November 2023 Print

Pauper Peregrinus

If you were to read the literature put out by some modern missionary organizations, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Church exists to provide housing, health care, and clean water for all. This is the error for which Romano Amerio, in his superb work Iota Unum, coined the phrase “secondary Christianity.” It consists in imagining that the main task of Christians is to promote the welfare of man on earth. But while the corporal works of mercy are certainly a part of the gospel, they are not that for which the Church and her missionary orders were principally founded.

As one might expect, it is our Lord Himself who gave to the Church her true missionary charter. Intercepting St. Paul on the way to Damascus, Christ told him that he was to be sent to the nations, to open their eyes, that they may be converted from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and a lot among the saints, by the faith that is in me (Acts 26:18).

Despite these dominical marching orders, some modern theologians have implied that the Church’s missionary work was never really needed. They have argued that people can be saved without having to hear about the faith that is in Christ. Such a requirement would be unfair, they protest: what of the poor Polynesian or native American who lived and died without seeing a Christian preacher? Isn’t it enough if such people are at least ready to believe in a hypothetical message from God, should a missionary one day arrive?

The trouble with this is that a readiness to believe is, by definition, not yet faith. But it is faith that saves us. The logic of the Apostle to the Gentiles is water-tight: “Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord, shall be saved.” How then shall they call on him, in whom they have not believed? Or how shall they believe him, of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear, without a preacher? (Rom. 10:13-14). As Pope St. Pius X said in his Oath against Modernism, echoing the teaching of St. Paul, faith is not just a good disposition of the heart arising from within, but “a true assent of the intellect to a truth received from outside by hearing.” To be saved, I must first hear about God’s offer of salvation, and then accept it.

Certainly, a pagan can prepare himself to hear God’s revelation by following as best he can the law written on his heart. His faltering efforts in this direction, though they cannot merit from divine justice that a preacher be sent to him, will nevertheless be efficacious with the divine mercy. Yet no son of Adam, until he is healed by the light of Christ, keeps the whole natural law without some serious delinquency; and how many make even a fair attempt at doing so? When the Japanese protested to St. Francis Xavier that God seemed to have forgotten their ancestors, having sent to them no missionary before he arrived, that great Jesuit replied that if their forebears had observed the divine law written on their hearts, “the light of heaven would without doubt have illuminated them, as, on the contrary, having violated it, they deserved condemnation.” St. Francis de Sales called this reply “an apostolic answer of an apostolic man” (Treatise on the Love of God, book 4, chapter 5).

Hearing about Christ, however, and believing that He is the Son of God and Redeemer, is only the beginning of the process by which someone is converted from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God. The Council of Trent, in the 16th century, had to condemn the Protestant idea that this conversion, technically called “justification,” happens by faith alone. Some other good dispositions have also to be active in the one who is to be converted. Rather as St. John the Baptist’s austere life and preaching preceded the divine conviviality of Jesus Christ, so some painful movements of the soul must precede the entrance of the Blessed Trinity within it. St. Augustine’s assessment is realistic: “It is on the ground of that very severity of God, by which the hearts of mortals are agitated with a most wholesome terror, that love is to be built up… For certainly it very rarely happens, nay, I should rather say, never, that anyone approaches us with the wish to become a Christian who has not been smitten with some sort of fear of God” (On Catechising the Uninstructed, chapter 5).

Scene A, Pope Paul III sitting on his Papal seat and surrounded by religious men, confirms the Jesuit Society to Ignatius; Scene B, while writing the constitutions of the Jesuit Society, Ignatius is guided by heavenly lights; Scene C, Ignatius instructs his sons to go and preach.

St. Thomas Aquinas, as was his wont, expresses a similar thought in a more abstract way: “The justification of the ungodly is a certain movement whereby the human mind is moved by God from the state of sin to the state of justice. Hence it is necessary for the human mind to be related to both extremes by an act of free-will, just as a moving body is related to both terms of its movement. Now, it is clear that a moving body moves by leaving one term and approaching another. Hence the human mind, whilst it is being justified, must by a movement of free-will withdraw from sin and draw near to justice. And this means detestation and desire” (Summa theologiae Ia IIae, 113, 5).

In other words, for justification to occur, the non-Christian must do more than simply believe the message that God reveals. Although it is an open question whether the process need always happen in the same order, the Council of Trent sketches what we may call a typical case. The non-Christian first hears and believes that God wants, “through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 3:24), to deliver people from the sins that separate them from Himself and from happiness. Taking this message to heart and seeing himself for the first time as not just foolish or imperfect but a sinner, he conceives a salutary fear of being punished: this council had to define against Protestantism that it is not a sin to turn to God from fear of hell. The fear of the Lord driveth out sin, says a wise man (Ecclus. 1:7).

Next, remembering the mercy of God who, he has just learned, wants all men to be saved, the converting sinner is enabled to make acts of supernatural hope that His redeemer will save him from eternal darkness. More than that, since he now begins to see his Creator not only as the giver of sun and rain, and health and children, and other temporal goods, but as “the source of all justice,” he begins for the first time to conceive a love for God. And since one cannot love anyone without hating what offends him, the person in question finds himself beginning to hate and detest sin, not only because it harms his neighbor, but because it is an offense against God.

Above all, of course, the sins that he has to hate are his own. Each one will bear his own burden, says St. Paul, and it is the burden of all the sins committed from his childhood upward that he must now put off, in order that the Holy Spirit may begin to load a burden of merits upon him instead. Not that he has to remember each of his sins in detail, which for most people would be impossible. St. Thomas’s words are reassuring: “Previous to justification a man must detest each sin he remembers having committed, and from this remembrance the soul goes on to have a general movement of detestation with regard to all sins committed, in which are included such sins as have been forgotten.”

Since we are body as well as soul, this detestation, if it is sincere, will naturally tend to show itself outwardly. This is why the council Fathers mention as the next good disposition, penance, by which they mean to include the purpose of exterior works of repentance, as well as restitution to those people whom one has wronged. Finally, presuming that he has been sufficiently evangelized, the convert must “resolve to receive baptism, to begin a new life, and to keep the divine commandments.”

As the wood when sufficiently heated will finally burst into flames, so too the person thus well disposed, sanctifying grace at last pours in. He is justified: which means not, as the Protestants imagined, that God decides to ignore his sins, but that he is a new creation. His sins are truly taken away, his soul is bright with sanctifying grace, and the three divine Persons dwell within him. From being unjust, say the Fathers of Trent, he becomes just, and from an enemy, a friend, that he may be an heir according to hope of life everlasting (Tit. 3:7). And when he emerges from the baptistery, all the punishment due to his past sins is now annulled, and so the gates of heaven stand open to him.

Such are the blessings that missionaries give their lives to bring.

TITLE IMAGE: The Vocation of the Apostles, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Sistine Chapel, Rome (Burkhard Mücke).