April 2003 Print


Our Adoption by God in Jesus Christ

 

Louis-Edouard-Desire Cardinal Pie


Cardinal Pie

Jesus Christ receives two qualifications in our holy books which could seem contradictory, but their relation demands to be well understood. Sometimes He is called the only Son of God;1 sometimes He is called the eldest Son of the Father,2 the first-born child of the Virgin.3 How can we reconcile these apparently opposed claims? Is it not an elementary point of our faith that God has only one Son; and implying He has several, is it not to make an attempt on the dogma of the unity of God in Three Persons? The objection is ever more so serious, as the quality of filiation which is bestowed on us by the Scriptures is not founded on a mere appellation, on a mere convention, as are human adoptions, but on an intimate and profound reality: ut Filii Dei nominemur et simus.4

Through this the immense charity of our Father who is in Heaven manifests itself. He has from all eternity and He will have to the end of time one single and unique son by nature. But, although this son is sufficient to Him, and that in Him all the essential force of engendering is exhausted, He has nevertheless wanted, not by the imperious requirement for His own happiness, but for the desire of the happiness of His creatures, to enlarge the circle of His divine family, to bring to others through the ages the title which belonged to His Word from all eternity. Admirable harmony of grace, magnificent dispensing of the sacrament of divine piety! The Word, who was and who will be forever the only Son, equal and consubstantial to God, is made manifest in the flesh. From that moment, there had been a man who could be called and who was fully the Son of God. This man, however, being one and the same with the divine Word, the fact of being "child of God" remained in its inaccessible unity and was not yet extended to the greater number. Without a doubt, by the effect of the Incarnation, entire humanity was to gain a precious affinity with God; an abyss of divine kinship already shone from the heart of this nature that the Son of God had made His, especially if one considers that the Creator of the world, through the very act of His creative power, had intended His incarnated Son as the original model and the end of all things, and that He had supernaturally placed in all beings, by the gift of their vocation and of their predestination, an initial germ of divine assimilation. But the mystery of the deification was not to end there. Man had lost the privilege of his vocation and his supernatural destiny by sin. Stripped of gratuitous gifts, he was wounded deeply in his nature. Because although the nature of man had preserved its proper and essential attributes, man had experienced an immense injury by the loss of the increase of gifts which had been at first bestowed on him. Fallen from these heights to which he had been called, stripped of this second embellishment of which he had been adorned, his condition was a condition of disgrace, of privation, of suffering–what am I saying? a condition of sin and damnation. Irreparable damage, if the Word, who had been the means of everything, had not made Himself the remedy of everything.

It was suitable, [says Saint Paul,] that the One for whom and by Whom are all things, and who had called His creatures to the glory of being His children, procured by the passion of His Son the consummation of the salvation of which this same Son was the principal author.5

This is what has marvelously occurred. "Because when we were dead by sin," and when we thus had lost the title of children of God,

Jesus Christ brought us to life again with Him, absolving us of all our faults, erasing the decree which was against us and taking away this judgment of condemnation to nail it to His cross.6

There is more. This Blood of Christ, which has restored the decree of our adoption, has become the agent and the instrument of His bringing this about.

Indeed, by virtue of this precious blood, shed once on Calvary, the general debt of humanity has been redeemed in Heaven; but, moreover, by the active and continuous virtue of this same blood, each soul has been and will be, up to the end of time, conceived and born to divine life. "To all those who have received Him," says the Evangelist, "the Word come into this world has given the power to become the children of God."7To receive Jesus Christ is to believe His word. Faith is therefore the first condition for justification. Nevertheless faith still confers only the "power to become children of God." The phenomenon of the second birth, the marvel of spiritual generation does not reach completion by faith alone. As a general rule, the sacrament is necessary. Now, the sacrament by which divine life is either infused or increased in the soul is none other than the infiltration of the blood of Jesus Christ into this soul. In the new law, even more than in the old covenant, the intervention of the blood is necessary, and the supernatural mysteries are not brought about without the blood.8 If the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of water mixed with the ashes of a heifer, had so great a virtue of sanctification, how much more efficacious will be the Blood of Jesus Christ circulating by means of the sacraments!9 The prophet Ezechiel saw, in a mysterious dream, a subterranean canal which was emanating from the right side of the sanctuary, and from which the waters washed down to the threshold of the temple, in a sand of gold and of purple, the particles of the blood of the victims and the ashes of the burnt-offerings.10 And a voice said to him: "A good number of fish will appear there emerging from these waters, and everyone that will be touched by the water of this torrent will be healed and will live."11 A marvelous image of the waters of baptism which, escaping from the sides of the Savior, or else from the foot of the Eucharistic cup, and carrying with them the life-giving powers of a prolific blood, inoculate all souls that the fountain of the holy baptistery bathes with the divine state of grace and with the divine seed of the glory.

Therefore, no one could ever deny the reality of our title of children of God. Again, Jesus Christ alone possesses this title by nature, and we participate in it only by adoption. But how this adoption surpasses all human adoptions! If a man and a woman, deprived of the blessing of fecundity, want to introduce as a son, a stranger into the family, a document is drawn up before the public officer, a contract is signed, obligations are assumed, the name and heritage of the adopters pass to the adopted. But all that is exterior. The one who hereafter takes the name of the family is still not of their blood. If he brings a noble and grateful heart, he will embrace the sentiments, the thoughts, the traditions of his adoptive family; he will vow to love and obey it; but from this artificial and conventional filiation he will always miss the bond of origin, the ancestry of the blood. It is not so in the order of our supernatural filiation. The day when we become Christians, our initiation does not confer only the name, it does not admit us only into the house, it does not only pledge us to the doctrine of Jesus Christ: it imprints on our soul a seal of resemblance, an indelible character; it communicates interiorly to us "the spirit of adoption of sons whereby we cry: Father";12 finally, by the sacramental action of Baptism and of other signs, and better still by the Eucharistic liqueur, it instills in the most intimate of our being the blood of the One by whom we are adopted.13 That way, we genuinely enter into His family: Ipsius enim genus sumus. And because we are in the family of God: genus ergo cum simus Dei,14 because our filiation is not purely nominal, but strictly true and real,15 we become heirs with full right and with title of strict justice,16 heirs of the Father that we have in common with Jesus Christ, consequently co-heirs of the eldest son of our race: si filii, et haeredes, haeredes quidem Dei, cohaeredes autem Christi.17And it is thus that, remaining always the only Son of the Father, He is nevertheless the first born of a great number of brothers: primogenitus in multis fratribus,18 and He derogates none of His own dignity in giving them this glorious title: propter quam causam non confunditur fratres eos vocare.19 From there also comes this so well used expression according to which we form with Jesus Christ only one and the same body of which He is the head, and of which we are the members;20 a body in which all the parts, united and bound by joints, yield a mutual assistance according to an operation matched to the capacity of each member, and form this hierarchical organization which establishes dependence in unity, order in multiplicity.


1. Jn. 1:14,18, etc.

2. Heb. 1:6.

3. Mt. 1:25.

4. Jn. 3:1.

5. Heb. 2:10.

6. Col. 2:13-14.

7. Jn. 1:12.

8. Heb. 9:22.

9. Heb. 9:13, 14.

10. Ezech. 47:1.

11. Ezech. 47:9.

12. Rom. 8:15.

13. Heb. 9:13; 10:19

14.Acts 18:28-29.

15. Jn. 3:1.

16. II Tim. 4:8.

17. Rom. 8:17.

18. Rom. 8:29.

19. Heb. 2:11.

20. I Cor. 11:27.

Translated exclusively for Angelus Press by Mr. & Mrs. William Platz from (Oeuvres Sacerdotales du Cardinal Pie, Choix de Sermons et d'Instructions de 1839 à  1849 ["Third Synodal Instruction" (V, 135-140)]. The couple responded to an invitation in The Angelus for translators to make the work of Cardinal Pie, a mentor for Pope Pius X and Archbishop Lefebvre, available in English, for most of it is only known in French.

Louis-Edouard-Désiré Cardinal Pie [say: "pea"] (1815-1880), renowned Bishop of Poitiers, France, was a major-league player in the fight against the anti-Catholic movement of the 19th century.

"...He is best known for his opposition to modern errors, and his championship of the rights of the Church. Regarding as futile the compromises accepted by other Catholic leaders, he fought alike all philosophical theories and political arrangements that did not come up to the full traditional Christian standard...." His distinguished service to the Church was recognized by Leo XIII, who made him cardinal in 1879. (From the Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. XII, 1913)