Apologeticae sive Theologiae Fundamentalis, Tomus II (Pars Altera): Demonstratio Catholica

The Roman Church shines both with sanctity taken simply and with sanctity spoken emphatically.

1. With sanctity taken simply: of doctrine, of the means, and of the members.

Sanctity of doctrine. By solemn magisterium and daily preaching, by public worship and private pastoral care, the Church unceasingly inculcates in her faithful that saying of Jesus Christ: "Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect."¹ She promulgates the natural law of virtue inviolately, urges the positive divine precepts, commends the evangelical counsels, exalts good works, and neglects nothing of those things that can promote internal sanctity. Compare the books of moral, pastoral, ascetical, and mystical theology written by Catholic authors.²

Sanctity of the means. The Catholic Church aids the faithful in attaining sanctity with the most abundant and most efficacious helps. The principal ones are: the seven sacraments, by which all the stages and states of life are hedged about with a wonderful order of graces; the sacrifice of the Mass, by which the fruits of the Lord's passion are daily applied to men and a clean offering is presented to God; prayer, by which the faithful several times a day honor God and experience divine help in the midst of the temptations and hardships of life; the sacred liturgy, by which men are raised to heavenly things at least on each Sunday and feast day; disciplinary laws, by which men are instructed and exercised in virtue; think of the precepts concerning hearing Mass and festal rest, concerning annual confession and paschal communion, concerning fasting and abstinence, etc.; pious institutes, by which the Church strives to promote her sons to charity and Christian perfection; think of sacred retreats, religious societies adapted to each state of the faithful, confraternities, mission institutes, seminaries, and celibacy for sanctifying the clergy, and above all religious orders and congregations.

Sanctity of the members. Although very many Catholics do not cultivate even common sanctity of life, nevertheless an infinite number of them strives after virtue with a continuous and serious struggle. Very many of the faithful either carefully keep themselves from every blemish of graver sin and pant after God with all their strength, or, if they have committed sins, being now already contrite and confessed, they bring forth worthy fruits of penance and stand as an example of every virtue. Countless Catholic families lead a truly evangelical life, eminent in the spirit of prayer, in zeal for the divine glory, in love of neighbor, in patience in adversity, in chastity, in temperance, and in every kind of virtue. Especially, however, countless clerics and religious, even with vows pronounced, observe perfectly not only the precepts but also the evangelical counsels. How many young men and virgins renounce the world, riches, pleasures, and their own will, so that in the state of perpetual obedience, poverty, and chastity they may either serve God alone in cloisters, or even spend their whole life in relieving the poor, in educating children, in caring for the sick, in converting the heathen!³ This indeed is a sign not only of common sanctity, but even already of nearly eminent sanctity.

In truth the Roman Church has many sons who: 2. shine with sanctity spoken emphatically. For since the Catholic Church alone, as we shall see, is apostolic, hers are those innumerable martyrs who in the first three Christian centuries and thereafter down to our own times poured out their blood for Christ; hers are all the holy fathers and doctors who sustained the Church of Christ by word, by writing, and by example; hers, finally, are so many other holy confessors and virgins of all ages, nations, and conditions, whose life and glorious deeds profane and sacred history narrates. How many saints the Roman Church has produced, and with how eminent sanctity adorned, is proved above all by the Acts of the Martyrs edited by Ruinart and Assemani, by the Acta Sanctorum collected by Bolland and his companions and successors, as well as by the Acts of the processes of beatification and canonization drawn up in the Roman Church from at least the tenth century.

From this very century, indeed, the Roman pontiffs reserved to themselves the right of solemn beatification and canonization. But no servant of God is solemnly numbered among the blessed or the saints, unless an extremely careful process concerning his heroic virtues and the miracles worked has first been held.⁴ The Roman Church, to be sure, does not rest content with uprightness however conspicuous, even if it is attested by miracles, but requires heroic virtue in her sons, whom she makes partakers of the honor of the altars. Indeed, if the heroic virtue of anyone is not evidently established, the Church neither attends to nor investigates his miracles, but immediately breaks off the process. Yet it is not enough to have proved heroic sanctity by human means, unless God has also approved it by miracles. For from the times of Urban VIII (1625), excepting martyrs, no one is beatified unless it is established that at least two miracles were wrought through his intercession; no one is canonized unless it is established that at least two miracles were obtained anew (after beatification) through his intercession. Moreover, the inquiry into the heroicity of the virtue and the truth of the miracles is conducted with such severity that, on the admission of the unbelievers themselves, no scientific tribunal employs it.⁵ And since the Roman Church has nevertheless down to our own age beatified and canonized a sufficiently great number of her sons, she truly is the holy Church, indeed the Church of saints.

1. The Greeks, having abandoned the Catholic Church, have indeed for the most part preserved the sanctifying doctrine and the means of sanctity. Yet the Orthodox Church itself neither incites nor obliges its priests and monks, much less the laity, to true interior sanctity. It has likewise deformed the helps of sanctity, especially worship and the sacraments, into a dead ritualism lacking all effective authority.¹ Whence, although among the Orthodox many members are found who stand out by a certain more distinguished uprightness and piety, yet a religious decay has invaded the greater part of the people. The clergy and the cloisters, however, flourish with almost no zeal for the holy life; rather, they for the most part teem with drunkenness, idleness, ignorance, and other vices.² A fortiori the Orthodox are wholly wanting in that eminent sanctity which is necessarily and exclusively proper to the Church of Christ. The Eastern regions, once the nurseries of all sanctity, after the schism once arisen produced no further saint who shone with heroic virtue and at whose intercession God worked miracles.³ The saints who are venerated by the Orthodox were either sons of the Catholic mother Church or are painted with the legendary varnish of sanctity and charisms. Much less:

2. The Protestants enjoy the mark of sanctity. For Protestantism professes doctrines directly opposed to sound morality, e.g. that faith alone justifies and that the virtues are by no means required;⁴ that good works are useless and to be despised;⁵ nay, that all the actions of man, however holy, are sins;⁶ that God, taking absolutely no account of the lives of men, predestined some to beatitude, others to damnation;⁷ that man is deprived of free will.⁸

With the whole foundation of morality thus rooted out, the Reformers and their followers removed also very many of the means of sanctity. They abhor the sacrifice of the Mass; they neglect all the sacraments except baptism,⁹ nay, very many do not even retain baptism; they despise the evangelical counsels, etc. Whence even the fruits of sanctity among the members of the Protestant communities miserably withered. With history as witness and by the concession of the Reformers themselves, we know that the "pure" gospel soon became a hotbed of all vices and produced the worst effects everywhere.¹⁰ Indeed, very many Protestants have striven and strive after supernatural virtue and especially after a certain natural honesty and humanity; Protestantism, however, set over against the Christian life in itself that "modern" life intent only upon cares and worldly things.¹¹

Whatever you may in the end say of the morals of the Protestants, certainly among them you will find no example of heroic sanctity confirmed by miracles. Nay rather, they mock the saints and the invocation of the saints, and affirm that miracles cannot even come to pass.¹²

Nay, not even the fathers of the pseudo-reformation themselves flourished in sanctity. Luther was notable for voluptuousness, gluttony, pride, wrath, and other vices; Zwingli was lustful, fraudulent, mendacious, and haughty; Calvin was a man of immense pride, slanderous arrogance, and savage cruelty; Henry VIII was a tyrant as libidinous as he was atrocious.¹³ Wherefore not only later and recent Protestantism lacks sanctity, but already at its beginning it was destitute of the sanctity of its authors and origins.