More hopeful words concerning the Church

St. Irenaeus

We continue to atone for recent dispiriting posts concerning the Novus Ordo, by quoting hopeful passages from Fr. Henri de Lubac's "The Splendour of the Church:"

Whatever  the difficulties we encounter and the disturbances which threaten to throw us off our balance, we should always keep a firm hold on [the equivalence of Christ and His Church].
Like Ulysses bound to the mast, ... we should hold on ... to the saving truth formulated for us by St. Irenaeus: "Where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God, and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and all grace, and the Spirit is Truth; to sever ourselves from the Church is to reject the Spirit" - and in virtue of that "to shut ourselves out of life."

Hopeful words concerning the Church

St. Joan of Arc

To atone for yesterday's somewhat dispiriting post concerning the Novus Ordo, here is a hopeful passage from Fr. Henri de Lubac's "The Splendour of the Church:"

Practically speaking, for each one of us, Christ is thus His Church. . . . Joan of Arc's words to her judges convey at one and the same time the depths of the mystique of belief and the practical good sense of the believer: "It seems to me that it is all one, Christ and the Church, and that we ought not to make any difficulty of it."  These words of a simple believer are also a summing-up of the faith of Church's Doctors.

"Nothing would be more regrettable"

"Hardrock Mass,"  Tarragon, Spain

Writing in 1956, Fr. Henri de Lubac had already anticipated and critiqued foolish and appalling efforts to renew liturgy such as "Hardrock Mass" (h/t Eponymous Flower):

In the present welcome efforts to bring about a celebration of the liturgy which is more "communal" and more alive, nothing would be more regrettable than a preoccupation with the success of some secular festivals through the combined resources of technical skill and the appeal to man at his lower level . . . The Catholic liturgy is luminous in its very mysteries, balanced and reposeful in its very magnificence; everything in it is ordered, and even that which calls most strongly to our being at the level of the senses comes by its meaning only through faith.  Its fruit is joy but the lesson it teaches is one of austerity; the sacrifice which is its centre is "a symbol and representation of the passion of the Lord" (St. Thomas Aquinas) and sacrament of His sacrifice, and the memorial of His death.

Ecclesia Mater

Paul Claudel (1868 AD - 1955 AD)

The following quotation from the French poet Paul Claudel on the meaning of our membership in the Mystical Body of Christ is taken from Fr. Henri de Lubac's "The Splendour of the Church:"

The whole of creation, visible and invisible, all history, all the past, the present and the future, all the treasure of the saints, multiplied by grace - all that is at our disposal as an extension of ourselves, a mighty instrument.  All the saints and the angels belong to us.  We can use the intelligence of St. Thomas, the right arm of St. Michael, the hearts of Joan of Arc and Catherine of Siena, and all the hidden resources which have only to be touched to be set in action.  Everything of the good, the great and the beautiful from one end of the earth to the other - everything which begets sanctity . .  .  it is as if all that were our work.  The heroism of the missionary, the inspiration of the Doctors of the Church, the generosity of the martyrs, the genius of the artist, the burning prayer of the Poor Clares and Carmelites - it is as if all that were ourselves.

"Something infinitely more disastrous"

Henri de Lubac, SJ

The following observations on the Church are taken from Fr. Henri de Lubac, SJ's "The Splendour of the Church:"

"The-Church-as-Mother is never at the end of her labour to deliver us to the life of the Spirit, and the greatest temptation to the Church which we constitute - the most subversive, the ever-recurrent, reappearing insidiously when all the rest are overcome, and even strengthened by those victories - is what Abbot Vonier called the temptation to "worldiness of the mind . . .  the practical relinquishing of other-worldliness, so that moral and even spiritual standards should be based, not on the glory of the Lord, but on what is the profit of man; an entirely anthropocentric outlook would be exactly what we mean by worldliness.  Even if men were filled with every spiritual perfection, but if such perfections were not referred to God (suppose this hypothesis to be possible) it would be unredeemed worldliness."

If this worldliness of the spirit were to invade the Church and set to work to corrupt her by attacking her very principle, it would be something infinitely more disastrous than any worldliness of the purely moral order."

Many in the Church have succumbed to the temptation Fr. de Lubac calls "wordliness of the mind."   Among the Jesuits, Fr. de Lubac's own religious order, this "worldliness of the mind" has becoming especially dominant.  As Fr. de Lubac predicted, the results have certainly been disastrous for both the Jesuits and the Church.

St. Ignatius Loyola, pray for us.