Michael Davies

Et Incarnatus est

Part One

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION  is based upon great mysteries, truths which we must believe if we are to call ourselves Christians, but which we can never fully understand. We must believe that there is one God and no more than one God; that this God is pure spirit; that He is the Lord and Maker of heaven and earth who has neither beginning nor end; that He is always the same, is everywhere present; knows and sees all things, can do all things, whatsoever He pleases, and is infinite in all perfections. Furthermore, we must believe that in this one God there are three perfectly equal Persons; the Father who proceeds from no one; the Son who is begotten of the Father before all ages; and the Holy Ghost, who proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son. We must believe that these three Persons of equal power and equal wisdom are all three one and the same Lord and God who has existed from everlasting, as Cardinal Newman explained: "Before heaven and earth were made, before man fell or angels rebelled, before the sons of God were formed in the morning of creation, yea, before there were seraphim to veil their faces before Him and cry 'Holy,' He existed without ministers, without attendants, without court and kingdom, without manifested glory, without anything but Himself; He, His own temple, His own infinite rest, His own supreme bliss, from eternity."

God has need of no being outside the Trinity; the Holy Trinity is absolutely self-sufficient. But God is loving, and the basis of any form of love is a desire to share it. He decided to create beings who could share His happiness. He created angels, pure spirits like Himself. He created them with free will, with the ability to choose. He did not force them to love Him as love given under constraint is worthless even to God. A large number of the angels, led by Lucifer, abused their God-given freedom, rebelled against their Creator, and were expelled from His presence. Lucifer wished to be subject to no one. He wished to rule his own kingdom: "Non serviam" was his rallying cry: "I will not serve." God granted his request, and, as Satan, he now rules in his own kingdom of hell, separated from God for all eternity, an eternity of absolute and unmitigated misery and anguish, for there can be no greater misery, no greater anguish than the eternal separation from God of a creature whose ultimate purpose in life was eternal happiness with God. Note carefully that it is something of a misnomer to speak of God punishing Satan and the wicked angels when, in fact, what He did was to respect their freely and consciously chosen decision. God excludes no one from heaven, neither men nor angels. When God the Son comes in glory at the end of the world to judge the living and the dead, the sentence He pronounces will be that which each of us has already passed upon himself.

After the rebellion of the wicked angels, God created a new type of being, Man, a creature who was not a pure spirit like the angels, but in whom a spiritual soul was united with a physical body. Adam and Eve, the first human beings and parents of the entire human race, were given the earth to live upon and to subdue, but they were also heirs to heaven. A future of eternal happiness with God was given to them as a right, providing they used the free-will with which they had been endowed to love and serve their Creator. But like Satan, they responded to God's love by saying, "Not Thy will, but mine." They would not. serve, and, like Satan, made a free and conscious decision to disobey God in a serious matter. Like Satan, they lost the right to eternal happiness in heaven and, because Adam was the head of the entire human race, he lost this right not simply for himself but for all his heirs. There was no lack of justice here for a father cannot transmit to his heirs an inheritance which he has lost. Many decisions we make affect others as well as ourselves, and this can often bring suffering. A father who gambles away all that he owns will bring suffering upon his wife and children, but God must allow him to exercise his free will, whatever the consequence. An airline pilot who ignores the established procedures could lose not only his own life but that of hundreds of innocent passengers, but once again, God must respect his free will. It might be argued that the word "must" cannot be used where God is concerned. God, it is rightly said, can do anything. Perfectly true, but God is consistent, and when He has willed to do something in a particular way He will not contradict Himself. Thus, having chosen to create angels and men with free will, He foresaw and accepted that some would abuse this privilege, but if He were to intervene to prevent any and every such abuse, then the angels and men would not truly possess free will; we should be no more than machines or vegetables.

Adam, then, lost the right to heaven for himself and for his heirs. His was the first, the original sin, and this is the inheritance he has transmitted to us. It consists principally in the absence of sanctifying grace and a tendency towards sin in each newborn member of the human race. But in His infinite mercy God willed to give each member of the human race an opportunity to regain the inheritance which Adam had lost for them. He would send them a second Adam whose perfect love and obedience would pay the debt of sin incurred by Adam and all his children, and He would do this through the mystery of the Incarnation. We are bound to believe that God the Son, the Word begotten from all eternity by the Father, has raised into personal union with Himself the blessed fruit of the virginal womb of Mary; in other words, the human and divine natures are united in Our Lord in the unity of a single Person, the second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Further, since when we speak of a son we mean a person, Jesus must be called the Son of God, because as the Son of God, He is a Divine Person. He is the Incarnate Word. From this it follows that Our Lady is properly called the Mother of God; not because she has begotten the Word, but because from her is derived the humanity which the Word has united to Himself in the mystery of the Incarnation.

The mystery of the Incarnation is one upon which we can never meditate sufficiently, one for which our gratitude to God can never be adequate. This explains why we pray the Angelus three times a day, this explains why we genuflect at the mention of the Incarnation in the Creed and the Last Gospel at Mass. The liturgy of the Easter Vigil even terms the sin of Adam a "happy fault that merited so great a Redeemer." Cardinal Newman has well expressed the gratitude we should feel to the Son of God for deigning to take a human nature and dwell among us, for vouchsafing to partake of our humanity that we might share in His divinity:

The Incarnation is the rock upon which the entire Christian faith is built; remove it and nothing remains. A Christian is a man who believes that as a matter of actual, objective historical fact, at a specific time and at a specific place, the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, that He taught us how His Father wishes us to live, that He died for us on Calvary, that He rose in triumph on the third day, and that He ascended into heaven to prepare a place for all those who believe, who are baptized, and who make a sincere effort to cooperate with divine grace to achieve this end. Many who profess to be Christians today, both Catholic and Protestant, have no real claim to the title as they do not believe in the Incarnation as a historical fact. This error has been the basis of a number of heresies: Arius taught that Jesus was the greatest of God's treasures, but not equal to God; Mohammed accepted that Jesus was a great prophet and teacher, but not God Incarnate—the doctrine of the Incarnation is blasphemy to those who accept the Islamic faith; and a denial of the Incarnation is the ultimate logic of the theological Modernism which is so widespread among Catholics and Protestants today.

Catholics and Protestants who accept the literal truth of the Incarnation have very much in common, but there is one important aspect of this dogma concerning which they are irreconciliably divided: the manner in which Christ willed to apply to mankind the grace which He won for them upon the cross. Catholics believe that He willed to do this by means of a visible Church which would mediate His grace to us; Protestants believe that there is no mediator between God and man but Jesus Christ.

We have noted the manner in which God willed to redeem mankind by becoming incarnate, by the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity taking upon Himself a human as well as a divine nature. He offered Himself as a sacrifice for our sins upon the Cross. He could do this because, as Man He could represent men, and as God His sacrifice was of infinite worth. One drop of His Precious Blood would have been sufficient to save us, but for our sakes: "Christ became for us obedient unto death, even to the death of the Cross. For which cause God also hath exalted Him, and hath given Him a name which is above all names" (Phil. 2:8).

The redemption won for us upon the Cross must be looked at from two aspects. First we must consider the sufficiency of Our Lord's great act of atonement. The fruits of His Passion are sufficient to redeem all men. Christ died for all men, not exclusively for the faithful or for those predestined for salvation. He died even for those who reject Him and will not attain heaven. This is known as the objective redemption. Although the fruits of the Passion are sufficient to reconcile all mankind with God it will be efficacious only in the case of those who accept the objective redemption personally, who co-operate freely with divine grace to achieve their own salvation. This is known as the subjective redemption. The act of the application of the fruits of the Redemption to the individual man is called justification. The fruit of the redemption is sanctifying grace, nothing less than a share in God's own life.

Catholics believe that sanctifying grace is mediated from God to man by means of a visible, hierarchically organized Church. The word "Church," of course, is derived from a Greek root meaning "assembly" or "congregation" of the faithful. This visible Church was intended by Our Lord to be the ordinary means of salvation. By the word "ordinary" we mean the way He has chosen to save us. The mandate which Our Lord entrusted to His Church is the one which He received from the Father, to save the whole human race without distinction of time and place. But evidently, although it was Our Lord's command that the Gospel be preached throughout the world, this has not yet been achieved and there are many who have not had the authentic Gospel message and the claims of Christ's Church put before them. Such men are by no means excluded from salvation, but the manner in which they will be saved is an extraordinary means of salvation. God can save whosoever He chooses in any way He chooses. He will save men in other religions, though not through those religions—the distinction is an important one. There can be no limit to the workings of the Holy Ghost. But the ordinary means of salvation, the way willed by Our Lord, was to incorporate all men into a visible Church where the Gospel would be preached to them and a life of sanctifying grace initiated and sustained by the seven divinely instituted sacraments. It has already been explained that Protestants reject the idea of a divinely founded visible Church, and claim that there is no mediator but Christ between God and man. Fundamentally, there is no clash between their belief and ours, for what they fail to recognize is that no distinction can be made between Christ and His Church. Our Lord did not abandon us when He ascended into heaven. He has remained on earth in and as His Church, and will do so until the end of time. The Catholic Church in its most profound reality is, then, Christ still among us throughout the nations and the centuries—Christ still among us, teaching us and sanctifying us. The Catholic Church is nothing less than an extension of the Incarnation, and is Christ mediating between God and man. The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ in this world; He is the Head, the Holy Ghost is the Soul and we are His members. Just as He willed to become incarnate through the cooperation of a human being, His Blessed Mother, so He willed to perpetuate His Incarnation through the cooperation of the members of the Mystical Body. He did not need our help to perpetuate His work of redemption, but He chose to avail Himself of it. This is both a great honor and a fearful responsibility for every member of the Mystical Body.

The Church is visible through the profession of the same faith, the use of the same means of grace (primarily the Seven Sacraments), and subordination to the same authority. The authority to which we must be subordinate is the visible, divinely instituted hierarchy. Our Lord founded His Church upon the Apostles, transferring to them His threefold office—teaching, pastoral, sacerdotal—and by appointing Peter the supreme pastor and teacher of His Church. Christ willed that these powers should be transmitted to the successors of the Apostles, since the purpose of His Church necessitated this. The apostolic character of the Church appears most clearly in the unbroken succession of bishops from the Apostles down to our very day. Our Lord promised St. Peter that the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church, i.e., the Church is indefectible, that it cannot fail in its divinely mandated mission of teaching and sanctifying mankind. The Catholic Church, is, and will remain, the Institution of Salvation founded by Christ until the end of the world. The Church can never impose upon its members as necessary for salvation any teaching which is not in accordance with the Gospel; the Church can never offer to its members sacraments which are not valid. If it failed in its mission of teaching or sanctification it would not be indefectible, and hence could not be Christ in the world today, and Christ's promise to St. Peter would be meaningless, and we would have every reason for abandoning belief in the Incarnation itself.

But although the Church is indefectible, churchmen are not. They can and do fail. We have mentioned that the tendency to sin which has been transmitted to us by Adam is our inheritance of original sin. Mention was also made of the gift of free will, and that having given us this privilege God will not intervene if we misuse it. Thus the Mystical Body, being Christ in the world, is without spot or wrinkle, but its individual members, whatever their rank, not being Christ, are subject to temptation and liable to fall—this includes even the Pope himself, who is not Christ, but the representative of Christ. The Church is perfect but churchmen are not. Remember that Our Lord was betrayed by an apostle, that the apostles fled at the moment of His arrest, that only one stood at the foot of the Cross, that St. Peter himself denied Our Lord and at one time was rebuked by St. Paul for deviating from the true path. The human element in the Church means that though it cannot fail completely in its task, this task will be carried out more or less effectively depending upon the sanctity and courage of its members, particularly the hierarchy. When the shepherds fail the flock will be dispersed.

Quite naturally, the instruction given in Catholic schools tended to emphasize the lives of Catholics who had most fully lived up to the standard set by Our Lord, but there is another side to Church history which is far less edifying. British Catholics all know of the abject capitulation of the hierarchy under Henry VIII. Only one bishop, St. John Fisher, did not betray the fort. Sadly, many of the leading heresiarchs have been bishops, and wherever the Protestant Reformation triumphed, a weak or even decadent hierarchy was an important contributing factor. In this century in particular, Catholics have come to take for granted that the Church is always governed by saintly and prudent popes who receive the loyal support of national hierarchies. The Church in English-speaking countries in particular has been characterized above all for its loyalty to the Holy See. As the majority of Catholics have never acquired more than a superficial knowledge of Church history, and what they did learn tended to stress its more edifying aspects, it is hardly surprising that so many have reacted to the contemporary debacle with reactions varying from scandal to dismay, even to loss of faith.

In France, Mexico and the United States, some have grouped themselves around priests and illicitly consecrated bishops who claim that there is no longer a pope and that the Church exists only within these new sects which they have founded. One of these illicitly consecrated bishops in Spain claims to have been appointed Pope by Our Lord Himself, and has set up his own "Vatican" and curia, and appears to spend most of his time issuing impressively worded excommunications. Other disturbed Catholics have put their faith in one of the spate of seers claiming to receive divinely inspired revelations at the moment. Other Catholics join organizations like Catholics United for the Faith, an American movement which now has members in Australia. There are several such organizations, all of which are characterized by unthinking and uncritical loyalty to the Pope. They will not admit that any innovation or instruction receiving papal approval could be imprudent and harmful to the Church. They will not concede that the liturgical changes are theologically suspect and a pastoral disaster, and have caused incalculable harm to the Church, but allege that the official reforms themselves are marvelous and any harm done has been the result of unofficial abuses. Similarly, some Catholics have reacted to the widespread collapse within the Church following the Council by adopting the totally untenable suggestion that it was not a genuine Council at all, while at the opposite end of the spectrum the C.U.F. Catholic refuses to admit even the possibility that the Council documents are deficient in any way, or that the Council could have contributed in any way to what Pope Paul VI himself termed the "destruction of the Church."

Ironically, all the different groups mentioned here, even those which have, sadly, gone into schism have been motivated by a love for the Church and dismay at its self-destruction. But as a result of their diametrically opposed reactions to the crisis they have tended to turn upon each other and weaken the cause of the anti-modernist remnant within the Church. All this, no doubt, gives great delight to the Modernists and to Satan who is using them as his instrument, and who is certainly responsible for causing the divisions among those who are prepared to stand up for orthodoxy.

Fortunately, there is an alternative to these extreme and harmful attitudes: the position adopted by Archbishop Lefebvre. His Grace has frequently repudiated the absurd theory that the present Pope and, perhaps, some of his predecessors, have not been true popes at all; he accepts that Vatican II was a properly convoked Council; he has never contested the intrinsic validity of any of the new sacramental rites introduced since the Council; he has warned against putting faith in any of the self-styled seers who claim to have the answers to all the problems of the Church, but he has also refused to abdicate his responsibilities as a bishop by opting for uncritical acceptance of any papally approved innovation or every word in the documents of Vatican II.

Next month, we shall examine this position.