De Ecclesia Christi

« The name Ecclesia indeed also has a generic meaning, of an assembly of many, insofar as they are considered as called to some unity; but the specific meaning, and from biblical and ecclesiastical usage the most proper, is religious, so that the Church is the society of those united in the true worship of God; and this meaning is again taken either in universal extension or in some particular restriction. »

So that the diverse meanings in which the designation Ecclesia is used in the divine writings and in the other sacred monuments may not seem somehow to disturb our treatment, which, God favoring, is to be drawn from these same documents, it will not be out of place to set those manifold meanings, as is customary with most authors, before the beginning of the discussion itself in a single view.

I. The name Ecclesia, both by its etymology and by its use among sacred and profane writers, has the generic meaning of a multitude gathered into one by summoning; for ἐκκλησις is evocatio, a calling out, and from this ἐκκλησία, in a concrete sense, are those very persons who have come together into a certain unity by being called. According to this generic notion, therefore, the Church cannot be conceived without there being many, and these rational in nature, and some unity of these many toward a common end. For evocatio, in the proper and not the metaphorical sense, can be made only to rational creatures; and when its term is the Church or the unity of many, that calling itself cannot be rational unless some end to be attained is proposed to this unity of many. But in this generic meaning neither the form of the unity nor the end is determined as to what it is; and thus an assembly is called ecclesia not only when it is religious in form and end, but also when it is profane and political. Acts XIX. 22. 39. 40; indeed even « the ecclesia of the wicked » Ps. XXV. 5. More frequently, in this general sense, the name ecclesia, both in Greek and in Latin, stands for a political or judicial assembly in the Old Testament. Judg. XX. 2; Ecclus. XXI. 20; XXIII. 34; XXXIII. 19; XXXVIII. 37; 1 Macc. III. 13; V. 16; XIV. 19. Sometimes in this sense the Greek ἐκκλησία is rendered in the Latin Vulgate as concio (from concieo), Deut. XVIII. 16; as concilium, Judith VI. 19 (Greek 21), and elsewhere ¹.

II. But by solemn and common usage in the sacred books, Ecclesia signifies an assembly insofar as it is religious in form and end, namely holily bound to God (Lactantius, Divin. institut. IV. 28; Hieronymus in Amos IX. 6) and consecrated; and therefore the Church (and by this name, in this religious and common sense, the Scriptures never designate anything but the true Church) is called the society of those joined to God and to one another through true religion as its essential form, or through true worship. Since, moreover, in the present historical order the true religion neither is nor ever has been other than revealed and supernatural, hence the end and form of the Church, its union with God and in its members, the calling of each to it, and finally its whole institution, is supernatural; and accordingly the Church is understood as a supernatural society.

This proper meaning of the Church in sacred usage undergoes certain modifications as to extension.

1°. The fundamental notion presents itself everywhere: the Church is the very supernatural society of all those joined to God and to one another by true religion, and therefore a society universal in destination, which is formed by revealed religion and ordered to its end. In this principal meaning the plural number of Churches is repugnant, no less than in all the other names designating universality or absolute perfection. I say principal meaning, insofar as the usage of speech, both biblical, especially of the New Testament, and ecclesiastical, so determines this sense of the name Church that it must be held the most proper among the other meanings; and unless the context shows otherwise, Ecclesia simply so called is always understood in this notion ². « I will build my Church; Christ is the head of the Church; he loved the Church and gave himself up for her; To him (God) be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus unto all generations of the age of ages; Through the Church the manifold wisdom of God is made known; The Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth; The great mystery in Christ and in the Church; God has set in the Church first Apostles, second prophets, third teachers; In which the Holy Spirit has placed you as bishops to rule the Church of God, which he acquired with his own blood; » and the like, found everywhere. Matt. XVI.; Eph. I. III. IV. V.; 1 Cor. XII.; Col. I.; 1 Tim. III.; Acts XX.

2°. From texts such as those just cited it is clear why, when the government, the magisterium, and the ministry of the Church are in question, those very persons who have been placed in the Church by Christ for these offices, for the building of his body, have principally been called Church, both by the Savior himself and thence by universal ecclesiastical usage. If your brother sins against you, and if he does not hear you nor the private witnesses you bring with you, « tell it to the (tribunal of the) Church; but if he does not hear the Church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Amen I say to you (Apostles), whatever you bind upon earth shall be bound also in heaven » etc. Matt. XVIII. 17. ³. This meaning of the Church, namely as teaching and governing, is inadequately distinguished from the one explained a little earlier; for the Church is signified not only as a part in a whole, but as an essential part, and in some way a visible form, not so much contained in the whole as rather containing and forming the whole. Whence comes that saying of the holy Fathers, as we shall see in its place: « The Church is in the Bishop. »

3°. The Church simply so called, and thus universal, consists by the divine institution itself of many assemblies as members and parts, each of which reflects the image and participates in the nature of the whole, as the property of the parts of an organic whole requires. Thus most often Church is predicated with an express restriction to the notion of a part: « the Church which is at Jerusalem, at Antioch, at Corinth, in Cenchreae, of the Thessalonians, in Babylon » (Rome). Also « the domestic Church » (of Priscilla and Aquila), « the Church which is in the house (of Nympha), the Church which is in your house (of Philemon). » Whence in the plural they are often called « Churches of God, Churches of the saints, Churches of the Gentiles, Churches in Judea, Churches of Asia, Galatia, Macedonia, » and so on. These are everywhere found in the Acts, in the apostolic letters, and in the Apocalypse. « It has been answered by the Catholics that many Churches are also found named in the Scriptures, and the seven to which John writes, which, many though they are, are nevertheless understood to be members of that single one » — Augustine, Collat. III cum Donat. c. 10. « Behold, there are Churches in the Church... but all these are members of one Church, spread through the whole world » — Id., de unit. Eccles. c. 11. See also Chrysostom in 1 Cor. hom. I n. 1. Long ago Cyprian, comparing the seven Churches to which Paul wrote letters and the seven mentioned in the Apocalypse with the mother and the seven sons (2 Macc.), celebrated the many Churches as one family, which is the one Church built by Christ upon Peter. « With the seven children is plainly joined the mother, origin and root, who afterwards bore the seven Churches, herself first and one, founded upon Peter by the voice of the Lord » — Cyprian, de exhort. martyr. ad Fortunat., ed. Baluz., p. 270; L. de Testim. Script. ad Guarin., p. 201.

Sometimes the name Ecclesia signifies not so much the society of the faithful considered in itself as the assembly actually gathered for religious worship. « When you come together into the Church (a little later, when you come together into one place, ἐπὶ τὸ αὐτό), to speak, to be silent in the Church » 1 Cor. XI.; XIV. This sense occurs more frequently in the Old Testament: 3 Kings VIII. 14. 22. 25; 1 Chron. XXIX. 20; 2 Chron. VII. 8; Ps. XLVII. 27; Joel II. 16, and elsewhere.

4°. Between the Church universal simply so called and the significance of the parts and, as it were, the members of that one Church, of which we have spoken, there lies in some way an intermediate meaning, by which in the Old Testament the religious society of the people of Israel is called the Church, the Church of the Lord, the Church of Israel (Num. XIX. 20; XX. 4; Deut. XXIII. 1. 2. 3. 8; 2 Esdras XIII. 1; Lam. I. 10; Acts VII. 38). For the Church so considered comprises the divinely instituted society of the peculiar people of God, not however simply the whole people of God. For even before the peculiar covenant made with Abraham, confirmed and amplified at Sinai, there were sons of God justified through faith from Adam onward (Gen. VI. 2; Rom. IV. 10. 11; Heb. XI.); nor was the universal promise made by God to Adam for the whole human race (Gen. III. 15) abolished or restricted by that peculiar covenant, but was preserved more specially, propagated, and more distinctly explained in one chosen people. This peculiar Church of the people of Israel therefore constituted the principal part of the whole Church of God, already promised in the first parents for all posterity; and it was, as it were, the salt of the earth and the light of the world for all nations, among whom God, by his antecedent will, willed the universal Church of the people of God, already instituted in Paradise immediately after the fall. Wherefore God willed that the Gentiles, of whom he commanded, be excluded not from this universal Church or from the people of God simply, but from that peculiar Church of Israel: « not even after the tenth generation shall they enter the Church of the Lord forever; » or two generations of others, of whom he said: « in the third generation they shall enter into the Church of the Lord » Deut. XXIII. 3. 8.

Not rarely, especially in the Psalms, the peculiar Church of Israel is to be understood in the immediate sense, but in a fuller and typical sense the universal Church in the perfection of the New Testament. Thus without doubt in the typical Psalms: XXI (XXII) 23. 26 (cf. Heb. II. 12); XXXIV (XXXV) 18 (cf. 19 with John XV. 25); XXXIX (XL) 10 (cf. 7–9 with Heb. X. 5); LXXXVIII (LXXXIX) 6 (cf. 5, 26–30 with Heb. I. 5).

Here I shall note in passing what Augustine, and after him the theologians, dispute about the name synagogue. What in the Old Testament is called the Church of Israel is in the Greek and Latin versions often also called synagogue: Exod. XVI. 3 (in the Greek, where the Latin has multitudo); XXXIV. 31; Num. IV. 34; XXXI. 31; John IX. 22; Acts XIII. 43, and elsewhere; or also jointly, « in the midst of the Church and the synagogue » ⁴ Prov. V. 14. Hence it has been asked: a) whether anything differs between the meaning of these names; b) whether the Church of the New Testament can also be called synagogue; c) whether in the Scriptures it is ever so called. Augustine, and after him most theologians, observe for the first question that these two names differ in this: Ecclesia, that is, calling-out or evocatio, can be said only of rational creatures, while synagoga, that is, gathering or driving together, can be said properly not only of these but also of irrational things. In the Septuagint: συναγωγὴ ὕδατος (Is. XIX. 6); συναγωγὴ λίθων (Job VIII. 17). Hence to the second question they reply that the name synagogue could indeed be fitted to the Church of the New Testament, just as the faithful are also called the sheep of Christ; but the grace of the calling is better signified by the expressed name Church. To the third question they deny that the Church of the New Testament is anywhere in the Scriptures called by the name synagogue. « Although synagogue is properly said of the Jews, and Church of the Christians, because congregation is more usually understood of flocks, but convocation more of men; nevertheless we find that the former too is called Church, and perhaps it is more fitting for us to say: save us, Lord our God, and gather us from the nations... Nor ought we to disdain, but rather to give ineffable thanks, that we are the sheep of his hand, whom he foresaw when he said: I have other sheep that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, that there may be one flock and one shepherd » — Augustine, on Ps. LXXVII. You have the answer to all three questions briefly summed up by the same author: « In the synagogue we understand the people of Israel, since it too is commonly called their own synagogue, although it has also been called Church. But ours the Apostles never called a synagogue ⁵ but always Church, either for the sake of distinction, or because there is some difference between the congregation, whence synagogue, and the convocation, whence Church took its name; namely that flocks are usually gathered... but to be called belongs rather to those who use reason, as men do » — Id., on Ps. LXXXI.

5°. By the significations proposed so far, the Church is directly understood as still tending on the way toward its supreme perfection and its ultimate end; yet by this very fact the Church is also connoted with respect to this term of perfection and glorification, for which it is prepared and directed along the way. For when Christ « loved the Church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, cleansing her by the washing of water in the word of life, that he might present to himself the Church in glory, not having spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind, but that she might be holy and without blemish » (Eph. V. 25 f.); this purification and sanctification of the Church is indeed effected in the present stage, but so, and to this end, that it may at last be fully perfected in the term of glorification, where, without spot or wrinkle in all its members, it will be holy and without blemish. Augustine often admonished about this connection and connotation of the Church in the term of glorification with the present stage of preparation, in his books against the Donatists, the forerunners of the Cathar heresy. « Wherever in these books (On Baptism against the Donatists) I have mentioned the Church not having spot or wrinkle, it is not to be understood as if it already is, but as one being prepared to be so, when it shall appear glorious » — Augustine, Retract. II. 18. Now it « makes the increase of the body for its own building, » but then it will be consummated « into a perfect man, into the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ » (εἰς μέτρον ἡλικίας τοῦ πληρώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ) Eph. IV. 12–16.

Now the Church, in the sense with which we conclude this nominal question, is sometimes directly named as considered according to its final perfection. Thus the Apostle celebrates « the Church of the firstborn who are written in heaven » Heb. XII. 23. Let this suffice concerning the name; concerning the thing itself, in what follows.

« The Church of God, considered in its most ample notion, is the supernatural society or city of all those, whether angels or men, from Adam to the consummation, who are united to God under Christ the head, adhering to him by faith while on the way and by the beatific vision in the term, into the communion of saints. »

I. All rational creatures were indeed made, by the very essential order of nature, for God, the principle and the last end, the first truth and the highest good, to be known and loved in a manner congruent with their natural faculties, and to attain their own perfection and natural blessedness (that is, not above but according to the exigence of the rational nature), with God known and loved as their ultimate end. Whence also in the natural order all rational creatures would have, or ought to have, a natural union with God as principle and end, and by this very fact with one another, by knowledge and by love, whether still on the way toward the term or already established in the term. This order of natural communion of rational creatures could be called the kingdom of God the creator; it is not, however, the Church of God in the nobler signification, which is now proper to the kingdom of God the sanctifier, namely, according to sacred usage, including the supernatural calling of creatures (τὴν ἐκκλησιν) through superadded gifts to an end which is above the exigence and the power of created nature.

Now indeed into this supernatural order itself the whole universe of rational creatures, namely angels and men, have been raised, and either are being led on the way, by gifts of grace, toward the end of the supernatural vision and enjoyment of God, or have already been brought to this final vision and enjoyment in the gifts of glory.

a) Of the angels, those who, while they were on the way, fell through sin, these, fallen from their end through a perversion of intellect and will and stripped of all supernatural gifts, remain excluded from this order forever; but those who persevered in truth and charity, having now attained the ultimate end in the eternal vision and glorification, constitute, or rather complete, the heavenly hierarchy.

b) The human race, through sin in the first parent, its root according to the physical order and its origin (originating) according to the moral order, inasmuch as he, constituted in original justice, represented his whole race for the inheritance or the privation of those gifts, was deprived of sanctifying grace and of the other gratuitous gifts, and therefore, exiled from the supernatural end, was not, however, abandoned as justice would have allowed, but was restored by the gratuitous mercy of God. For the Word of God willed, from this very stock of the first Adam, to assume human nature and to be born as the second Adam, so that, as head for the members, by satisfying and by merit he might repair grace and glory. In the eternal divine counsel itself of the incarnation of the Redeemer Word, it is therefore clear that the work of redemption, or the redeemed world, has been decreed, which through the application of redemption in the second act (as we shall see in its place) is the Church acquired by the blood of God (Acts XX. 28). « The Lord said to me: You are my son, today I have begotten you; ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance, and the ends of the earth for your possession » Ps. II. 7, 8; CIX (Heb. CX).

Accordingly, just as all men by nature are born from the first Adam as children of wrath in the fallen state, so through the grace of redemption they are to be grafted into the second Adam by faith, hope, and charity. « What is written, that there is no other name under heaven given to men in which we must be saved, holds good for saving the human race from that time on from which the human race was corrupted in Adam; for as in Adam all die, so in Christ all shall be made alive. For as in the kingdom of death no one is without Adam, so in the kingdom of life no one is without Christ » Aug. ep. 190 (al. 157). The foundation and root of the gifts and supplies flowing from Christ the head, however, is faith (Council of Trent, sess. VI, c. 8), by which, as by a first joining (Eph. IV. 16), the members are inserted into Christ the head of the restored state. Those, therefore, who lack faith are members under Christ the head of the whole restored order only by destination and by what is due; in fact, however, they remain cut off from him in habit, though not in all actual and transient graces ¹.

Moreover, there are two principal and, as it were, distinct stages for the restoration of the whole human race and its insertion into Christ the second Adam, because the great mystery of piety was, from the beginning immediately after the fall, in promise, and over the course of the ages in continual preparation, but was not manifested in the flesh until the fullness of time (1 Tim. III. 16; Col. I. 26; Gal. IV. 4). In the earlier stage the members were formed beforehand for Christ the head, who was the expectation of the nations; in the other they are formed into the same head Christ, who has now been « made perfect for all who obey him, the cause of eternal salvation » (Heb. V. 9). There the preformation is by faith in the promised Redeemer; here the formation is by faith in the same Redeemer now sent. Whence there all sacrifices, sacraments, and institutions were types and a pedagogy leading to Christ; here they are the thing itself and the cause of actual union or insertion into Christ; there shadows, here the body (Col. II. 17); there prophecy foretelling, here the gospel fulfilling. The grace is indeed the same, but there it came from the merits of Christ still future, and therefore more sparingly, here from the same merits now accomplished, and hence more abundantly. « Not by a new plan, says St. Leo, did God provide for human affairs, nor with late mercy; but from the constitution of the world he established one and the same cause of salvation for all. For the grace of God, by which the whole multitude of the saints has always been justified, was increased, not begun, at the birth of Christ; and this great mystery of piety, with which the whole world has now been filled, was so powerful even in its signs that those who believed the promise obtained no less than those who received the gift » — St. Leo, sermo 23 (de Nativ. 3), n. 4; cf. sermo 24, n. 1. The same more clearly in the books On the Calling of the Gentiles: « Nor in the earlier ages did that same grace fail the world, which after the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ has been diffused everywhere... But since in that people, to whom both kinds of instruction were given (through the written law and through the testimony of all creation), no one was justified except by grace through the spirit of faith, who can doubt that those who could please God, from whatever nations and at whatever times, were set apart by the spirit of God's grace? Which, though more sparing and more hidden before, never failed in any age, one in power, different in quantity: by an unchangeable counsel, in a manifold work » — De vocat. gent. L. II, c. 4, 5. Therefore, by faith and grace from the beginning to the end of the ages, all the faithful are joined in Christ and to Christ, and form one Church in the wider sense, in which we now consider it. « The just went before, believing in him as one to come, just as we believe in him who has come... yet the same faith joins both those who believed that he would come and those who believed that he had come » — Aug. in Io. tract. 45, n. 9. « The saints before the law, the saints under the law, the saints under grace, all these, perfecting the body of the Lord, have been constituted members of the Church » — St. Gregory, L. V, ep. 18, ad Io. Ep. C. P. « Our Creator has a vineyard, namely the universal Church, which from the righteous Abel ² up to the last elect, who is to be born at the end of the world, has put forth, as it were, as many branches as it has brought forth saints. » He then enumerates all the ages in which « from the beginning of this world to its end he has not ceased to gather preachers to instruct the people of the faithful. » From Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to Moses, from Moses to the coming of the Lord, from the coming of the Lord to the end of the world, « first through the fathers, and afterwards through the teachers of the law and the prophets, and finally through the Apostles, as through workmen, he has labored in the cultivation of the vineyard (namely of the universal Church) » — Id., in Evang. hom. 19, n. 1.

These are, as it were, a commentary on the doctrine of the Apostle, where he joins the old economy of the remission of « former sins » through faith in the propitiation of Christ still to come with the economy of justification now present through faith in the same propitiation already accomplished. « Justified freely by his grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as propitiation through faith in his blood, for the showing of his justice (of justifying justice), because of the remission of former sins in the forbearance of God (ἐν τῇ ἀνοχῇ τοῦ Θεοῦ, in the patience of God), for the showing of his justice at this time (of satisfaction already rendered), so that he himself may be just and may justify him who is of the faith of Jesus Christ » (both in the present and in the preceding time) Rom. III. 25, 26; Heb. IX. 15.

If therefore we regard the grace of redemption in Christ Jesus, which justifies through faith (as its root and foundation) in his blood, all who through true faith belong to Christ the head constitute, under Christ the head, one people of God: in the economy of preparation from Adam to the coming of Christ, and in the economy of perfection from Christ to the end of the ages (cf. Tract. de Trad. th. XXVI). Hence, often in the Psalms and in the Prophets, speech about the sons of Abraham, the father of all believers, about Israel, Jerusalem, Sion, is such that the one people of God is regarded according to the twofold economy, and what is said in those oracles applies to it partly according to the one and partly according to the other, or in a less full sense according to the former and in a fuller sense according to the latter. Read, for example, the last chapters of Isaiah, chapter 41 and following. Indeed, very often not only this double stage of the Church on the way is included, but at the same time also its state of glorification in the term, of which we shall now speak briefly.

II. Just as the ancient economy of beginning is joined with the new economy of perfection, so this is joined with the final state of glorification (cf. Tract. de Sacram. in genere th. II). Christ, by satisfaction, redemption, his merits, the supply of all graces, faith, hope, and charity, joins together into one people of God not only the men of both economies, of whom we have spoken (he himself the chief cornerstone, in whom every building, fitly framed together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord), but the people of God on the way toward the term remains joined with its brethren, who are now already consummated in the term through these same merits of Christ, where faith and hope pass into vision and enjoyment, but charity never fails, and is perfected in the enjoyment according to the perfection of vision. By the same reasoning, already on the way, having become fellow citizens of the saints and members of the household of God (Eph. II. 19), they have communion with the holy angels, who are all ministering spirits, sent to serve for the sake of those who receive the inheritance of salvation (Heb. I. 14). « One city of God, of which one part sojourns in us, and the other part, in them, lends aid » — Aug., De civ. Dei L. X, c. 7; Enchirid. c. 56.

All the faithful, therefore, from Adam to the end of this world, while they are engaged on the way amid the manifold variety of charisms, graces, virtues, and merits, and among whom must also be counted the souls of the just after death, who must still be purged by punishments and thus led to the term; all the orders of the saints already consummated, and the choirs of angels, in such a great distinction of degrees of holiness and glory, from the Virgin Mother of God, queen of the celestial and terrestrial hierarchy, to the last saint who reigns there, constitute one supernatural city of God, by vocation, government, beatification, grace and glory, under the one head Christ, who, as in his own person he has united the divine and the human nature, so, as mediator between God and men, he, the God-man himself, has reconciled earthly things with heavenly.

In this way Paul teaches that those things which are in heaven and those which are on earth are joined through Christ, and under Christ the head, into one Church. « He is the head of the body, the Church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he himself may hold the first place; because in him it has pleased all fullness to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things to himself, making peace through the blood of his cross, whether those on earth or those in heaven » Col. I. 18. This pacification of things on earth and things in heaven in the one head Christ the Apostle elsewhere calls the recapitulation of all things that are in heaven and on earth in Christ, or the restoration to the one head Christ: ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι τὰ πάντα ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ. This recapitulation is indeed accomplished through the redemption of the fallen race on earth, restoring the ruin which had been wrought in the heavenly hierarchy by the fall of the angels, as the Vulgate interpreter renders it: « to restore all things in Christ, those in heaven and those on earth, in him » Eph. I. 10. Thus Augustine explains the words of the Apostle: « Therefore also for the angels takes place whatever of men is redeemed through his death and freed from evil, since with them in a certain way it returns to grace, after the enmities which sins made between men and the holy angels; and through the very redemption of men the losses of that angelic ruin are repaired. And certainly the holy angels, taught by God, by the eternal contemplation of whose truth they are blessed, know how great a number from the human race is awaited to complete the integrity of that city. For this reason the Apostle says: to restore all things in Christ, those in heaven and those on earth in him. For those in heaven are restored when that which fell from them among the angels is replaced from men; and those on earth are restored (finally) when the men themselves who are predestined to eternal life are renewed from the old age of corruption » — Aug., Enchirid. c. 61, 62. This is the Church of God according to the most ample signification which we now use, in its threefold state of militant, purgative and triumphant, of which the first two belong to those on pilgrimage and are temporary, the third is final and eternal; and all of them are recapitulated in Christ and under Christ, who is the head of the body, the Church, holding the first place in all things. Ambrose, explaining the description of the Church in Eph. IV, argues thus: « One temple of God in all, and one dwelling of the heavenly habitation in the spirit of all. In which, I think, a connection of faith and spirit must be understood not only of holy men but of all believers, and also of all the higher rational Virtues and Powers, so that through a certain harmony of virtues and ministries one body from all the spirits of rational nature may cling to its head, Christ » — Ambros. ep. 76, n. 13, ad Irenaeum. Augustine often explains this most ample universality of the Church under Christ. « Christ is our head; we are the body of that head (the militant Church). Are we alone, and not also those who were before us? All who from the beginning of the age were just have Christ as head. For they believed that he would come, whom we now believe has come; and in his faith they too were healed, in whose faith we also are: so that he might be also the head of the whole city of Jerusalem, all the faithful from the beginning to the end being numbered, the legions and armies of angels being added too, so that it becomes one city under one king, and one province under one emperor, happy in perpetual peace and salvation, praising God without end, blessed without end » — Aug. in Ps. 36, serm. 3; in Ioan. tract. 45; ep. 102 (al. 49); de catechiz. rudib.; cf. St. Thomas, 3, q. 8, a. 4.

Therefore the incarnate Word, Christ Jesus, even considered as man, is the head of this whole Church, joining to himself, and among themselves, with the one and triune God, angels and men ³. For this reason the city of God, the heavenly Jerusalem, is described in such terms that with that city of those consummated in heaven the supernatural city on earth, with all its spiritual gifts, is connected, as in Paul, or at least connoted, as in John. For « God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places » (Eph. I. 9), that is, supernatural ones (ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις). To the members of the Church still pilgrim on earth Paul says: « You have come to Mount Sion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem ⁴, and to the multitude of many thousands of angels, and to the Church of the firstborn who are written in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the just made perfect, πνεύμασι δικαίων τετελειωμένων, and to Jesus the mediator of the New Testament, and to the sprinkling of blood » Heb. XII. 22–24. John saw the heavenly Jerusalem coming down to earth, where heaven and earth are joined, and in this joining the state of those militant on earth is transformed into the state of those triumphant in heaven: one holy city, the new Jerusalem, and the tabernacle of God with men, and he will dwell with them. This Paul also wrote to the Corinthians: « For you are the temple of the living God, as God says: I will dwell in them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people » (2 Cor. VI. 16). But a preparation of newness in mourning and sorrow, which are the first things, precedes; full newness follows, where the first things have passed away and will be no more ⁵. « And I, John, saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a great voice from the throne saying: Behold the tabernacle of God with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them, their God; and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, nor mourning, nor crying, nor pain shall be any more, for the first things have passed away » Apoc. XXI. 2–5.

This is the heavenly Jerusalem, one Church in heaven and on earth. « The heavenly Jerusalem is called that whose citizens are all the sanctified men who were, and who are, and who will be, and all the sanctified spirits too, whoever in the high parts of the heavens obey God with pious devotion... The king of this city is the Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God, by whom the highest angels are ruled, and the Word, taking up man, so that by him men too might be ruled » — Aug., de catechiz. rudib. c. 19. Most beautifully in the hymn for the dedication of the Church is the heavenly city of Jerusalem celebrated, in the blessed vision of peace, as the gleaming city of heaven surrounded by thousands of thousands of angels; but at the same time in its building, as stones are polished by the blows of the chisel and by much hammering of the workman, they construct this mass.

III. From all that has been declared so far, the notion of the Church of God, considered in this wider sense, is sufficiently clear. It is constituted by all rational creatures which, subject to Christ the head by a supernatural, habitual gift pertaining to sanctification, are by it either ordered on the way to the end of eternal glorification or have arrived at that end in the term. These supernatural gifts, therefore, are the bond that unites, and the formal cause by which the same creatures, to a degree that varies with the diversity of gifts, are joined as members with Christ the head, in Christ with God the sanctifier, and in Christ and God with one another, into the society of the Church of God: « that you also may have fellowship (κοινωνίαν) with us, and our fellowship may be with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ » 1 John I. 3; 1 Cor. I. 9. Among these habitual gifts for those on pilgrimage on earth, faith is the root and foundation of all, as the first habitual disposition toward holiness; the beatific vision is the consummation and crown of all, as the ultimate term of holiness. If therefore we call the gifts, from the lowest to the highest, insofar as they are the form of this supernatural society, by the common name holiness, expressing this concretely as that which informs rational creatures, the Church of God must be called the supernatural society of saints, or in the solemn formula of the creed, the communion of saints. For although saints, in the fuller sense and by excellence, are those who have been sanctified through the indwelling Holy Spirit and through the habit of grace, in heaven and on earth; nevertheless, by biblical usage all the faithful, among whom are also sinners deprived of justifying grace, are called saints; and so faith itself, as the first disposition to that perfect holiness, is taken as the form through which the faithful not yet justified participate in the name of saints: Acts IX. 32; Rom. I. 7; XII. 13; XV. 25 ff.; 1 Cor. I. 2; XIV. 33; XVI. 1; 2 Cor. I. 1; 1 Tim. V. 10, and elsewhere. The Roman Catechism, speaking of the Church of the New Testament itself: « The faithful are called saints, it says, who have been made the people of God, and who by faith and the baptism received have consecrated themselves to Christ, although they offend in many things and do not fulfill what they have promised » (Part I, c. 10, §15).

The definition by which the Church of God is called communion of saints is not hindered by the fact that in the creeds the holy Church and the communion of saints seem to be distinguished. For a) the Church, in the creeds at least directly, is not taken in that wider sense in which we now consider it, but according to the determined state in which it was instituted on earth by Christ, and about which we must speak throughout this whole treatise. b) If the Church in the profession of the creed is understood, with St. Augustine (Enchir. c. 56), in the wider sense, the article on the communion of saints does not differ in subject from the preceding one on the holy catholic Church; but, as the Roman Catechism says (l.c. §24), it is « as it were a certain explanation » of it.

From the declared sense in which the form of holiness is understood in the definition of the supernatural society or communion of saints, the opposition to the Quesnellian doctrine condemned in the Constitution Unigenitus is clear. By that doctrine, under the name of saints who alone are the members of the Church, from the whole complex of the statement, only the just perfected in charity and predestined are designated (Props. 72, 73, 74, 75, 78); and so it belongs to the errors of the Protestants about the invisible Church, which we shall refute in its place.

If the definition must be stated simply, without explanation, then to exclude ambiguity it can be said that what we called holiness, from true faith on earth to the blessed vision in heaven, is denominated from the act as true and supernatural worship of God, where the habit, as disposition toward the act, is also included. Hence the Church of God, in the sense in which we now speak, will be called the society or communion of those adhering to God by true supernatural worship. See Gregory de Valentia, Analysis Fidei L. IV, c. 2; Wirceburg., T. I, disp. II, n. 79. Thus also St. Augustine, embracing at once « the whole Church, not only from the part that is pilgrim on earth, but also from that which in heaven has always clung to God », says that « it is all instituted to worship the one God » (Enchirid. c. 56).

Corollary. Since Christ, as will be declared in the following theses, instituted his Church on earth with special laws and a special form, besides this Church of Christ there is now no other Church on earth, nor can there be. More is therefore required for someone to belong simply as a member to the Church of Christ, which is one and the only Church on earth, than what suffices for the more general notion of Church, whose essential and sufficient form for those on pilgrimage on earth we have said to be true faith. Hence, when Suarez (De Fide, disp. IX, sect. 1, n. 3, 13–19), with other theologians, distinguishes in the Church of Christ itself faith alone as the essential form, from the other properties and institutions determined by Christ in his Church, so that that essential form suffices not only for the more general notion of the Church of God on earth, as we have said, but also for the character of the Church of Christ, and therefore catechumens, excommunicated persons, and schismatics themselves, as long as they retain faith, simply are and ought to be counted as members of the Church of Jesus Christ: this manner of teaching or of speaking, I say, is not to be admitted, as will be expressly demonstrated in its place, although the disagreement among Catholic theologians is rather in the manner of speaking than in the thing itself.

From this distinction between the general notion of the Church of God on earth, whose form we have said is faith, and the special state of the Church in the New Testament, it is understood that no one has ever been saved, or can be saved, who has not in act itself belonged, or does not belong, to the Church according to that general notion: « without faith it is impossible to please God » (Heb. XI. 6), and « the just lives by faith » (Rom. I. 17; Gal. III. 11). Yet those in the Old Testament who died « according to faith » and were « proved by the testimony of faith » (Heb. XI. 13, 39) were saved without belonging to the special state of the Church determined by Christ; and still may be saved those who, with a perfect disposition of soul, are fitted to this state of the Church, although, being inculpably hindered, they are not in act and simply its members. Suarez (l.c. n. 18) bent this distinction to confirm his somewhat unsuitable way of considering and speaking. After he has tried to prove that catechumens are simply members of the « present Church », he answers the objections raised against it. « The things adduced to the contrary, he says, prove only that catechumens are not in the Church as to those peculiar conditions and as it were accidents, which Christ added to the Church; but not that they are not in it as to those which are as it were the substance of the Church, which has always been the same; and these two are to be distinguished in the Church as it now is. » For he saw on the one hand that men could be saved by faith perfected in charity, who in act do not participate in the state of the Church determined in the New Testament; and on the other hand, at least in n. 18, he preferred the manner of saying that conjunction with the true Church is necessary for salvation by a necessity of means, not only by desire (as Bellarmine had said, de Eccles. L. III, c. 3) ⁶ but in act: hence he concluded that the substance and the essential form of the Church, for any state, is uniquely true faith; and so he referred the rest, which constitute the Church of Jesus Christ in its own proper special form and distinguish it from the Church of the Old Testament, « as to accidents. » This manner of speaking cannot be approved by us; indeed by a similar argument it could be urged that all those articles of faith which were not at all times to be explicitly believed even in the Old Testament are « accidental » in the Christian profession; and thus Tertullian (against Praxeas c. 31) and other Fathers would have wrongly called the profession, e.g., of the Holy Trinity « the substance of the New Testament »; which we do not think it right to suppose, even if perhaps the explicit faith in articles of this kind, as many theologians and with them Suarez teach, is not, for the New Testament either, simply of necessity of means, but only of divine precept (cf. Suarez, disp. XII, sect. 4).

« The patriarchal Church, from Adam onward, was contained as a less conspicuous beginning, in the profession of the true faith and in the true worship of God; compared with this state the form of the Church, not universal for all nations but peculiar in the people of Israel instituted by God through Moses, appears more expressed in the unity of the sacred ministry, of rule, and of the magisterium; yet even this was only a foreshadowing and an introduction to the Church of Jesus Christ in the perfect state of the New Testament. »

As long as we consider the Church of God on earth, setting aside for the moment the consideration of the final state in the heavenly consummation, according to the more general notion declared above, namely the society of the faithful, or of those who worship God in true worship, the members of this society are understood to be joined by true faith and true supernatural worship of God, with God and with one another; for unless they were associated by some common bond, there would be no communion or society; unless this bond were constituted by faith and the worship of God, there would be no religious society, and therefore no Church. Nevertheless, everyone sees that this notion, precisely because it is generic, is too indeterminate and abstract. For it does not say by what safeguards the one true faith is kept and propagated in the society of the faithful through the succession of generations; by what form of government this city of God is ruled; by what common rite of divine worship, which among men must be not only internal but also external, the same communion of saints honors God and is itself sanctified ¹; it does not say, I repeat, by what teaching authority of faith, what rule of sacred government, what ministry of sanctification or priesthood the religious society itself is formed and shaped. By how much more perfect, in universality, is the unity, the perpetuity, and the holiness to be formed and maintained through the magisterium, the sacred rule, and the ministry for the sanctification and salvation of the members (of all these, namely the profession of faith, of government, and of divine worship), by so much more perfect is the religious society itself; or, by so much more perfect is the state of the Church.

Now indeed, just as generally in the economy of the revelation and salvation of the human race through Christ the Redeemer, divine omnipotence and wisdom, justice and mercy distinguished a threefold stage, by which it continually advanced from the less perfect to the more perfect until the fullness of time; so also specifically in the state of the Church, which is formed and perfected through this very economy of revelation and salvation as its concrete expression, the same degrees of advancing perfection are observed, from the beginning to growth and to fullness. For the threefold state is clearly distinguished: the Church patriarchal, or (as it is commonly called) of the law of nature; the Church Mosaic; and the Church of Jesus Christ, of the Word now incarnate, which, remaining now an unshaken kingdom (Heb. XII. 28), awaits no other consummation of its state than from faith to vision in the heavenly Church.

I. The Church in the state of beginning was instituted for the restoration of the human race immediately after the fall, through the promised seed of the woman, which for her, and she who through it, shall crush the head of the serpent ² (Gen. III. 15). For the supernatural revelation made to the first parents about God, about his law and worship, about the angels and about eternal life, above all about the future Restorer and the expiation of sins, together with internal grace joined to the external graces, and thus faith and hope in God and in the Redeemer, and their greater perfection, charity: these supernatural gifts, I say, from the merciful will of God, on account of the future merits of Christ as head, were prepared for all the posterity of Adam in the state of redemption, and were conferred on those who cooperated in act (cf. Heb. XI.). By faith therefore, not only of the heart but, according to the condition and the exigence of human nature, also by the profession of the mouth (Rom. X. 10), by worship of the true God not only internal but also visible and external, by sacrifices and sacraments ³ were gathered into a religious society and a communion of « the sons of God », distinct and separated by religion from the impious « sons of men » (Gen. VI. 2, 4).

Augustine describes the city of God, or the Church of that first age, both before and after the flood, thus: « Therefore among those peoples of men of that time... we shall seek, if we can find it, that city of God which is wandering on earth, which was led down to the flood and the ark, and which is shown to have persisted in the sons of Noah through their blessings, especially in the greatest of them, who is called Shem... The series of generations, therefore, must be held from Shem himself, so that it may show the city of God after the flood, just as the series of generations from him who is called Seth showed it before the flood... When therefore we seek the city of God among those seventy-two nations (Gen. X), we cannot affirm that at the time when they had one lip, that is one speech, the human race had already become estranged from the worship of the true God, so that only in those generations true piety remained, which descend from the seed of Shem through Arphaxad and tend toward Abraham; but from that pride of building the tower up to heaven... an earthly city appeared, that is, a society of the impious; whether therefore it was not before, or was hidden, or rather both persisted, the pious indeed in the two sons of Noah who were blessed and in their posterity, and the impious in him who was cursed and in his progeny... is not an easy judgment. For perhaps, which is indeed more credible, already in the sons of those two, even before Babylon began to be built, there were despisers of God, and among the sons of Ham worshippers of God; yet we must believe that both kinds of men have never been lacking on earth » — Aug., civ. Dei L. XVI, c. 9, 10.

But just as revelation itself, both about God and about the moral and liturgical law and about the future Redeemer, was less ample and less distinct in those beginnings (see St. Thomas, 2-2, q. 174, a. 6; cf. Tract. de Tradit. th. XXVI), so also the Church, which is the concrete expression and sum of revelation itself, was less conspicuous. It had indeed, as its forming principle, the priesthood, religious rule, and the magisterium of the patriarchs, who, as it is written of Noah (2 Pet. II. 5), were « heralds of justice » (Tract. de Trad. th. XX; cf. Mauclerus, de Monarch. eccles. T. I, p. 226; Phillips, Ius eccles. T. II, p. 347; Haneberg, Histor. revel. sect. I, c. 4); and God himself calls them « his prophets and anointed ones » (Gen. XX. 7; Ps. CIV (CV) 15; 1 Chron. XVI. 22), which St. Augustine also notes. « And Noah himself, the patriarch... and others above and below, up to this time, when kings (namely, from Samuel onward, in the time of the kings properly so called, the prophets) began to be in the people of God, on account of certain things done or signified or foretold by them, which pertained to the city of God and the kingdom of heaven, we can not unreasonably call prophets, especially because we read that some of them were expressly named so » — Aug., civ. Dei L. XVII, c. 1. Yet in all these offices both the divine institution and the perpetual succession, and the function itself, were determined not so much by positive laws as by an internal divine instinct. Whence also sacrifices and sacraments and the whole ritual worship, in general, indeed were instituted by God, but in species and in particulars, especially up to the immediate preparation of the peculiar people of God in the calling of Abraham, appear to have been left to the determination of the heads of families or patriarchs themselves. To this specific determination applies what St. Thomas says: « just as in the state of the law of nature men were moved to worship God by no law given outwardly but only by an inner instinct, so also by an inner instinct it was determined for them what sensible things they should use for the worship of God » — St. Thomas, 3, q. 50, a. 5, ad 3.

Hence the visible unity of the Church, still looser and only begun, was for the most part reduced to one profession of the true faith and to the truth of divine worship; and by this very fact the body of the Church, which is held together by unity, was constituted, as it were, in its first formation and still imperfect. Yet in this Church, or city of God, « above and below Noah », the truth of faith and of divine worship was preserved both by perennial tradition through the ordinary patriarchal ministry, and was explained by increments of new revelations, through the extraordinary prophetic ministry. For to all of them, in their office of « heralds of justice », there belonged in their own way what God said expressly of Abraham: « I know that he will command his sons and his house after him, that they keep the way of the Lord, and do judgment and justice » Gen. XVIII. 19. But the extraordinary office of the prophets is to be recognized in them for the further explanation of revelation « on account of certain things done or signified or foretold by them (namely, by the supernatural illumination and motion of the Holy Spirit, either together with an external divine locution or without it), which pertained to the city of God, the kingdom of heaven. » Cf. Suarez, de Legibus L. I, a. 3, n. 12; L. IX, c. 6, n. 21; c. 7, n. 5, 6.

II. Since the whole old economy was preparation and type for the incarnate Word and for his Church, and prophecy for the gospel, for this purpose God chose a peculiar people for himself and instituted it through the ministry of Moses; in which, as prophetic revelation became clearer day by day and the meaning of the types more manifest, so the form of the Church would be more expressed.

1°. Divine worship was instituted by God himself through the hand of the mediator (Gal. III. 19), and was determined singly in sacrifices, sacraments, ceremonies, and solemnities, in the very unity of the sacred tabernacle or temple, in which alone the public worship of God by sacrifices was ordinarily to be celebrated, for the visible union of the whole Church of Israel.

2°. For the administration of this divine worship and its perpetual preservation, ministers were consecrated by God's command and instituted in a certain succession fixed by God's law, according to the threefold hierarchy of one high priest, the priests of the second order (4 Kings XXIII. 4), and the Levites ministering (λειτουργούντων) (1 Chron. XVI. 4, etc.).

Through these very priests the whole people was to be governed and judged in sacred matters. « If you perceive that the judgment is difficult and ambiguous with you... arise and go up to the place which the Lord your God shall choose; and you shall come to the priests of the Levitical race and to the judge who shall be in that time, and you shall ask them, and they will declare to you the truth of the judgment; and you shall do whatever they say, who preside in the place which the Lord shall choose, and who teach you according to his law... but he who is proud and refuses to obey the command of the priest who in that time ministers to the Lord your God, and the decree of the judge, that man shall die, and you shall take away the evil from Israel » Deut. XVII. 8 ff.

3°. From these very things it is clear that not only the right of government, but also, consequently, the ordinary magisterium of the priests follows, for the preservation and interpretation of the divine law and doctrine. « And you shall know that I have sent this command to you, that it might be my covenant with Levi (and with his posterity), says the Lord of hosts... For the lips of the priest shall keep knowledge, and they shall seek the law at his mouth, because he is the angel (messenger) of the Lord of hosts » Mal. II. 4–7; Lev. X. 10, 11. The priest is indeed the angel of the Lord, a name by which the prophets too are sometimes called (Hagg. I. 13; Mal. III. 1), so that they seek the teaching of the divine law from his mouth; for this is what the Hebrew name תורה, teaching, expresses.

Eminent in the threefold office of sacred ministry, rule, and magisterium, the high priest held together the unity both of the hierarchy and of the whole people in divine worship, in sacred discipline, and in doctrine.

4°. Nevertheless, that ancient economy was only a preparation for the New Testament, « a pedagogue leading to Christ, a guard toward that faith which was to be revealed, an introduction to a better hope; there the law given through Moses, here grace and truth made through Jesus Christ; there the spirit of bondage, here the spirit of the adoption of sons » (John I. 17⁴; Rom. VIII. 15; Gal. III. 23, 24; IV. 24–26; Heb. VII. 19). And so the old economy, compared with the new to which it led, was imperfect both in worship and in sacrifices, which are called shadows of future goods (Heb. IX, X); and in discipline, which, accommodated to a carnal people in the « works of the law », was so far the « law of carnal commandment » (ibid. VII. 16); and in doctrine, which was yet to be completed and finally consummated through the incarnate Word himself. Wherefore also the priesthood, as an essential part of the whole economy, was imperfect in the efficacy of its ministry, in the power of sacred rule, and in the truth of its magisterium; and so the priesthood itself, with its sacrifices, in the Mosaic Church was an introduction and prefiguration of the perfect priesthood and sacrifice in the Church of Jesus Christ. « If the consummation was through the Levitical priesthood... why was it still necessary that another priest should arise according to the order of Melchisedech, and not be called according to the order of Aaron? For when the priesthood is transferred, it is necessary that the law also be transferred » Heb. VII. 11, 12.⁵ « You have drawn all things to yourself, O Lord, for when the veil of the temple was torn, the holy of holies departed from the unworthy high priests, so that figure might be changed into truth, prophecy into manifestation, law into gospel. You have drawn all things to yourself, O Lord, so that what was done under shadowy signs in the one temple of Judea, the devotion of all nations everywhere might celebrate in full and open sacrament. For now both the clearer order of the Levites (deacons), and the greater dignity of the Elders (presbyters), and the more sacred anointing of the priests (bishops)... Now also, with the variety of carnal sacrifices ceasing, one offering of your body and blood fulfills all the differences of victims... and so you bring all mysteries to perfection in yourself, so that as there is one sacrifice for every victim, so there is one kingdom from every nation » — St. Leo, sermo 59 (al. 57), c. 7.

5°. This imperfection of the old priesthood, namely in the magisterium, about which not all theologians think alike, requires a more careful explanation. Certainly in that Church of Israel, to which « the oracles of God were entrusted » (Rom. III. 2), which was specially chosen and destined by God to preserve the integrity of revelation already given, and to perfect it day by day with new revelations of divine truth and of the divine counsels, so that the fullness of time might be prepared, in which from this very people, as from a thirsty land and from the root of Jesse, as a flower, the expectation of the nations would rise as a sign of the peoples (Gen. XLIX. 10; Is. XI. 1, 10; LIII. 2; Rom. IX. 6); in this Church, I say, a magisterium suited and necessary to so exalted an end, and therefore equipped with supernatural charisms for infallibility (cf. Tract. de Tradit. th. VII), could not be lacking. Whence several theologians hold that infallibility in preserving and proposing the doctrine of faith is to be asserted for the Aaronic priesthood itself, simply, or at least until the coming of the promised Christ himself (cf. Bellarmine, de Concil. L. II, c. 8). But this opinion has so many contrary difficulties, in either form, that it cannot be demonstrated by firm arguments. Some affirm that the priests, even in Christ's time and in Christ's very condemnation, erred not in doctrine but only about a fact (what fact, pray? namely that Jesus of Nazareth is the promised Christ, which, as the end, embraced the whole preceding doctrine, and, as the foundation, the whole subsequent doctrine); or that they erred indeed in mind as private men, but not in publicly proposed doctrine by sacerdotal power, since the high priest, as John testifies (XI. 51), prophesied and so taught divine truth by a divine instinct. But these things are manifestly refuted from the whole evangelical history, and especially from the solemn and judicial sentence by which the high priests and their whole council pronounced that Christ was to be rejected and condemned, because he made himself the Son of God (Matt. XXVI. 63–66; XXVII. 1; Mark XIV. 53, 61–64; Luke XXII. 66–77; John XIX. 6, 7, 15); cf. Stapleton, De principiis fidei L. II, c. 12. But if, with Bellarmine in the same place, you concede that the priests erred by a doctrinal error in designating to the people the very person of the Messiah already present, when by solemn judgment they pronounced that Christ was to be rejected as an « impostor » and a « blasphemer, because he made himself the Son of God »; then you cannot demonstrate from the very end of the magisterium in the Church of Israel that a charism of infallibility was attached to the Aaronic priesthood considered in itself before the coming of Christ, which nevertheless ceased when the Messiah came, while that same priesthood still remained legitimate. For the end of the magisterium, at least by far its principal end, was to prepare the ways of the Lord, and to show forth the « desired of all nations » (Hagg. II. 8), both proximately to the peculiar people of Israel and to all the nations themselves. If therefore it is established that the magisterium with the charism of infallibility was not connected with the Aaronic priesthood, considered in itself, in the recognition and showing forth of Christ already present, by which the whole preceding preparation had to be completed and finished; then we cannot demonstrate from the very end of the magisterium in the Mosaic Church that a perfection of infallibility belonged to the magisterium of the Aaronic priesthood considered in itself before Christ, which certainly was lacking, with Christ present, in the principal acts of recognizing and showing forth the Savior promised and already sent. This so essential difference in the ordinary magisterium of the Old Testament, that it was infallible before Christ and became fallible when Christ was already present, would have to be demonstrated by express testimonies of Scripture or of Christian tradition. But that such testimonies cannot be brought forward for the infallibility of the ordinary magisterium of the synagogue, while luminous ones stand for the infallibility of the magisterium in the Church of Christ, Bellarmine himself (in the same place, ch. 6) admits quite clearly. For when Calvin objected the fallibility of councils in the Old Testament, he replied, among other things, that it is not permitted to transfer the imperfection of the magisterium of the Old Testament to the magisterium of the Church of Christ: « For the Church has more certain and greater promises of God than the synagogue; nor do we read anywhere about the synagogue what Christ says of the Church (Matt. XVI.): upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it; nor what the Apostle says (1 Tim. III.): that it is the pillar and ground of the truth; nor is it written of Caiaphas (or of his predecessors), but of Peter (and his successors): I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail (Luke XXII.) » — Bellarmine, l. c.

Therefore the charism of infallibility, which it is not right to deny also in the magisterium of the Church of the Old Testament, seems to be conceived in another way, from the very proper character of that economy. Since there the divine truth was to be explained by continual new revelations, from this very fact the extraordinary mission of the prophets, who were namely to be ministers of revelation, is understood to be intimately bound and joined with the proper end of that economy. Whence to the magisterium of divine religion (in doctrine and morals) pertained not only the ordinary sacerdotal office but also the extraordinary prophetic office. To this prophetic office belonged no less the guarding and true declaration of revelation and law already promulgated, than its further explanation and increase through new revelations. If therefore the ordinary magisterium at any time failed through its own fault, the prophetic charism of the extraordinary magisterium supplied the defect, for the infallible preservation of divine doctrine and faith in the Church of Israel. Hence the prophets are also shepherds of the people (Jer. XVII. 16, Hebrew; cf. Zech. XI. 4), and watchmen set upon the walls of Jerusalem, who « shall not keep silent all day and all night forever... until (God) sets Jerusalem as praise in the earth » (namely the Church of the New Testament), Is. LXII. 6, 7; cf. XXI. 11. Indeed, the extraordinary prophetic charism, in certain singular causes and occasions, was connected with the high priesthood, as when the high priest was commanded to seek the answers of the Lord through the Urim and Thummim, which in the Vulgate (Lev. VIII. 8) is rendered « teaching and truth » (cf. Num. XXVII. 21; 1 Kings XIV. 18; XXII. 10; XXIII. 9, etc.). The evangelist John indicates this connection of the freely given charism, for certain extraordinary occasions, with the high priesthood (XI. 51), when he says that Caiaphas, at that very time when he was prevaricating in his ordinary office of magisterium, also, though unknowing, prophesied by an extraordinary instinct, « since he was high priest of that year. »

Therefore the infallible custody of the deposit existed indeed also in the Mosaic Church; but not through the promised perpetual assistance of the Spirit of truth for the ordinary magisterium (as in the New Testament); rather, insofar as both offices, the ordinary of the priesthood and the extraordinary of prophecy, are considered as joined. Hence the mission of the prophets constituted an intrinsic element, and as it were an integral part, by the character of that economy; and so their succession was not only morally continuous and manifest until the return from the Babylonian exile, but also under the second temple the charism of inspiration did not cease, as both the books written by inspiration and other facts demonstrate (see Tract. de Scriptura, thes. XI, corollary 2). Wherefore, considering only perpetuity, the prophetic office in the Old Testament could be called ordinary; but since by this name, in divine institutions, is understood not only perpetuity but rather an order of succession or propagation according to a certain and fixed law, whereas the spirit of prophecy, bound to no certain law or means of communication, as a gift freely given, breathes where it wills; therefore also in that economy the prophetic office was and ought to be called extraordinary.

6°. From what has been said it is understood how God was able to permit the transgression of the old priesthood in the magisterium, even then, and most of all, when « the end of the law, Christ, » came, so that in him the law and the prophets might be fulfilled as in their end, to which they were ordered, and by him, as the consummator of faith, might be fulfilled in the ultimate perfection of revelation and of divine institutions. Just as those who infallibly foretold Christ as to come were prophets with an extraordinary magisterium, so he who showed Christ as present (now let us say nothing of Simeon, Anna, and others) was a prophet with an extraordinary magisterium, and more than a prophet, of whom it was written by the ancient prophets: « behold, I send my angel before your face, who shall prepare your way before you » (Matt. XI. 9, 10). « The law and the prophets until John; from then the kingdom of God is evangelized (now present) » (Luke XVI. 16). Indeed, what is infinitely greater, the Word himself made flesh, through whose divinity, as inspiring cause, and to whose divinity and humanity, as final cause, the prophets spoke the words of the Lord, he himself, I say, now the Lord of the prophets, who is ὁ προφήτης (John I. 21; VI. 14; VII. 40; Matt. XXI. 11) and the one master (Matt. XXIII. 8, 10; John XIII. 13, 14), being present, bore witness by himself and of himself, consummating in his divine person the fullness of the prophetic office and of divine teaching (Deut. XVIII. 15; Acts III. 22). He was himself shown to all the people, the preceding prophecies of the law and the prophets having been fulfilled, which fulfillment Moses and Elijah, the law and the prophets, witnesses of his divine magisterium in the transfiguration, also exhibit sensibly (Matt. XVII. 3, 5; see St. Leo, sermo 51, c. 4); attested by works and miracles as by divine seals, designated by the preaching of the forerunner, and declared by the heavenly Father in the solemn initiation of his magisterium as the Son to be heard before all others (Luke III. 22; IX. 30–35; John V. 33–37, 39, 46; X. 38; XV. 24, etc.).

By this magisterium Christ, now that the revelations of faith and the divine institutions have been completed by himself and, once the Holy Spirit was sent, through the Apostles, remains perpetually in his Church, for the custody and explanation of the whole deposit, himself the one master, through his legates, instituted by himself in perpetual succession, furnished with the charism of truth and always protected by his presence, teaching in his own name and authority. All of this shall be explained and demonstrated more distinctly in its place. It is recalled here in passing, so that it may be clear on how many grounds the ordinary magisterium of the Church surpasses the ordinary magisterium of the synagogue: by reason of the incarnate Word, from whom the magisterium itself and its whole authority is derived and shared; by reason of the doctrine now consummated; and by reason of the indefectible assistance of the Spirit of truth. From this very perfection it is understood why the extraordinary prophetic magisterium, intrinsic to the old economy because of its imperfect state and still to be perfected, is by no means among the perpetual institutions of the economy now perfected (cf. Matt. XI. 11–13; 1 Pet. I. 10–12). There Moses and the prophets were as servants in the house of God, inspired many times and in many ways (as through successive parts and different degrees: πολυμερῶς καὶ πολυτρόπως) to cultivate the old Testament and to prepare the new; here the Son of God, in his own house, has already completed the New Testament and the unshaken kingdom, and he remains the author and perfecter of faith with his Church all the days until the consummation of the age (Heb. I. 1; III. 3–6; XII. 2, 27, 28).

The sum of all that we have demonstrated in this thesis is finally recalled here. The whole preceding state of the Church, both primitive, from Adam, by its destination universal for all nations, and Mosaic, for the peculiar people of God, as a real prophecy in types, as a verbal prophecy in announcements and foretellings, and generally as preparation and introduction of a better hope in all institutions and laws, was ordained to the Church of Jesus Christ, as to the real gospel in the mysteries and things fulfilled, as to the verbal gospel in the doctrine of mysteries and things now present, and finally to the consummation of the mercies of God in grace and truth. « The redemption of the Savior... has so arranged the sacrament of its great piety that, until the consummation of the world, the appointed fullness of generations should run its course, but the renewal of the origin through the justification of undiscriminating faith should pertain to all the ages past... Nothing in the Christian religion differs from the ancient signs, nor has salvation ever been hoped for by the just who went before except in the Lord Jesus Christ; the dispensations, indeed, varied according to the reason of the divine will, but shining forth in the same thing, both in the testimonies of the law, and in the oracles of prophecy, and in the offerings of victims; for so it was fitting that those peoples be instructed, that what they could not grasp when revealed they might receive veiled, and that the authority of the Gospel might be greater, to which so many signs and so many mysteries of the pages of the Old Testament have served... Nothing of the legal institutions, nothing of the prophetic figures has remained which has not wholly passed over into the sacraments of Christ... so that the messengers have rightly ceased, now that the things announced have come, nor is the reverence for the promises emptied, because the fullness of graces has been manifested » — St. Leo, sermo LXVI (de passion. Dni XV), c. 12. Certainly the fullness has been manifested in the Church of Jesus Christ; indeed the Church itself is called by Paul (Eph. I. 23) the fullness of Christ, also in this present state of the Church, in which it still militates on earth, teaching and believing in faith, ruling and obeying in hope, sanctifying and being sanctified in charity: « a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for acquisition » (1 Pet. II. 9).

« In the institutions and laws of the Old Testament, there must be distinguished: 1°. those which were in themselves necessary for salvation, pertaining to the eternal and universal Testament, from the others which were precepts only for the peculiar people and for the time of introduction to a better hope; 2°. within these very peculiar institutions one must distinguish those which by their principal end were typical of the Christ to come and of his Church, so that after they were fulfilled in Christ, their observance is to be regarded as abolished and dead, and after the sufficient propagation of the Church, altogether forbidden and deadly; but others, which, without at least a proximate and immediate prefiguring of Christ, pertained to the political or external religious discipline of the synagogue, though the obligation of divine law has now been removed in the Church of Christ, can nevertheless be permitted, or even prescribed, by custom or by human ecclesiastical law. »

The form of the Church, as it was imperfectly in the Old Testament, as has been declared in the preceding thesis, did not cease through defect but through the announced perfection, which was prefigured even in the synagogue itself; for the veil of the Old Testament « is done away in Christ » (2 Cor. III. 14), by a progress similar to that by which, in the present stage of the Church, « when that which is perfect has come, that which is in part shall be done away » (1 Cor. XIII. 10). Wherefore it is worthwhile to inquire briefly here how, in this transition from the imperfect to the perfect, the cessation of the old institutions, which are said by the Apostle to have been done away in Christ (τὸ καταργούμενον), has taken place.

I. In the Old Testament, those things which we generally call spiritual (in distinction from those which the Apostle, Heb. VII. 16, calls « the law of carnal commandment »), namely those pertaining to the grace offered and given in view of the merits of the Restorer of human nature fallen in the first Adam, to faith, hope, and charity, to the end of eternal life: all these, I say, are and always were of the eternal Testament, destined for all nations and all times. These therefore remain common to the people of God, or to the Church, in every economy, whether patriarchal, or in the fuller Mosaic, or in the perfection of the New Testament; although in the last, in keeping with its very perfection, after the « great mystery of piety » has been completed, they are more abundant in themselves and wider in extent. « For the grace of God, by which the whole multitude of the saints has always been justified, was increased, not begun, at the birth of Christ » — St. Leo, sermo XXIII (de Nativ. III), c. 4 (cf. thes. II, III). But since these spiritual things were given at any time from the merits of Christ, and since their perfection is the proper character of the New Testament, therefore they are sometimes said to have always pertained to the New Testament, even in the time of the Old. Cf. St. Augustine, contra Faust. L. IV; St. Thomas, 1-2, q. 107, a. 1.

These must be distinguished entirely from what was proper to the Old Testament in the Mosaic economy, insofar as it contained the shadow, type, and preparation for Christ to come, and for the New Testament promised in the Old and prefigured in it. To this typical order belong all the political and liturgical institutions, or judicial and ceremonial ones (as the theologians customarily call them), whether principally and in themselves, or at least indirectly, insofar as they were given by God through Moses for forming and preserving that peculiar people, so that in it the preparations for the Christ to come and for his Church might be kept and explained through the successions of times; and thus (as Paul says of certain historical events of that people) « all these things happened to them in figure » (1 Cor. X. 11).

What pertains to the spiritual order Augustine calls « precepts of the life to be lived »; theologians, using a generic name, call them moral, and they are theological, pertaining to faith and morals, and therefore to the eternal Testament. These have neither been changed in the Church of Jesus Christ nor can be changed, except by explanation and by bringing them to the state of the perfection of the New Testament (cf. Matt. V. 21 ff.; XIX. 8 f.). But those things which belong to the typical order, comprised under the name judicial and ceremonial, are called by Augustine « precepts of the life to be signified. »

Under these latter precepts the Mosaic synagogue was constituted in its own and peculiar manner, so that when these were removed in their signification of future things, their value, and their purpose, the whole peculiar character and form of the synagogue was removed. « The priesthood having been transferred (the principal subject and center of the judicial and ceremonial precepts), it is necessary that the law (of the whole peculiar Testament) also be transferred » Heb. VII. 12. Now indeed all these institutions, from their very intimate nature as types and preparations for Christ and his coming work, of their own accord ceased in this their signification and value, as they were fulfilled in Christ, now present, and in his Church, now constituted: « which are the shadow of things to come, but the body is Christ » Col. II. 17. Augustine discourses on these things most fully in his books against Faustus. « When a Jew says to me: why do you keep the Old Testament, whose precepts you do not observe? I answer: the Christians observe even from those very books (of the Old Testament) the precepts of the life to be lived; but the precepts of the life to be signified were then rightly observed, when those things which have now been revealed were foretold. Wherefore I do not even observe these things thus for religion, yet I hold to them as a testimony, just as also the carnal promises which are contained there, whence the Old Testament is properly so called, although eternal things have been revealed to me to be hoped for » — Aug., cont. Faust. L. X, c. 2. He disputes much more fully about these things in L. XIX, cc. 8, 9, 10, 11.

Therefore the cessation of the old judicial and ceremonial institutions, and so of the synagogue as true Church, has taken place by fulfillment in Christ and in the Church of Christ; this cessation, I say, is understood as the transition from the future to the present, from shadow and figure to body and signified thing, from promise to gift, from prophecy to gospel: « I came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it » Matt. V. 17.

II. Nevertheless, so that we may judge rightly about those divine but temporary institutions, and about their extinction at the apostolic time and afterward, when they were now dead or deadly, four very different modes of observance must be distinguished in them: a) observance in the formal reason of promises and types, as still awaiting Christ; b) observance held necessary from perpetual institution and divine law; c) observance in the reason of a religious institution once given by God to the sons of Israel, no longer necessary but nonetheless permitted; d) observance not to be retained from the divine law of the Old Testament, but imposed by human law.

1°. It is clear that the first mode of observance, for the time of the New Testament, involves the denial of Jesus Christ. In this mode the synagogue, persisting, denied and perverted the proper reason and purpose of the Old Testament itself; and thus, through apostasy from its own law, it fell into an unbelief contrary to true faith and to the Church of the New Testament, promised and prefigured by that very law, as the Savior reproached them: « There is one who accuses you, Moses, in whom you hope (ἠλπίκατε); for if you believed Moses, you would perhaps believe (ἐπιστεύετε ἄν) also me » John V. 46. The Apostle himself explains this thus: « Israel, pursuing the law of justice, did not arrive at the law of justice. Why? Because not by faith, but as if by works (of the law): for they stumbled at the stone of stumbling... Not subject to the justice of God; for the end of the law is Christ, unto justice for every believer » Rom. IX. 27 f.

Accordingly, after the manifestation of Jesus Christ and the fulfillment of these in him, the judicial and ceremonial precepts of the old law always were and remain not only dead, that is, neither necessary nor useful, but altogether deadly. « If certain deeds and celebrations which were future-announcing figures were still done by Christians, nothing would be signified except that those things which were then foretold by figures had not yet come. For what is still foretold as to come either has not yet come, or if it has already come, it is foretold in vain or deceitfully » — Aug., cont. Faust. L. XIX, c. 8.

2°. As to the second mode of observance which we named, by obligation of the divine law, still remaining: this obligation, and the necessity of observance for salvation, once the redemption was completed through the death of the cross, objectively and in itself certainly ceased, even for the Jews themselves, and all the more for Christians from circumcision. For that peculiar law, given for one peculiar people, never obliged the other nations, and consequently the faithful from the Gentiles; and for the people of Israel itself, as we said just before, it was only a pedagogy to Christ and to his Church and to the perfection of the new law. « But before faith (the new law) came, we were kept under the law, shut up in that faith which was to be revealed; so the law was our pedagogue in Christ (εἰς Χριστόν), that we might be justified by faith; but when faith came, we are no longer under the pedagogue » Gal. III. 19 ff. Where God through Jeremiah (XXXI. 31) promised a « new Testament », the Apostle adds a comment: « In saying new he has made the first old; and what grows old and aged is near to perishing » Heb. VIII. 8–15. « But now he promises, saying: Yet once more I will move not only the earth but also the heaven (Hagg. II. 6). Now that he says yet once more declares the transference of things movable, so that those things that are immovable may remain. Therefore, receiving the immovable kingdom, we have grace » ib. XII. 26.

After the promulgation, therefore, of the Christian faith of the New Testament, the immovable kingdom, it was never permitted to hold or teach the observances of the pedagogy, of the Testament made old and of the already translated movable things, as if they still persisted in their value and in their binding force. Against those who taught that the ceremonies of the law must be observed from obligation, as necessary for Christian justice, the Apostle wrote his whole letter to the Galatians. « Behold, I, Paul, tell you that if you are circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing... You are estranged from Christ, you who are justified in the law; you have fallen from grace » Gal. V. 2. Augustine explains this passage: « To them it was said: if you are circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing; who therefore wished to be circumcised because they thought that otherwise they could not be saved in Christ. In this mind, with this will, with this intention, whoever then was circumcised, Christ profited him nothing at all... He therefore accuses those who believed themselves justified in the law, not those who observed those legitimate things in honor of him by whom they were commanded, understanding both for what purpose of foretelling the truth they had been commanded, and how long they ought to endure » — Aug., ad Hieron. ep. 82, n. 19.

3°. Another mode, therefore, of observing the legal things, which Augustine indicates in his last words, could be altogether different from both preceding ones: namely, if, conceding and professing that the transference of the old law has already taken place, and that therefore the necessity or obligation of these ceremonies has ceased, the same legal institutions were nevertheless observed, either out of veneration for their origin and for the tradition of so many centuries among the people of God, or, in Augustine's words (ad Hieron. ep. 40, n. 6), « out of the custom of solemnity, not from the necessity of salvation; » or for reasons of prudent economy, in the way in which Augustine (ep. 82, n. 9) warns that Paul himself at times observed the legal things, « lest they be thought to be condemned by the doctrine of Christ as sacrilegious, or written without God's command, and to show that neither were the Jews at that time to be prohibited from them as from wicked things, nor the Gentiles compelled to them as necessary. »

That this mode of observing the legal things was for some time permitted, and that therefore those things, although already dead, were not yet deadly, is demonstrated by the deeds of the Apostles themselves, and especially of Paul, which embody the doctrine: Acts XVI. 3; XVIII. 18; XXI. 20–26. As to doctrine, and even as to the mode of conduct and the practice considered generally, there was indeed full agreement between the Apostles Peter and Paul.

For just as the Apostle of the Gentiles constantly taught that the obligation of those ceremonies had ceased, and therefore that they no longer conduced to Christian justice, not only for the Gentiles but also for the Jews; yet so he became to the Jews as a Jew, in order to gain the Jews; to those who are under the law, as if he were under the law, though he was not under the law, that he might gain those who were under the law (1 Cor. IX. 20); and he circumcised Timothy « because of the Jews » (Acts XVI. 3); and he himself observed the legal ceremonies, lest the faithful from circumcision, or Jews not yet converted to the faith, be led into the opinion that the Apostle condemned the old law in himself and taught (as they used to say) « a departure (ἀποστασίαν) from Moses » (Acts XXI. 21). But this very thing, concerning the abolished and in no way necessary observance of the ceremonies of the law, was first proclaimed and defined by Peter in the Council of the Apostles, directly indeed for the converted faithful from the Gentiles, but at the same time also for the Jews (Acts XV. 10, 11). This doctrine he confirmed by his own mode of conduct: « For being a Jew, he lived in the manner of the Gentiles (ἐθνικῶς) and not in the Jewish manner » Gal. II. 14. On the other hand, he tolerated it just as Paul did, and where he feared the scandal of the Jews, or (as Paul says) « fearing those who were of the circumcision » (Gal. II. 12), he himself observed the ceremonial laws. The difference of economy between the two Apostles consisted in the application of one and the same doctrine to the particular condition of the Antiochenes. For since (by special providence) Paul had been entrusted with « the Gospel of the uncircumcision, as Peter with that of the circumcision », the one, Paul, wished the greater regard to be had for the Gentiles, lest they be led into error about the necessity of the legal things; the other, Peter, for the Jews, lest they be turned away from the Christian Church ¹. Gal. II. 7, 11–14.

From the teaching and practice of the Apostles it is certain that that ceremonial law, although already dead, was nevertheless not yet deadly in those first beginnings of the Christian Church. But no less, from the very reason and nature of that temporary permission, from the consensus of the Fathers and indeed of the whole Church, and from definitions and condemnations against heretics, it is established that the observance of those ceremonies, of legal circumcision and of the other old sacraments, of the Levitical priesthood, of the sacrifices, and of the other sacred things of this kind, soon began, when « the Christian Church had been already established and more widely diffused among the nations », to be altogether illicit, and therefore deadly. In the decree for the union of the Jacobites issued in the Council of Florence (4 Feb. 1442), after the definition of the cessation of the legal things of the Old Testament, and the declaration « that whoever, even after the passion, puts hope in legal things and submits himself to them as if necessary for salvation, as if the faith of Christ could not save without them, has sinned mortally », a further explanation is added: « Nevertheless the Holy Roman Church does not deny that from the passion of Christ until the Gospel was promulgated those things could be kept, provided that they were not believed to be necessary for salvation; but it asserts that after the promulgation of the Gospel they cannot be kept without the loss of eternal salvation. Therefore it declares all who after that time observe circumcision, the sabbath, and the other legal things to be alien to the faith of Christ, and that they cannot be partakers of eternal salvation, unless at some time they repent of those errors. » The same is stated in summary in the Profession of Faith prescribed by the Holy See for the Orientals.

The time is not, indeed, defined more strictly by those words, « after the Gospel was promulgated »; yet it seems right to say that this promulgation, sufficiently ample and widely diffused among the nations, coincides with the foretold final destruction of the holy city and temple, and with the dispersion of the Church of Jerusalem, which was made up of Christians from circumcision. From that time, therefore, the observance of the laws and rites of the synagogue began to be not only negatively unnecessary, but privatively proscribed and pernicious. Indeed, that prophetic law had already lost the life of its office, as Augustine says; nevertheless, until the extreme execution of the sentence pronounced by Christ the judge against the city and the temple, it had to be religiously carried to burial; but once buried under the ashes of the city and temple, it cannot be brought to light without violating the divine economy established in the institution of the Church. « Why should I not be allowed to say that the Apostle Paul and the other Christians of right faith ought then to have commended those old sacraments truly, by observing them a little, lest those observances of prophetic meaning, kept by the most pious fathers, be thought diabolical sacrileges to be detested by posterity? For when faith had come, which was foretold by those observances and revealed after the death and resurrection of the Lord, they had lost, as it were, the life of their office. Nevertheless, just as dead bodies had to be carried in some way to burial by the duties of their kinsfolk, not feigned (as St. Jerome had said) but religious; yet not to be abandoned at once, or thrown to the detractions of enemies as to the bites of dogs. Therefore now, whoever of the Christians, even if he is of the Jews, should wish to celebrate these in the same way, digging up the buried ashes, will not be a pious bearer of the body, but an impious violator of the burial. » — Aug., ad Hieron. ep. 82, n. 15–17; cf. cont. Faust. L. XIX, c. 17. The Judaizing sects, who contended that those observances were perpetual by divine law, fell into heresy, and « while they wished to be both Jews and Christians, they could be neither Jews nor Christians. »

4°. There remains for us, from the questions proposed, the last one: whether, and within what limits, the observances which were divinely prescribed to the people of Israel in the Old Testament as ceremonial can be imposed on the faithful by the Church to be kept for a pious and fitting discipline; not indeed by divine law (since they have been abrogated), but by its own ecclesiastical laws, or by an equivalent lawful custom?

Benedict XIV, in his encyclical letter (1 March 1756) addressed to the bishops of the Greek rite, to commend and explain a new edition of the Euchologion, illustrates this doctrine on the Mosaic legal things at length, §§ 59 ff. « Although with the Gospel promulgated the ceremonial precepts of the old law have ceased... nevertheless it is within the power of the Church of Christ, with just concurring reasons and for grave causes, to restore the obligation of observing some of the ceremonial precepts which were in the old law, although, as we have indicated, they have been abrogated in the new; provided that the precept is not of the number of those which in the old law were chiefly ordained to prefigure the Messiah to come, such as, for example, circumcision and the sacrifices of animals, as Vasquez observed for our purpose; but that it is of the kind which pertained to external discipline and bodily cleanliness, in whose class must certainly be counted those things prescribed about clean and unclean foods. This assumption is confirmed no less by the discipline of the Western Church than of the Eastern, and indeed by the monuments of earlier centuries. » So the most learned Pontiff. Also in the decree for the Jacobites cited above, the doctrine of the Holy Roman Church is first put forward: « that the distinction in the Mosaic law between clean and unclean foods belongs to the ceremonial things which passed away and ceased to be effective when the Gospel arose; » and further, « that no nature of food that human society admits is to be condemned, nor is there to be a distinction among animals... whatever kind of death they die; » nevertheless there too account is taken of « the regular and ecclesiastical discipline »; for it concludes: « although for the health of the body, for the exercise of virtue, for regular and ecclesiastical discipline, many things not forbidden (by the divine law) may and ought to be forgone, because according to the Apostle all things are lawful but not all things are expedient. »

Many and principal ceremonial laws had their own foundation and form in the signification of the types of the Christ to come and of the Church of Christ, in which therefore other institutions, prefigured by those old typical ceremonies, are as the complement of prophecy. To this belong the sacraments of the old law, and in the first place the sacrament of circumcision, as a sign of the Redeemer to be born from the seed of Abraham, and as a seal of adoption into that peculiar people, and therefore as a type of the future adoption of sons in the Church of the New Testament through sanctification in baptism, which is « the circumcision not made by hand, but the circumcision of Christ » Col. II. 11, 12; cf. Rom. II. 29. The same holds of the priesthood and of all the old sacrifices, since in the New Testament they are wholly excluded, both by the bloody sacrifice on the cross, to which those were referred, and by the priesthood according to the order of Melchisedech, in which, by divine institution, « the variety of carnal sacrifices ceasing, one offering of the body and blood of Christ fulfills all the differences of victims » (St. Leo, sermo 59, c. 7). Besides sacraments and sacrifices, there are referred here the sacred things connected with them to the peculiar form of external worship, and the observances ² pertaining to legal cleanness or holiness, which Paul (Heb. IX. 9, 10, 13) calls « the ordinances of the flesh imposed until the time of correction », if indeed these sacred things and observances are considered not singly, apart, but in their complex, by which they constituted the peculiar ritual and priestly character of the typical people and its separation from all the nations.

It is therefore manifest that these rites, containing a profession of an economy imperfect and to be completed by the coming Redeemer, can neither be restored by ecclesiastical law nor tolerated by the Church among its faithful. In this matter St. Augustine most effectively expresses his agreement with St. Jerome, who seemed to understand him otherwise: « Just as you freely pronounce that the ceremonies of the Jews are both harmful and deadly for Christians, and that whoever has observed them, whether from Jews or from Gentiles, has fallen into the abyss of the devil; so I wholly confirm this your word, and add: whoever has observed them, whether from Jews or from Gentiles, not only truly but also feignedly, has fallen into the abyss of the devil » — Aug., ep. 82, n. 17, 18.

From all the foregoing it appears how much those are in error who foresee a future time in which the Jewish people, converted to Christ, in the rebuilt temple of Jerusalem, together with the eucharistic sacrifice of the immaculate Lamb, will by divine command also offer the sacrifices of the old form and restore the other sacred things.

Quite distinct from what we have recalled must be the judicial laws and certain individual ceremonial ones, which had their foundation not in the typical signification of things to come in the New Testament, but in disciplinary, ethical, and political considerations generally regarded. Therefore, from this very foundation of the ethical or political order, or, as is said in the decree for the Jacobites, for the health of the body, for the exercise of virtue, for regular and ecclesiastical discipline, observances of this kind, which were, and although they were, prescribed in the Old Testament by the Mosaic law for the people of Israel, may in the New Testament also be permitted, or even prescribed, for Christians by lawful authority. That this is not a renewal of the old divine law now abolished, but a new imposition of human law, is manifest in itself; although for its honesty and fitness it can, and usually does, appeal to the old law given by God himself. Thus the abstinence of the Mosaic law from « blood and what is strangled » was prescribed by the Apostles themselves even for Christians from the Gentiles (Acts XV. 20, 29; XXI. 25); and although « with the cause of this apostolic prohibition ceasing, the effect also ceased » (decree for the Jacobites), and therefore it ceased to be properly an apostolic law; nevertheless the same abstinence was kept for many centuries in the Western Church, and in some Eastern Churches down to our own age, either by custom or by positive ecclesiastical law; and this also held for certain uncleannesses of the body or of foods established in the old law. On these matters, besides the encyclical letter of Benedict XIV cited above, the theologians may be read, and among them Suarez, de Legibus, L. IX.

From what has been said one may note in passing in what sense certain laws which are in themselves ecclesiastical are sometimes referred to the Mosaic law, and under this relation are called divine. Namely, when the very substance of the thing commanded is derived from the natural law (granted the institutions of the supernatural order), but the determined manner is prescribed by the Church in the same form as the Mosaic ceremonial law, appeal is rightly made, in commendation of such a prescription, to the old law given by God himself. Thus the right of sacred pastors to a suitable support is derived from the natural law, and in the New Testament too it is confirmed by positive declaration (1 Cor. IX. 7 ff.; 1 Tim. V. 17, 18); but the manner of this support by the receipt of tithes in the Mosaic economy belonged to the ceremonial or (if you prefer) judicial law (Suarez, l. c., chap. 19, n. 18). Wherefore, since the obligation from that divine law has ceased, the law of tithes, considered formally, is to be counted for the New Testament as ecclesiastical. Nevertheless, Innocent III in the Decretals (L. III, tit. 30, cap. 26, Tua nobis) declares the obligation, nature, and consecration of the tithes of the New Testament from the divine law of the Old Testament, since the reason in the priesthood of the New Testament is equal or stronger than in that old Levitical priesthood ³. In this way is also explained the divine right of ecclesiastical immunity, even in those things in which the exemption, formally considered, is not by divine but only by canonical right; on which matters may be consulted Bellarmine, de Clericis L. I, cc. 28, 29; Suarez, de Religione, T. I, L. III, c. 8, n. 10; contra Reg. Angl. L. IV, toward the end.

« Although the solemn division between the power of order and the power of jurisdiction is most true and most necessary; nevertheless the power of jurisdiction, which in that two-membered partition is taken generically, can, and for greater clarity and because of its mutually diverse properties ought, to be distinguished in sacred Theology into the power of governance or of jurisdiction specifically so called, and into the power of the authentic magisterium, infallible in its fullness; so that the threefold distinction of priesthood or sacred ministry, ecclesiastical rule, and authentic magisterium is to be regarded as theologically true. »

We confess that this thesis is not placed in its proper position if the internal order of things is considered in itself. But since in the preceding theses we have already presupposed the threefold power instituted by God in the Church, and much more because we think that this distinction — not a division, but a distinction of ecclesiastical rule or jurisdiction specifically so called and of the infallible magisterium, according to formal reasons very different from one another — is to be retained by us above all in what follows, for the Church of Jesus Christ, and is of great use in sacred theology: for these external reasons it has pleased us to explain and vindicate this distinction in these prolegomena, as far as is needed, so that false interpretations and attacks may be guarded against or removed.

I. The division of ecclesiastical power into the power of order and the other of jurisdiction generally considered is usually stated so that the former is referred to the real body of Christ, namely to the sacrifice and the Eucharistic sacrament, and the latter to the mystical body of Christ or to the members of the Church. Since this manner of speaking, to comprehend the full division, seems to need many explanations, we shall declare the same thing from theological principles a little differently. We shall say nothing that ought not to be accepted by all Catholics; yet there are several things whose theological demonstration we shall not give here, but suppose to be drawn from other places.

The Church, the kingdom of truth and holiness (John XVII. 17 ff.; XVIII. 37), Christ the Redeemer acquired with his blood, through satisfaction and merits consummated by the sacrifice on the cross; and he founded it by his institutions and disposed it to this end, that in it, here on earth, all men might be prepared through faith in revealed truth, through the holiness of hope and charity and of the other supernatural virtues, for the kingdom of vision and enjoyment in heaven. Now the holiness merited for us, Christ, as we know from revelation, confers in his Church first of all ex opere operato, mediately indeed through the propitiatory and perennial unbloody sacrifice of his body and blood, by which the satisfactions and merits of the bloody sacrifice once offered, and efficacious forever (Heb. X. 14), are applied for the granting of actual graces for the remission of sins and for the bestowal of holiness (cf. de Euch. sacrif. th. XII, XIII.); but immediately the opus operatum of sanctification is through the sacraments, which from their institutor Christ and from his satisfaction and merits have dignity and efficacy for conferring holiness itself, namely habitual grace, on all who put no obstacle in the way (cf. de Sacram. in genere th. VI–IX.).

Therefore, just as in the Church of Christ sacrifice and sacraments were instituted for sanctification ex opere operato, so for this sacred ministry the priesthood is consecrated; or, to speak in the concrete, priests have been instituted by Christ the supreme priest for ever according to the order of Melchisedech, who by a ministerial power communicated to each of them by him offer the sacrifice of the New Testament and confer the sacraments. Now the power of the priesthood is itself communicated ex opere operato through the sacrament of Order, and is sealed with an indelible character (Tract. de Sacram. in genere th. XII, XIII.). For this reason it follows the nature of the character in its properties; and so in all who are marked with the same character it is the same and efficacious for all the acts for which it is instituted; in this its efficacy, or as to its value, it is independent not only of the merits of the minister but also of every higher power in the Church; indelible in this life; and finally communicable to no one who lacks the character corresponding to this power.¹. This power of the priesthood is what, on account of the mode of its conferral and its immutability and its independence in value, is called the power of order, so that it may be distinguished from the other, of jurisdiction.

II. The priesthood, with the sacrifice and the sacraments and with the opus operatum of grace, is indeed essential in the Church of Jesus Christ, the priest for ever, for the holiness by which he willed to sanctify it and to present it glorious to himself (Eph. V. 26, 27); yet with these things his infinite love and providence toward his Church have not been sufficiently provided for. For in those same ministers, the Apostles and their successors until the consummation of the age, to whom he gave the fullness of the priesthood, he instituted another power, which comprehends both infallibility in teaching, for the propagation and perpetual preservation of the integrity of faith, and supernatural governance in ruling, for the undefective holiness of Christian morals.

There is therefore, first of all, the power and the office, divinely enjoined, of preaching — under the protection of Christ and the assistance of the Spirit of truth who abides with them forever (John XIV. 16) — not only to the subjects in the Church but to all nations; and of explaining and preserving in its integrity the doctrine and law of God and its divine sanctions. The fullness of power, as we shall soon see from Suarez's explanation, « in this genus is nothing other than that the power is for teaching with the assistance of the Holy Spirit and with infallible certitude. » Further, so that this power of infallibly teaching in the visible kingdom of Christ — which, though not of this world, is in this world — may be more effective in guarding the very deposit of sacred doctrine, in securing the unity of faith in the kingdom of truth, and above all in ruling the kingdom of holiness, the power of governance has been joined and intimately united with it by the divine author and consummator of faith (Heb. XII. 2), which is properly the power of ecclesiastical rule (Titus II. 15), or of governance. For to Peter, as the ancient theologians spoke, together with the key of knowledge for infallibly opening the doctrine and law of God, there was committed at the same time the key of power for ruling by his laws, judgments, and sanctions; so that, according to the prayer and command of Christ, he might confirm his brothers with unfailing faith in teaching and with power in ruling (Luke XXII. 32). There were given by Christ not only teachers but, at the same time, teachers and pastors, for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ (Eph. IV. 11, 12; cf. de Tradit. th. XXV. n. I.); the bishops, set by the Holy Spirit to rule the Church of God (Acts XX. 28); and constituted leaders (ἡγούμενοι) to exact obedience and subjection, who are bound to keep watch as those who will render account for the souls of their subjects (Heb. XIII. 17).

This whole power, considered in its complex, is and is most rightly called, in the generic sense of the name, power of jurisdiction; for from both reasons, from infallibility in teaching as well as from the power of ruling, it induces, by its definitions and its laws, an obligation of obedience according to hierarchical subordination, though in a different mode. But concerning this unity and distinction, of what kind it is, we shall speak a little later. Meanwhile let it be noticed how great is not only the real distinction but the diversity between power of jurisdiction and power of order.

III. We shall set out this diversity between the power of order and of jurisdiction in a few words, although it may already be established from what has been said.

1°. The power of order is essentially bound up with the sacramental character. On the other hand, that of jurisdiction does not depend essentially on the character; whence jurisdiction, not only episcopal but also supreme and full over the whole Church, which belongs to the Roman Pontiff, can be present without the episcopal character. This indeed in fact takes place whenever a Pontiff is elected who is neither a bishop, and perhaps neither a priest nor a deacon: by divine institution, namely, through lawful election and the consent he gives, Christ immediately confers the whole power of jurisdiction on the one designated; and this is separate from the power of order, for the latter, not the former, is conferred by the sacrament of Ordination or Consecration.

2°. In those in whom the sacramental character is the same, in all of them the power of order is the same; so there are no differing degrees in them as regards this power: « wherever there is a bishop, whether at Rome or at Eugubium... he is of one and the same priesthood » (Jerome, ep. 146 ad Evang.).

But in the power of jurisdiction there exists a hierarchical subordination and a distinction of grades, partly by divine right, as is the supreme and universal power of the successor of Peter, and as under him other bishops participate in it; by ecclesiastical right there is also a subordination among the bishops inferior to the Roman Pontiff. The former subordination is essential, according to the divine constitution of the Church, and therefore unchangeable; the latter, among the bishops themselves, is indeed connected with the constitution of the Church, but is mutable according to those conditions which are governed by ecclesiastical right.

3°. Lacking the sacramental character, as is plain from what has been said, one can have no power of order; whence this cannot be delegated, nor conferred in any other way except through sacramental ordination itself. But one marked with the sacramental character always validly exercises, on his side, the power of his order, which can never be restricted or taken away. That its exercise may be forbidden, and thence rendered sacrilegiously illicit, follows from the hierarchical subordination of divine or even ecclesiastical right in the grades of jurisdiction.

From this same subordination it is manifest that the power of jurisdiction, insofar as it is considered not as supreme but as inferior in the individual bishops, is both liable to restriction, suspension, and removal by the superior, by which act the acts become not only illicit but altogether invalid; and that it can be delegated to others within the limits established by divine or ecclesiastical right. Hence, with what we said under 1° assumed, it is clear why, by delegation of the Supreme Pontiff, whether this is made by a general law or by a particular disposition and act, those who are not bishops can have jurisdiction by which they concur in ecumenical Councils not only to decide on matters of ecclesiastical discipline but also to define matters of faith; for this latter too pertains not to the power of order but to the power of jurisdiction considered generically.

4°. Finally, the efficacy of the power of order through the sacrifice and the sacraments is ex opere operato, immediately for the sanctification of souls by the gifts of inner grace; although indeed these at the same time pertain to the most noble part of the Church, insofar as it is visible.

The efficacy of jurisdiction, in itself and immediately, concerns the visible unity of the profession of faith in the kingdom of truth, and the visible governance of the kingdom of holiness; but, as to its end, it concerns faith itself and interior holiness, ex opere cooperantium.

IV. But what is chiefly in question for us is not the distinction or division of the power of jurisdiction, generically considered, from the other power of order; rather, whether and how, within that very power of jurisdiction, the two formal reasons, the power of the divine magisterium and the power of ecclesiastical rule, or of jurisdiction specifically so called, are to be judged distinct from one another?

1°. That we may forestall at the outset some suspicion of novelty somewhere thrust upon us, let us first look at the manner of thinking and speaking about this matter among the more ancient theologians. Suarez certainly speaks as if he supposed a distinction commonly received and known in itself, requiring no proof or defense. Where he demonstrates that the Constitution of Gregory XIII, Ascendente Domino, is not merely disciplinary but dogmatic, and therefore infallible « from the fullness of power », he takes the distinction of the twofold key, of doctrine and of jurisdiction, as certain and necessary. « Because the power must be fitted to the act, it is certain that here the discourse is not only about the power of jurisdiction, but chiefly about the power which is called the key of knowledge; for this was per se necessary for making this declaration (namely the declaration of doctrine, for which the power of jurisdiction alone would not have been sufficient). But the fullness of power in this genus is nothing other than that the power is for teaching with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, and with infallible certitude » (Suarez, de Relig., T. IV, l. III, c. 4, n. 11). He assumes the same distinction in the defense of the Apostolic letters by which Paul V condemned the doctrine and forbade the use of the oath imposed by the King of England, James I, on Catholic subjects « to detect and repress papists »; where I would have you note the author's observation: the key of knowledge pertains to the condemnation of error considered in itself, while the key of power, or of jurisdiction, is referred to the persons to whom the command or prohibition is given. « The formula of the oath, he says, contains much that is contrary to religion and good morals; therefore the Pontiff, in reprobating it, used the lawful power of the keys: namely, by the key of knowledge declaring the injustice and malice of that oath, which is the proper office of a pastor, to whom it belongs to feed the flock of Christ; and by the key of power prohibiting the use of such an oath... To reprobate a false doctrine it is not necessary to be the competent judge of its author, nor to hear him otherwise than through his writings; but to prohibit such an oath under precept, jurisdiction over those to whom the precept is directed is indeed necessary, which Catholic Englishmen acknowledge in the Supreme Pontiff as in their own pastor; rightly, therefore, could the Pontiff impose such a prohibition on the English, especially since he did not so much make a new law as declare the divine and natural law about avoiding an illicit oath and fleeing the profession of false error (by the key of knowledge), and confirm it by his precept (by the key of power). With regard to the king, however, although it is most true that the Pontiff is his competent judge, as we have shown above (from the character of baptism), nevertheless in this act he exercised no judgment of jurisdiction over the king » (Defens. fidei cont. Reg. Angl. l. VI, c. 7). He exercised no judgment of jurisdiction over the king; but surely also for the king, as for all others, by « declaring the malice of that oath » and « reprobating the false doctrine », he exercised « the power which is called the key of knowledge », for which, considered in itself, no judgment of jurisdiction is needed, as Suarez teaches throughout the whole context.

In the same sense, but with a somewhat different division of the keys, the distinguished Louvain theologian Thomas Stapleton speaks; for on the one hand he places the key of knowledge, on the other the keys of power, both of order and of jurisdiction. « The keys of the Church, he says, can be divided into the key of knowledge and of power... To the key of knowledge belongs the opening of the Scriptures (or, more universally, of the revealed doctrine and law), which Christ exercised at Luke XXIV, and about which he said to the lawyers: you have taken away the key of knowledge (Luke XI. 52). The power of the keys is either of order or of jurisdiction. Jurisdiction itself is either in the external forum, by excommunicating, suspending from office, granting indulgences, and enacting laws (generally: legislative, judicial, coercive); or in the internal, by remitting sins. All this most ample and adequate power of the keys was promised by Christ the Saviour to Peter alone in this place (Matt. XVI) » (Stapleton, Opp., T. I, de Princip. fidei, l. VI, c. 1).

It is enough to have indicated these things in passing, so that from the very way of speaking of the ancient theologians it may appear that the magisterium and the imperium of jurisdiction in the Church were so understood by them that neither did they themselves call their distinction into doubt, nor did they think it could be called into doubt. But lest the distinction itself be taken in a perverse way, its formal reasons must be defined a little more precisely. For the sake of clarity and brevity we shall consider the supreme power in the head of the Church, from which application to the power of the lower grades can easily be made, with the limitations which follow from the subordination and dependence of the inferior on the superior being, of course, saved and retained.

2°. First let it be noted what the union is between the key of the magisterium and the key of jurisdiction. The whole material object of the sacred magisterium is also, or can be, the object of jurisdiction; and conversely, supreme jurisdiction, at least insofar as its acts refer to the governance of the whole Church, includes infallible magisterium. When the revealed doctrine of faith or of morals² is defined by the Pontiff ex cathedra or in an ecumenical Council, the definition itself includes both infallible magisterium and supreme jurisdiction over the whole Church; or rather, the definition is made, with the Holy Spirit assisting, by an act of infallible magisterium, insofar as the doctrine itself is declared divinely revealed, or at least a truth closely linked with a revealed dogma; but an act of jurisdiction is included insofar as the doctrine, by the definition itself, is intimated to all the faithful (or rather, to all the baptized) to be held under the penalty of an explicit or implicit anathema or of another censure. Besides, the Church, by the power of jurisdiction, surrounds the divine faith, the divine laws, and the divine institutions, for their safer custody and application, with its own laws too, as with a wall and a rampart; it exercises its judgments against transgressors and enacts its penalties. But in all these things, if not in time, at least by nature, there is presupposed the formal, or equivalent, declaration by the magisterium of the truth of the doctrine, of the laws, and of the divine institutions. Likewise, on the other side, the Church, in its laws which it enacts by the power of jurisdiction concerning universal governance, the sacred liturgy, and the holiness of Christian morals, at the same time, in the same act, exercises the power of magisterium concerning the honesty and holiness of its own such laws; and on this foundation of infallible magisterium rests the infallibility of the Church in governing and legislating. Insofar as an act of magisterium directly or at least indirectly regarding the whole Church is or is not included in laws and precepts, from this is taken the proper reason for the distinction which Bellarmine (de Rom. Pontif. l. IV, c. 5), with other theologians, draws between « precepts of morals », in which the Roman Pontiff cannot err, and « those in which it is not absurd that the Pontiff errs. »

3°. That this union and at the same time distinction may become clearer and be more effectively proved, let us consider « the supreme power of jurisdiction » and « the supreme power of magisterium also » in the Roman Pontiff; of which the former was defined in chapter four and the latter in chapter five of the Constitution Pastor aeternus in the Vatican Council. Chapter four is « on the force and nature of the primacy of the Roman Pontiff. » The formal conciliar definition declares this force and nature to be « full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church »; and a little before, in the doctrinal exposition, it is said of the power of jurisdiction that « to it the pastors and faithful of each rite and dignity, both singly and all together », are bound by the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience. Now this power of jurisdiction over the whole Church, and the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience toward it, is taught to be valid not only, indeed, but yet above all in matters that pertain to faith and morals: full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church, « not only in matters that pertain to faith and morals, but also in those that pertain to the discipline and governance of the Church spread throughout the whole world. » The power of jurisdiction, therefore, is over the Church, over pastors and faithful, who, both singly and all together, are bound toward it by the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience; and this also, and especially, in matters pertaining to faith and morals; but it is not said to be a jurisdiction over the matters or the doctrine of faith and morals. Even concerning these matters, concerning the doctrine of faith and morals, the supreme power is comprised in the primacy of the Roman Pontiff, which is the power of infallibly defining the truth of those matters, namely the doctrine of faith and morals, with the Holy Spirit assisting; but of this the Council treats in the following chapter five, as of a power distinct yet not separate, since both are contained in the primacy, from the power of jurisdiction which it had declared in the preceding chapter four.

After the force and nature of the primacy has thus been defined, by which the Roman Pontiff has full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church, the Council teaches that, besides this, and together with it, « the supreme power of magisterium also » is comprised in the Apostolic primacy itself. It is not sufficient, therefore, to believe the supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church also in matters pertaining to faith and morals; together with it is to be believed the supreme power of magisterium also.³ There were among Catholics, before the definition of the Vatican Council, those who indeed admitted the Roman Pontiff's supreme power of jurisdiction in matters pertaining to faith and morals, insofar as, namely, it was already established, from the consent of the Church or from the definition of an ecumenical Council, what the truth of matters of faith and morals was; but they denied, or called into doubt, or at least contended that it was not to be defined as an article of faith, the supreme and by this very fact infallible power of magisterium. The Council, however, does not in any way exclude — as is manifest in itself — that to exercise the power of jurisdiction in matters pertaining to faith and morals, the truth of the doctrine must at least in order of reason be presupposed; but it teaches that in the Pontiff himself there is not only the supreme power of jurisdiction but also of magisterium, by virtue of which, in defining a doctrine of faith or morals, he is endowed with infallibility through the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, so that his definitions are irreformable of themselves and not from the consent of the Church.

From definitions of divinely revealed truth issued by the fullness of the power of magisterium — which (as Suarez rightly said) is nothing other than infallibility through the assistance of the Holy Spirit — there immediately arises, for all, not only the baptized but also the non-baptized, and therefore those not subject to the jurisdiction of the Church (considering the matter in itself and abstracting from excusing ignorance), the obligation of divine faith on account of the authority of God revealing. At the same time, however (as we have already said), in the definition itself the supreme power of jurisdiction is exercised, to which all pastors and faithful are bound by the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience; while the Pontiff, discharging the office of Pastor and Teacher of all Christians, not only by defining the revelation of truth makes it certain for all to be believed with divine and Catholic faith (which is done by the supreme power of the infallible magisterium), but also by his supreme power of jurisdiction enjoins on all Christians subject to him the duty of true ecclesiastical obedience, and he fortifies the custody of the divine faith itself with ecclesiastical penalties, either implicitly or explicitly, as in the dogmatic canons.

The Council itself, in so far as the pastoral office is the supreme magisterium, declares two functions by which it is evidently distinguished, in its formal reason, from the power of jurisdiction specifically so called. First, in order that the Roman Pontiffs might satisfy this pastoral office of the power, namely of the magisterium, of which alone it there treats, « they always gave untiring labor that the salutary doctrine of Christ might be propagated among all the peoples of the earth; » secondly, « with equal care they watched that where it had been received it might be preserved sincere and pure. » Therefore the supreme power of magisterium extends also to the non-baptized unbelievers; for not by voluntary charity alone, which can and should belong to any Christian, but by virtue of the pastoral office, the supreme power of magisterium comprehends all the peoples of the earth to be taught by the command and institution of Christ: « Go, teach all nations. » But the supreme power of jurisdiction specifically so called is over the whole Church, i.e., over all who are bound to the Church by baptism, and not over others: « For what have I to do with judging those who are outside? For God will judge those who are outside. » The former therefore, by Christ's institution and divine right, extends more widely than the latter; and by this very fact they are understood to be distinct. But is it perhaps the case that within the Church, in order that doctrine be preserved sincere and pure, the magisterium does not act under its formal aspect, by which it is distinguished from the power of jurisdiction? Indeed, the Council describes most clearly how the Roman Pontiffs, above all and especially, preserve the sincere and pure doctrine of Christ, not now by the power of commanding or of jurisdiction, but by that which, according to the prayer and promise of Christ, « I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail », is the power, with the Holy Spirit assisting, of infallibly knowing, expounding, and defining the revelation handed down by the Apostles, and thus of guarding the deposit of faith. This description indeed says nothing other than that fullness of the power of teaching with the assistance of the Holy Spirit and infallible certitude, which the ancients called « the key of knowledge »; the Council, however, most aptly, according to the constant doctrine and manner of speaking of Scripture, calls it « the supreme power of magisterium ». In the dangers that arose in matters of faith, the Council says, the Roman Pontiffs, according to the condition of the times and of affairs, employing now one and now another aid, « defined those things to be held which they had known, with God's help, to be consonant with the Holy Scriptures and Apostolic Traditions. For the Holy Spirit was not promised to the successors of Peter so that they might, by his revelation, make known a new doctrine, but so that, with his assistance, they might holily guard and faithfully expound the revelation handed down through the Apostles. » Moreover, all the orthodox Fathers and Doctors followed their expounded and defined doctrine as Apostolic: from what reason, I ask, first and chiefly moving them? Namely, « fully knowing that this holy See of Peter remains untouched by every error forever, according to the divine promise of our Lord and Saviour made to the prince of his disciples: I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and you, when you have turned again, confirm your brethren. »

Nevertheless, as we have already declared above, in the definition and custody of the deposit the supreme power of jurisdiction is joined and subjoined to the infallibility of the magisterium. The Council itself indicates this conjunction of both powers sufficiently, not only in chapter four, as we have seen, but also in this fifth chapter « on the infallible magisterium ». It places indeed, as the matter itself requires, for knowing, expounding, defining, and guarding the revelation handed down by the Apostles (of which it had spoken in the preceding context), first and principally « this charism of truth and of faith that never fails, divinely conferred on Peter and on his successors in this chair ». The function of infallibility in teaching, or of infallible magisterium, must be first in every definition and in the custody of the deposit; for from this charism comes their irrefragable certitude and irreformable firmness. Nevertheless, the successors of Peter, instructed by this charism, discharge their lofty office not only « so that the whole flock of Christ may, through them, be turned away from the poisonous food of error and nourished with the pasture of heavenly doctrine », but also « so that, the occasion of schism removed, the whole Church may be preserved as one, and, resting on this foundation, may stand firm against the gates of hell ». All of which things, because and insofar as doctrine is concerned, though they require at least in order of reason the prior function of infallible magisterium, this function, however, in the present order of providence is not, and cannot be, alone in the visible militant Church; but to this very end of unity and firmness the power of jurisdiction is also joined and subjoined even in doctrine, which, after what has been said above, needs no further declaration.

4°. Now we can set forth, as it were in one view, the chief distinctions we have brought out between the power of magisterium and the power of ecclesiastical rule, or of jurisdiction specifically so called.

a) In the amplitude of its extent, from the institution of Christ the Saviour of the world, the power of magisterium reaches more widely than that of jurisdiction: to all nations, not only those already gathered into the Church but also those to be called into the Church. Hence, in its place we shall see that many things were prescribed and done in the discipline of catechumens, as they are still done now according to the condition of times and affairs, which might seem to proceed from the power of ecclesiastical jurisdiction; certainly, however, they had and have their foundation not in this but in the power of magisterium.

b) The object of the magisterium, formally considered (i.e., insofar as it is magisterium), is the infallible manifestation, exposition, and definition of the divine doctrine, of the law, and of the sanction in rewards and penalties by divine justice; and, through this infallibility in teaching, the custody of the whole sacred deposit.

The object of jurisdiction is not the manifestation of revealed truth and law, but its application, defense, and vindication in the Church, by the laws, precepts, judgments, and sanctions proper to ecclesiastical rule, of that truth and law as manifested through the infallible magisterium.

c) From the authentic preaching, exposition, and definition of doctrine as revealed by the infallible magisterium there immediately arises the obligation of obedience of divine faith (ὑπακοὴ πίστεως, Rom. I. 5; Gal. III. 2), i.e., obedience of faith on account of the sole formal motive of the authority of God revealing; although which truths, and in what sense, are to be believed as revealed is made known through the proposition of the infallible magisterium: we believe whatever the Church proposes to be believed, because God has revealed it. This is what Augustine said: « We therefore, who are and are called Christians, do not believe in Peter (as the formal object on account of which we believe, and as the end toward which we tend by faith), but in him in whom Peter believed, built up by the words of Peter (through the magisterium derived from Christ) about Christ... That master of Peter, Christ, in the doctrine which leads to life, he is our master » (one is your master, Christ, revealing, and by the magisterium participated in Peter and in the Church preserving the revealed doctrine) (Augustine, City of God, L. XVIII, c. 54, n. 1). And this obligation of obedience of faith, precisely because it is on account of the authority of God revealing, is equal in all; to it the defining Pontiff or Council is subject no less than any other men, whether within the Church or (considering the thing in itself and objectively) outside the Church. The power of jurisdiction indeed is also instituted by Christ the King and derived into his kingdom, the Church; but it is an ecclesiastical power proper to the Pontiff and to others to whom it is communicated in an ordinary office, by virtue of which they govern not by divine but by their own ecclesiastical laws, judgments, and sanctions; and by all these they also apply, guard, and vindicate, toward their subjects, the doctrine and the divine law handed down through the infallible magisterium, subjects who in Christ's kingdom are liable to jurisdiction according to hierarchical subordination.

Therefore the power of jurisdiction concerns, per se and immediately, not internal but external acts in the visible kingdom of Christ; the power of magisterium first and per se attains and binds the inner mind and will. Hence, whoever denies by an interior act alone a doctrine defined by the power of the infallible magisterium is, before God and in his conscience bound to God, a heretic who falls away from the unity of faith and of the Church, so long as he persists in this sin; he is condemned not by the judgment of ecclesiastical jurisdiction but by that of God and of his own conscience. But when he betrays heresy by an external act, he is subject to the power of jurisdiction and to its judgment and penalties according to the sanctions of ecclesiastical laws. This distinction, certain on other grounds theologically and juridically, we have declared more expressly in the dogmatic Constitution defining the preservation of the Mother of God from every stain of original sin. After the words of the definition, pronounced indeed from the fullness of the power of the infallible magisterium, declaring this doctrine to be revealed by God and therefore to be held firmly and constantly by all the faithful, the Pontiff concludes: « Wherefore, if anyone should presume to think in their heart otherwise than as has been defined by us, which God forbid, let them know and further understand that they are condemned by their own judgment, that they have suffered shipwreck in the faith and have fallen away from the unity of the Church; and besides, by that very act they subject themselves to the penalties established by law, if they have dared to signify what they think in their heart by word or in writing or by any other external means. »

Therefore the power of magisterium concerns not only the external forum but, proximately and directly, the internal forum. The power of jurisdiction of which we speak pertains to the external forum, because although it indeed binds conscience before God, nonetheless by its laws, judgments, and sanctions it is occupied, proximately and directly, with the objects of the external forum. For the power of jurisdiction in the internal forum is of a different kind, and sacramental, for remitting sins in conscience and before God.

d) The power of magisterium does not constitute its own object, namely the truth of doctrine and of divine law; but by infallibly declaring it as revealed by God, it adds nothing of its own and takes nothing from the divine, as the holy Fathers have so often warned (cf. Tract. de Tradit.). Hence doctrines and laws once infallibly proposed or defined by the magisterium are unchangeable, and there is no power of abrogating, changing, or dispensing from them.⁴ By the same reasoning, the interpretation of divine law by the magisterium is only inherent; if at any time divine law seems to be applied by a somewhat extensive interpretation, this is done through the legislative power of jurisdiction.

On the other hand, the power of jurisdiction constitutes its own laws, and thus new law is established, or can be established, which, both in its origin and in its force, or in its dispensation, modification, or abrogation, depends on the very power of jurisdiction.

Hence there is that difference of language in the definitions of the magisterium, declaring the truths of faith to be believed, and in the decrees of the power of jurisdiction, establishing ecclesiastical laws to be observed; which St. Athanasius explains, as the Nicene Fathers employed it excellently. « About Easter they wrote thus: the following decrees have been made (ἔδοξε τὰ ὑποτεταγμένα); for then it was decreed that all should obey. But about faith (namely about the creed and the truths defined in it) they did not at all say it has been decreed, but thus the Catholic Church believes; and at once they confessed what they believe, so as to declare that their view is not a more recent but an apostolic one; and what they wrote was not invented by them, but is the very thing the Apostles taught. » (Athanasius, de Synod. Arimin. et Seleuc. n. 5.)

There are therefore weighty reasons for sacred Theology why the power of jurisdiction, which in its diversity from the power of order is generally considered and called so, is itself distinguished in the kingdom of the truth of faith and the holiness of morals: insofar as it is the supreme power of ecclesiastical rule, or of jurisdiction specifically so called, over the whole Church; and insofar as it is the supreme power of the infallible magisterium; just as the ecumenical Council itself defined and declared each of them in distinct chapters, not confounding them as one but enumerating them as two; so that these two keys of St. Peter are to be deemed joined together and inseparably united, yet not confused into one; since both were indeed given by Christ for binding and loosing, but in a different way, with regard to the extent, to the special object, and to the efficacy or nature of the loosings and bindings.