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| The Catholic Church-The living Pillar of Truth; the Mystical Body of Christ |
The Catholicity of the Church
From The Splendor of the Church by Aloysius Kayiwa
By St. Francis de Sales
From The Splendor of the Church by Aloysius Kayiwa
By St. Francis de Sales
That great Father, Vincent of Lerins, in his most useful Memorial, says that he must before all things have a great care to believe “that which has been believed by all [always and everywhere]” … (1) such as the jugglers and tinkers; for the rest of the world calls us Catholic; and if we add Roman, it is only to inform people of the See of that Bishop who is general and visible Pastor of the Church. And already in the time of S. Ambrose to be Roman in communion was the same thing as being Catholic.
But as for your church, it is called everywhere Huguenot, Calvinist, Heretical, Pretended, Protestant, New, or Sacramentarian. Your church was not before these names, and these names were not before your church, because they are proper to it. Nobody calls you Catholics, you scarcely dare to do so yourselves. I am well aware that amongst you your churches call themselves Reformed, but just as much right to that name have the Lutherans, and Ubiquitarians, Anabaptists, Trinitarians, and other offshoots of Luther, and they will never yield it to you. The name of religion is common to the Church of the Jews and of the Christians, in the Old Law and in the New; the name of Catholic is proper to the Church of Our Lord; the name of Reformed is a blasphemy against Our Lord, who has so perfectly formed and sanctified his Church in his blood, that it must never take other form than of his all lovely Spouse, of pillar and ground of truth. One may reform the nations in particular, but not the Church or religion. She was rightly formed, change of formation is called heresy or irreligion. The tint of Our Savior’s blood is too fair and too bright to require new colors.
Your church, then, calling itself Reformed, gives up its part in the form which the Savior had established. But I cannot refrain from telling you what Beza, Luther, and Peter Martyr think on this. Peter Martyr calls you Lutherans, and says you are brothers to them; you are then Lutherans; Luther calls you Zwinglians (2) and Sacramentarians; Beza calls the Lutherans Consubstantiators and Chymists, and yet he puts them in the number of Reformed churches. See then the new names which the reformers acknowledge for one another. Your church, therefore, not having even the name of Catholic, you cannot with a good conscience say the Apostles’ Creed; if you do, you judge yourselves, who, confessing the Church Catholic and universal, obstinately keep to your own, which most certainly is not such. If S. Augustine were living now, he would remain in our Church, which from immemorial time is in possession of the name of Catholic.
THE TRUE CHURCH MUST BE ANCIENT, THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IS MOST ANCIENT, THE PRETENDED QUITE NEW.
The Church to be Catholic must be universal in time, and to be universal in time it must be ancient; antiquity then is a property of the Chruch. And in relation to heresies it must be more ancient than any of them, and must precede all, because, as Tertullian excellently says: (3) “Error is a corruption of truth, truth then must precede.” The good seed is sown first, the enemy who oversows cockle comes afterwards. Moses was before Abiron, Dathan, and Core; the Angels were before the devils; Lucifer stood in the light before he fell into the eternal darkness; the privation must follow the form. S. John says of heretics (I Ep. xix. 19): They went out from us; they were then within before they went out; the going out is heresy, the being within is fidelity; the Church then precedes heresy. So the coat of Our Lord was made whole before it was divided. And although Ismael was before Isaac, that does not signify that error was before truth, but that the true shadow, Judaism, was before the body, Christianity, as S. Paul says (Gal. iv.)
