individuals, but the reality which

comprehends individuals--the Church. She embraces the

people; she embraces mankind. She draws even things, indeed

the whole world, into herself. Thus the Church is regaining

that cosmic spaciousness which was hers during the early

centuries and the Middle Ages. The conception of the Church

as the "Corpus Christi mysticum," which is developed in the

Epistles of St. Paul to the Ephesians and Colossians, is

acquiring a wholly new power. Under Christ the Head the

Church gathers together "all which is in Heaven, on earth,

and under the earth." In the Church everything--angels, men

and things--are linked with God. In her the great

regeneration is already beginning for which the entire

creation "groaneth and is in travail."

This unity is not a chaotic experience; it is no mere

outburst of emotion. We are concerned with a community

formed and fashioned by dogma, canon law, and ritual. It is

not merely a society, but a religious community; not a

religious movement, but the very life of the Church; not a

spiritual romanticism, but her existence.

This consciousness of the community is, however, caught up

and permeated by the consciousness of a supernatural life.

As in the sphere of natural psychology "life," which is at

once so mysterious, yet so completely evident, is everywhere

finding recognition, so it is in the supernatural sphere.

Grace is real life; religious activity is the development of

a higher vitality; the community is participation in a

common life, and all forms are forms of life.

And if in the natural sphere we have acquired a clear vision

for the structural laws and the organic purpose of life; if

we have discovered how one thing fits another and where

man's intellectual objectives lie; if consciousness of the

organic is everywhere awakened, the same thing is occurring

here. The profound formulas of theology once more reveal

their inexhaustible significance for the spiritual life of

every day. Our life, whether the life of the individual, or

the life of the Church, is "in Christ, through the Holy

Ghost, to the Father." The Father is the Goal, and to Him

the great and final Object, is focused the vision which

alone gives our religion a fixed aim.[5] He is the sublimest

and all-embracing sovereign power, and the wisdom which

pervades the world, the sublimity which lifts us from narrow

ways. The Son is the Way, as He Himself has told us. By His

Word, by His life, and by His whole Being He reveals the

Father and leads us to Him: "No man cometh to the Father but

by me." He who acknowledges Christ, he who "seeth" Him,

"seeth the Father also." In proportion as we become one with

Christ we approach the Father more closely. And the Holy

Ghost, the Spirit of Jesus, is the Leader, and shows us the

way. He bestows Christ's grace, teaches Christ's truth, and

makes Christ's ordinances operative. This is the law

governing the organization of Christian life--the law of the

Blessed Trinity. Only where order is, God is. The Father has

sent the Son, and He has sent the Holy Ghost from the

Father. In the Church we become one with the Holy Ghost; He

unites us with the Son, "and he will surely take of his own

and give to us." And in Christ we come back to the Father.

An event of tremendous importance has happened. The

religious life no longer rises solely in the self, but at

the same time at the opposite pole, in the objective and

already formed community. There also life originates and is

thus a reciprocal movement between these two poles. It is

once more what of its very nature it should be, a phenomenon

of tension, an arc of flame. And it is full and free only

when its process is an arc rising from two extremities. The

objective is no longer merely the boundary of the subject to

which religion in the strict sense is confined. It is an

essential factor of the religious life, given from the very

outset. It is the presupposition and content of religion.

The religious life is being released from its fatal

confinement within the subject, and draws into itself the

entire fullness of objective reality. As once in the Middle

Ages, all things are re-entering the religious sphere, and

moreover with a religious coloring and as religious values.

The rest of mankind and the things of this world once more

are invested with a religious atmosphere and a profound

religious significance. As a result the feeling for

symbolism is coming back; concrete objects once more become

the vehicles and expressions of spiritual reality. We

understand how every department of a real world could find a

place in the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, in its "Summas,"

universal histories, encyclopedias and cycles of legend, and

moreover not as an incongruous accessory, not as an allegory

stuck on from without, but filled with religious content and

itself invested with a spiritual character. Many signs point

towards the re-emergence of a religious world. This,

however, is the Church, which gathers together under one

head "what is in heaven, on the earth, and under the earth."

The moment seems near for a genuine religious art, which

will not be content to depict religious subjects with an

unconsecrated brush, but will see the whole world

spiritually as a vast kingdom of realities, comprising good

and evil powers,[6] and in which the Kingdom of God is taken

by storm.

All this, however, can be summed up in one word--"the

Church." That stupendous Fact that is the Church is once

more becoming a living reality, and we understand that she

truly is the One and the All. We dimly guess something of

the passion with which great saints clung to her and fought

for her. In the past their words may sometimes have sounded

empty phrases. But now a light is breaking! The thinker,

with rapture of spirit, will perceive in the Church the

ultimate and vast synthesis of all realities. The artist,

with a force that moves his heart to the depths, will

experience in the Church the overwhelming transformation,

the exquisite refinement, and the sublime transfiguration of

all reality by a sovereign radiance and beauty. The man of

moral endeavor will see in her the fullness of living

perfection, in which all man's capacities are awakened and

sanctified in Christ; the power which contrasts

uncompromisingly Yea and Nay, and demands a decision between

them; the determined fight for God's Kingdom against evil.

To the politician--forget, reader, the ugliness which is

usually implied by the term; it can bear a noble sense--she

is revealed as that supreme order in which every living

thing finds its fulfillment and realizes the entire

significance of its individual being. It achieves this in

relation to beings and the whole, and precisely in virtue of

its unique individual quality combines with its fellows to

build up the great "Civitas," in which every force and

individual peculiarity are alive, but at the same time are

disciplined by the vast cosmic order which comes from God,

the Three in One. To the man of social temper she offers the

experience of an unreserved sharing, in which all belongs to

all, and all are one in God, so completely that it would be

impossible to conceive a profounder unity.

All this, however, must not be confined to books and speech,

but must be put with effect where the Church touches the

individual most closely--in the parish. If the process known

as the "Church movement" makes progress, it is bound to lead

to a renewal of parochial consciousness. This is the

appointed way in which the Church must become an object of

personal experience. The measure of the individual's true--

not merely verbal--loyalty to the Church lies in the extent

to which he lives with her, knows that he is jointly

responsible for her, and works for her. And conversely the

various manifestations of parish life must in turn be such

that the individual is able to behave in this way. Hitherto

parish life itself has been deeply tainted by that

individualistic spirit of which we have spoken above. How,

indeed, could it have been otherwise?

And confirmation is the Sacrament by which the Christian

comes into full relation with the Church. By Baptism he

becomes a member of the Church, but by Confirmation he

becomes one of her citizens, and receives the commission and

the power to take to himself the fullness of the Church's

life, and himself to exercise--in the degree and manner

compatible with his position as a layman--the "royal

priesthood of the holy people."

It is in the light of what has already been said that we can

understand the liturgical movement. This is a particular

powerful current and one more exceptionally visible from

outside than within the "Church movement"; indeed, it is the

latter in its contemplative aspect. Through it the Church

enters the life of prayer as a religious reality and the

life of the individual becomes an integral part of the life

of the Church.

Here the individual is as one of the people, not a member of

an esoteric group of artists and writers, as, for instance,

in the books of J. K. Huysmans, but essentially one of the

people. That is to say, he is comprised in the unity which

finds room at the same time for the average man and the most

extraordinary possibilities of heroism, the unity which

comprises both the surface and the deepest roots of

humanity, hard, every-day common sense and profound

mysticism, which can even include crude popular beliefs

which verge on superstition: and which is nevertheless alone

competent to judge the realities of life and of the Church

because it alone really faces life--its possibilities of

development hampered in innumerable respects by poverty and

narrow surroundings, and yet, as a whole, the sole complete

humanity. The liturgy is essentially not the religion of the

cultured, but the religion of the people (cf. p. 19). If the

people are rightly instructed, and the liturgy properly

carried out, they display a simple and profound

understanding of it. For the people do not analyze concepts,

but contemplate. The people possess that inner integrity of

being which corresponds perfectly with the symbolism of the

liturgical language, imagery, action, and ornaments. The

cultured man has first of all to accustom himself to this

attitude; but to the people it has always been inconceivable

that religion should express itself by abstract ideas and

logical developments, and not by being and action, by

imagery and ritual.

The liturgy is throughout reality. It is this which

distinguishes it from all purely intellectual or emotional

piety, from rationalism and religious romanticism. In it man

is confronted with physical realities--men, things,

ceremonies, ornaments--and with metaphysical realities-a

real Christ, real grace. The liturgy is not merely thought,

nor is it merely emotion; it is first and foremost

development, growth, ripening, being. The liturgy is a

process of fulfillment, a growth to maturity. The whole of

nature must be evoked by the liturgy, and as the liturgy

seized by grace must take hold of it all, refine and glorify

it in the likeness of Christ, through the all-embracing and

ardent love of the Holy Ghost for the glory of the Father,

whose sovereign Majesty draws all things to Itself.

Thus the liturgy embraces everything in existence, angels,

men and things; all the content and events of life; in

short, the whole of reality. And natural reality is here

made subject to supernatural; created reality related to the

uncreated.

This full reality is shaped by the constructive laws of the

Church--by dogma, the law of truth; by ritual, the law of

worship; and by canon law, the law of order.

The growth itself does not take place according to a program

or regulations carefully thought out, but as all life grows-

-rhythmically. But we cannot develop this point further now.

What proportion and equilibrium are in spatial construction,

rhythm is in sequence--systematic repetition in change, so

that the following step repeats the previous one, but at the

same time goes beyond it. In this way life grows to its

fullness and the transformation of the soul is accomplished.

The liturgy is a unique rhythm. Incalculable discoveries

still await us in this field. What the Middle Ages

experienced as a matter of course, what is already contained

in the Church's rubrics, but which has vanished from the

consciousness of religious people, must be rediscovered.

Its substance, however, is the life of Christ. What He was

and did lives again as mystical reality. His life, infused

into those rhythms and symbols, is renewed in the changing

seasons of the Church's year, and in the perpetual identity

of Sacrifice and Sacrament. This process is the organic law

by which the believer grows "unto the measure of the age of

the fullness of Christ." Living by the liturgy does not mean

the cultivation of literary tastes and fancies, but self-

subjection to the order established by the Holy Ghost

Himself; it means being led by the rule and love of the Holy

Ghost to a life in Christ and in Him for the Father.

We have yet to realize what constant discipline, what a

profound fashioning, and training of the inner life, this

demands. When we do, no one will any longer regard the

liturgy as mere a aestheticism.

Creation as a whole embraced in the relation with God

established by prayer; the fullness of nature, evoked and

transfigured by the fullness of grace, organized by the

organic law of the Triune God, and steadily growing

according to a rhythm perfectly simple yet infinitely rich;

the vessel and expression of the life of Christ and the

Christian--this is the liturgy. The liturgy is creation,

redeemed and at prayer, because it is the Church at prayer.

At Pentecost, when the fullness of the Spirit came upon the

Apostles, all those tongues were not sufficient to declare

the "wonderful works of God."

It often seems as though a breath from that mighty tempest

is stirring in our own time! Our Religion rises before us as

a shape so majestic that it leaves us breathless.

But why do I speak of religion? Did the primitive Christians

or the Middle Ages talk about "Religion" as we use the word?

Is there such a thing as "religion" for the Catholic? He is

a child of the living God, and a member of the living

Church.

ENDNOTES

1. This and the remarks which follow are intended merely to

describe how people felt and what consciousness was theirs.

It is not concerned with the essence and significance of the

Church herself.

2. Naturally much in this individualism is necessary and

true. These criticisms are directed solely against a false

one-sidedness which impoverishes human life; against

subjectivism, not against the subjective. This will be

obvious from all that follows.

3. At this point the real meaning of politics becomes clear.

It is no technique of deceit, lying and violence. But it

means the noble art which accepts all the concrete phenomena

of life, races, classes, and without violating their

distinctive characters finds room for all, but in such a

fashion that their combined life and functions build up a

powerful and richly endowed society. Here moral and

educational problems intervene which, to the best of my

knowledge, hardly anyone with the exception of F.W. Foerster

has seriously tackled.

4. The constant repetition of the idea of "realization" in

the writings of Newman, who experienced the individualistic

crisis so intensely, is most significant. By this he means

the transforming of an object from a purely verbal and

conceptual entity into an experience, in which it is

apprehended as a reality. This will in turn make our lives

serious.

5. Because this had been widely forgotten, it was possible

for Harnack to present the message of the Father in so one-

sided a manner as the content of the work of Christ, that it

became, so to speak, colored with Protestantism. Every page

of the Breviary, every prayer of the Mass loudly proclaims

that the aim and aspiration of our whole life is directed to

the Father.

6. For belief in that which is opposed to God is also

religious. Only coldness and intellectual pride are

irreligious. He who believes in the devil as a reality, by

so doing believes in God also.

Copyright ©1999-2023 Wildfire Fellowship, Inc all rights reserved