p. 55Duties to the Church

The soul of duty is obedience to lawful authority, obedience even when blind in matters not plainly wrong, is highly moral and rational. A soldier is praised for doing his duty, though acting on a wrong signal. “Into the jaws of death marched the six hundred” in dutiful response to an insane command. Authority may err—fallible authority, I mean—but never those whose duty it is to obey. Duty, even acting in the dark, as I said, is always right. Its justification is the will of one “having authority,” and exercising it in commanding; and, because ultimately based on the will of God, commanding order to be observed in the conduct of life. This supreme will of His, extending through every department of existence, is the eternal law of God.

In this life we are subject to this law in a double sense, political and religious, natural and supernatural. We are subjects both of Church and State, or, as our Lord phrases it, “We have to render to God the things that are God’s, and to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s.” We owe duties to both. They are both empowered by God to rule us within their respective spheres, but with this difference, that we claim for the Church, directly, a divine origin and guarantee of permanency, and special aid in carrying out her wish of training men for a higher and better world. The State is for this life and world, and may vary in form, constitution and government, according to time, place and other circumstances. In both legally established authority is divine; but in the State, its working, permanency, and application are human and fallible; whereas in the Church they are sacred and infallible.

I. We deal to-day with the duties we owe the Church. Why there should be a power in the world other than the State, and claiming rights against it, is not my purpose to explain. Our main object is to point out the exact duties we owe to the Church of which we are actual members. A word or two of explanation, however, about the function of the Church, may help us to understand these duties better. It might seem that duty is laid down clearly enough in the great moral law, traced on reason and indicating well enough for all practical purposes what we owe by way of duty to God, our neighbor, and ourselves, without the huge encumbrance of a spiritual state, always at war with the world we have to live in, and interfering with our soulborn liberty of thought, speech, and conduct. Now, my answer to this is, that the moral law, as revealed in reason, never did, never does, and never will suffice for man’s spiritual needs. For mankind at large it was practically a dead letter, till Christ came, warmed and put life into it, and embodied it whole and entire in the religion He founded; which religion finds its only true, full, and adequate development and expression in the worldwide humanity-embracing Catholic Church. In the material order we live in, we need facts and persons in religion, not fancies and abstractions. On her doctrinal side, no doubt, the Church teaches us abstract truth; but hers is a philosophy, a wisdom, which, while it enlightens the head, does not leave the heart cold and empty; for, she even teaches the way of God, in truth and “as having authority.” When the critics, moralists, and divines, who lecture her so severely from without, have made up their own minds once and for all, amongst themselves, as to whether there is a personal God above us, or a responsible soul within us; or whether we have any reason to fear Christ’s “hard sayings” about death, judgment, hell and heaven, then, perhaps, shall we be tempted to compare their credentials with those of the Church, to be our guide, “in the way of life.” Meanwhile, it is safer and wiser to cling to the rock of Peter, though at the risk of being rated as unwise for doing so. “Give ear to me, you that follow that which is just, and you that seek the Lord: look unto the rock whence you are hewn, and to the hole of the pit from which you are dug out. Look unto Abraham, your father, and to Sarah that bore you” (Isaias li, 1, 2). We are children of the Lord of Abraham. We are and will remain sons of holy Mother Church, and as such obey her laws; in other words, discharge our duties to her. She has maternal rights to our obedience, stronger, because directly granted by God, than those of the country or State we live in, and the laws of which, as good citizens, we gladly obey. She does not rule by the sword, by physical force, but in Christ’s name claims conscientious fulfilment of the duties we owe her.

Many, it may be said, lead lives of duty to God and their neighbors, are scrupulous observers of the moral law, who are not even Christians. Unitarians and agnostics, and others outside the body of the Church there are who, in their practical lives, put us Catholics to shame. But this fact, if true, is altogether irrelevant. The question is, did Christ found a Church, into which all are bound to enter, and did He impose corresponding duties? Apart from this, however, it is not by isolated cases we can judge a system. Good Samaritans are found everywhere, though “salvation is of the Jews,” and “at Jerusalem is the place where men must adore.” Many now rejecting Catholicism are living on its sap. A few isolated leaves, or even a large severed branch, may appear greener, healthier, and more vigorous than many on the tree; but they are cut off from the stem with all that, and bear within them the seeds of death. To work out our salvation, God never meant us to live in detached and antagonistic bodies, but in one. The peculiarity of the great society, founded by Christ for this end, the Church, or Kingdom of God, as it is called in Scripture, is to make us feel our common brotherhood, that in Him “there is neither Jew nor Gentile,” that all are one family in God. “Go, teach all nations,” without distinction of race or color, is her commission.

Duty to a Catholic, i. e., a worldwide church, is a necessary corrective of that narrow and exclusive patriotism which would confine our love of, and interest in, our fellow men within the limits of the territory we live in. It opens our eyes to a larger, wider, and holier brotherhood than that bounded by sea, river and mountain, the Church that is the common home and country of the nations.

Like all other communities or States, the Church is a society founded for a common object, but not narrowed by race, clime, or territory. Though only one body of believers with head and members, yet is it rooted in the idea of the common brotherhood of men and fatherhood of God, with the “bounds of the earth as its inheritance.” There is room enough in it for all other legitimate societies, from the smallest family to the largest State. Men crave for unity with God and one another, and the Catholic, i. e., the universal Church, answers to this craving. The instinct at the back of socialism, the solidarity of the race in one common bond of union, can only be ratified when men do their duty to the Church God has planted in their midst, as an ark of salvation for all. This society is free and open to all who wish to enter under due conditions. The Church is no secret society, but visible: a house raised on the hills, founded on a rock, and such that all may recognize her, and by submitting to her just claims discharge their duty toward her. In this life, good and bad, saints and sinners are found within the fold. She is a field wherein grow both wheat and cockle—a net containing fishes, good and bad—the ark in which were found animals both clean and unclean.

Now, like all other societies, she has a sovereign right to frame and enforce laws for the benefit of the members at large. All self-governing bodies can impose duties on their members, and, therefore, why not the most perfect of all, founded by Him, who claimed “all power in heaven and on earth,” and who said to her first rulers, “Whatsoever you bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven.” To bind is to impose duties. He came to found a Kingdom, of which He is still the invisible head and ruler, carrying on His work and office till the end of time through its visible head, Peter and his successors. They are key-bearers, i. e., office-holders to bind and loose, to make and unmake laws, binding in conscience the better to be able “to feed his sheep and lambs.”

The Church is no mere ideal “reign of justice” on earth, framed in men’s fancies, no mere Utopian or Platonic republic, but a real living, working, Divine state. She is not the product of human hands or brains, but fashioned by God. She is the “new Jerusalem” let down to earth from heaven, the “civitas Dei,” or city of God. Though ideal and spiritual in her aims and her purposes, yet she uses, and must use, human means and persons to attain these ends. She has a body as well as a soul—a visible, palpable, human, and, therefore, imperfect side, as well as invisible and divine. She is eminently fitted for the office of training and fitting fallen humanity to regain the high estate from which it fell and making its members good citizens both of this world and of the next. Though the oldest, she is withal the most vigorous, of all social bodies. She has outlived all the political commonwealths that filled the earth at her birth, and now numbers more citizens in her ranks than any actual and undivided religious organization in existence. Say what her enemies may, the Church is no wreck, no mummy, no empty tomb, but “the Kingdom of God on earth,” “the bride of the Lamb,” without spot or wrinkle, “and ever ready to meet her spouse.”

II. Now, what, as loyal members of this Kingdom, should be our attitude towards the Church: in other words, what are the special duties we owe her? We call her, as she really is in our regard, “holy Mother Church,” to whom we owe the same filial duties of love, respect and obedience that are due to our parents in the flesh. However, as our duty is mainly that of obedience, in which, indeed, duty chiefly consists, we shall dwell particularly on this point. It is the test and barometer of filial piety. A worldly son or daughter is false to the name, if he fails in obedience to his parents; and so is a Catholic, if disobedient to Mother Church; the more so, as she has inherited from her Divine Founder the power that was given to Him in heaven and on earth. Besides being Saviour, He was King and Legislator, and to His Kingdom, as a perfect, well-organized, social body, He granted the same power He had himself, of making laws that bind in conscience: in other words, of imposing duties, “He that heareth you heareth me, and he that despiseth you despiseth me.” And just as in a well-ordered State, there are and must be, rulers and ruled—in a school, teachers and pupils; so, in God’s Kingdom, the Church, which is both a commonwealth and a school, there are rulers and subjects, teachers and taught, i. e., clergy and laity; or, as our Lord touchingly expresses it, shepherd and sheep.

We all singly come into contact with the whole hierarchy or ruling and teaching power of the Church, in and through our own immediate pastor, duly sent by the bishop, who, in turn, was sent or deputed by the Pope, our chief shepherd, the direct lineal successor of St. Peter, made the rock on which the Church or house of God was built, and who was commissioned by Christ to feed His sheep and lambs. “I have prayed for thee . . . and thou, being confirmed, confirm thy brethren.”

Now, the Church claims to keep the world straight in two very important points, faith and morals, i. e., belief and conduct. They are essential to our spiritual well-being; and experience shows how helpless unaided reason is to answer pressing questions, as to God, our soul, and our destiny. Hence, she has a double aspect, doctrinal and moral. Our first duty, therefore, once reason is satisfied with her credentials to lead men aright, is to submit to her guidance in the realm of faith or belief. We say guidance, because the Church does not originate or reveal Divine truth any more than a teacher of arithmetic reveals the truths of the science he teaches. Her function is to explain, determine, and bear witness to God’s truth “as it is in Jesus.” She is prevented by the Holy Ghost from error. The Pentecostal Spirit is still with her in her office of teaching and ruling the flock of Christ. To-day our Lord requires unflinching and unshaken faith in His person and mission, just as when “He walked on earth and was seen by men.” To elicit that faith, He says, speaking of the pastors and rulers of His Church, “He who heareth you heareth me.” Our pastors voice and personate Him in our regard; and it is our plain duty to accept their guidance. Whatever be their personal gifts or characters, they stand to us as authorized teachers and expounders of Christ’s gospel message. The Catholic clergy do not preach themselves, their private opinions, or virtues, but Divine truth and morality, as witnessed to by the Church at large. We do not attend a place of worship to hear the popular preacher of the day expound his views on the Trinity, or Holy Spirit, or the Incarnation, or the atonement, but the pure gospel, as handed down by its authorized guardians and interpreters.

“Ubi Petrus ibi ecclesia,” where Peter is, there is the Church; and where the Church is, there is Christ, who promised “to abide with her all days even to the end of the world.” The Church is His body, and as such has only one head, the organ of His mind, whose voice to us is His. Christ Himself, no doubt, is the invisible head; but the successor of St. Peter is the visible and earthly head, to whom is entrusted the care of His sheep and lambs.

The first duty of obedience we owe the Church, therefore, is to bend the mind to her teaching. It is guaranteed free from error in all essential points. Nothing more in accordance with reason itself than this submission to faith; as, like children in school, we cannot find out its truths otherwise. She knows her own mind and the limits of her commission in her pastoral office. To whom shall we go? As voicing Christ, she is to us “the way, the truth and the light.” She does not hide, cloud, or obscure Christ, as her enemies says: she reveals Him. And just as Christ did not obscure the Father, but manifested Him to men, so does the Church “show forth Christ, till He come.” There are spiritual cravings in our nature that we cannot still; there are mysteries about our souls and bodies, in relation to God and the future, that we cannot unlock, if we seek not the key in holy faith. Our duty, plainly, is to choose God’s appointed guide in this all-important realm of truth, “Obey your prelates and be subject to them” (Rom. xiii, 1), “Remember your prelates . . . whose faith follow” (Heb. xiii, 7), to whom it is said “the Holy Ghost hath placed you bishops to rule the Church of God” (Acts xx, 28) in faith and morals, in true belief and right conduct. These are the two momentous issues on which our happiness here, and destiny hereafter, depend. The duty of mental submission is our sole safeguard. Jesus Christ, speaking in and through His Church, is the light of the world. All questions bearing on belief and conduct once decided by her are as a matter of duty, and happily so, closed questions. The truth of the Trinity, or the lawfulness of suicide, or divorce, are not open to discussion. Our duty is to obey the Church, to us “the pillar and the ground of truth.” Divine faith, taught by the Church, is the highest form of certainty. Heed not those who say that her teaching, “cribs, cabins, and confines” the free soul of man. They know not what they say. All truth binds, and, as far as it goes, chains freedom, or rather, license of thought; so does school, so does discipline of every sort. It is “the truth that makes us free,” free from error, doubt—all the mental ailments of the day. So far from obedience to Church checking true science, you may rest assured that the highest culture and most ennobling knowledge are quite compatible, nay enlarged, by compliance with this duty. Faith is the complement of reason. The mind craves for, and gladly submits to, a light higher than its own.

So much for the duty of obedience to the Church in her doctrinal aspect as authorized teacher; but we must also obey her laws in the practical department of life, also. She has, like every other society, power to make laws suited to her sphere of action in the world—laws dealing with public and private worships—the teaching and spread of the gospel—the administration of the Sacraments and the rest. The law of the Church forms a special branch of study, called Canon law, and as her empire covers the whole earth and deals with a period of some nineteen centuries, we need not be surprised at its complexity and extent. The bulk of its contents deals mainly with particular classes and special circumstances, and hardly concerns the laity at all. It may be stated that as she herself has framed these laws, she may, like any other legislative body, change, modify, or abolish them. This does not apply, as is evident, to the fixed unchangeable moral law, summarized in the Ten Commandments or law of God. This she claims only to teach and expound, never to change, modify, or abrogate. No power on earth can dispense with the law of God in its moral and doctrinal side.

As I said, the chief commandments of the Church, pointing out our practical duties to her, are reduced to six, and are really the application and development of some of the commands of God. Thus, the first of these duties, “to hear Mass on Sundays and holidays and rest from servile work,” specifies the way in which we are to keep the first Commandment of God. The second duty, “to keep the days of fasting and abstinence appointed by the Church,” points out how we are to fulfil the law of penance and self-sacrifice, specially enjoined by Christ. Though the Church may frequently modify or suspend fasting, or abstinence, yet her law, her second command, reminds us of our Lord’s words, “Except you do penance, you shall all likewise perish” (Luke xiii, 5). “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself” (Ibid. ix, 23). Our third practical duty as Catholics is “to go to Confession at least once a year”; and the fourth, “to receive holy Communion at least once a year at Easter.” The power of forgiving sins and distributing the new manna of the Eucharist was entrusted to the Church; and, though recommending daily Communion, she determines the least interval that can elapse without our using this power. Repentance for sin is a law of Nature. The means to be used by us lies in the Sacrament of Penance. Our Lord Himself laid down the law of Communion, “Except you eat the flesh of the son of Man . . . you shall not have life in you.” The Church merely enjoins the time and place of its fulfilment. The fifth duty of a practical Catholic is “to contribute to the support of the clergy according to his means.” St. Paul enjoins that “they who preach the gospel should live by the gospel” (I. Cor. ix, 7), and this duty puts it into actual shape.

The sixth and last of the commandments of the Church and of our chief duties is, “Not to marry within certain degrees of kindred or at certain seasons”; a duty that reverence to blood relations, health, and respect for the great Sacrament of Marriage alike suggest.

May she not, then, justly say in the name of Him who was at once her Founder, Law-giver, King and Mystic Spouse, “Tollite jugum meum super vos,” “Take my yoke upon you, for my yoke is sweet and my burden light.” Her authority to impose duties upon us comes straight from the authority of God, fountain of all just rule. We are not our own masters. We are not free. The dent of the collar and the yoke is upon us all. Our very beliefs and opinions, our faith, in fact, whatever it is, is imposed by others. We are hedged in and hampered with laws and burdens on all sides far heavier than those of the Church—burdens, too, we can’t escape. The yoke of religion put on us by the Church is neither galling nor intolerable. It sweetens all the bitter waters of life. There is in reality no truer, safer, broader, holier or larger life possible than what we may enjoy within the limits of the Catholic Church when we are dutiful subjects, or, rather, children. Every faculty of soul and body, every legitimate interest, every feeling and affection, may be nursed and developed to the fullest capacity within her fold. The long roll of pure, noble, unselfish spirits of every age, rank, and sex that adorn her history proves this. One condition is essential, and that is, whole-hearted discharge of the duty we owe her—obedience of mind to her teaching and conformity of conduct with her law. Duty to her is carrying out into practise our Lord’s law of life, “Seek, first, the Kingdom of God, and all else will be added.” A good citizen of God’s Kingdom, the Church, is the best asset, even of the kingdom of the world. Be it then, ever our glory to love, obey, and defend our holy Mother Church. Her cause is God’s cause. Her aim is to strengthen the Kingdom of God in our hearts—to train and fit us for His Kingdom without end.