De Ecclesia Christi

Historical preface.

That the Church established by Christ is visible, and that he instituted no other than this one visible Church, is so manifest to the eyes from the very history of its institution and constitution, as it is evidently contained in the Scriptures and has been set forth by us above, that a special explanation of this matter does not seem necessary to a Christian. This is indeed without doubt true, if the thing is considered absolutely in itself. But the Deformers of the sixteenth century, however much they boasted of Scripture as « clear and sufficient », utterly perverted this very¹ dogma, which is most clear in Scripture; whence arose the greatest need for an explanation and defence of this doctrine. Indeed, just as the errors about the Church were, for those apostates, the polemical foundation for establishing their other heresies, so the support of these errors, and consequently of the whole heresy in its assault upon the Catholic faith, was this very denial of the visibility of the Church; so that, with this dogma rightly explained and established, the heresy itself could not have stood, even in its other parts. Since moreover only a dire polemical necessity against Catholics led the heresiarchs into this denial, and since on the other hand, by simply persisting in the denial of the visible Church of Christ on earth, they could neither gather any society, even one Christian in name and appearance, nor preserve any society so gathered against the other sects springing up day by day from their own principles; and since moreover the institution of the visible Church of Christ on earth was too evident from the words and deeds of Christ himself and of the Apostles: hence has arisen, on this head of doctrine, among the Protestants, a certain incredible confusion and variation of opinions and explanations, from the first authors down to our own age; so that not only their different masters in different ages, but the same men at one time, like their own heresiarch Luther, spoke now one way and now another according to a different polemical aim: denying the visibility of the true Church in disputes against Catholics and in defence of their own apostasy, affirming it against other fanatical sects; again denying it in defence of their principle of the independence of private interpretation of Scripture, affirming it in an attempt to retain some part still of the Christian dogmas; further denying it in defence of their other principle, justification by faith alone, and then again affirming the visible Church, when they found some discipline and repression of crimes necessary in their assemblies.²

First of all the Deformers were wholly intent on destroying the Church, affirming that for many centuries she had corrupted the true faith of Jesus Christ, and in place of divine faith had introduced into the world many human errors, and that she wholly cleaves to idolatry; that the Roman Pontiff is Antichrist, and that the Catholic bishops, priests and monks are the very Apostles of Antichrist, in the proper sense in which Antichrist is foretold in the Scriptures.

But if this were so, the Church founded by Jesus Christ and redeemed by his blood would have wholly perished many centuries ago. Nothing would then remain to be reformed; but an altogether new Church would have had to be instituted, which would thereby not be the Church of Jesus Christ but another Church of a new founder, a work therefore of mere man. On the other hand, Christ God clearly promised that his Church, founded by him, would be indefectible, and would thereby be infallible in faith and doctrine, under his own perpetual protection all days until the consummation of the age, and under the direction of the Spirit of truth, who remains for ever with the teaching and believing Church itself. Pressed by these straits, those apostates, lest they should confess what was evident — that they had fallen away from the indefectible Church of Jesus Christ, which therefore was still existing — and that they had denied the dogmas of the infallible Church, and so truths certainly revealed by Christ, were compelled to devise a new doctrine about the very nature of the Church, or rather to deny the thing itself while retaining only the name of Church: a fiction no less evidently contrary to the Scriptures, yet sufficient to cast over impious rebellion some appearance, owing to the ignorance of the crowd.

The Church of promises, they said, which alone is the true Church of Christ, indefectible, holy and universal by his promises, consists only of the holy members alone (according to the Lutherans) or of the predestined (according to the Calvinists). By special faith alone individual Christians lay hold of the merits of Christ and of the justice by which he himself is just; and through it, imputed to themselves, the individuals are not just, but before God are held as just. These therefore are the holy, and (according to the Calvinists) the predestined — for those who are not predestined never receive any faith or any fruit from the word and sacraments, but are rather hardened from them to their own damnation; and from the number of all these and these alone the true Church of promises is constituted³. Not by any power or ministry divinely instituted are they formed and generated by the Church; but they themselves form and generate the Church; and each is priest to himself, not sanctified through the ministry of the Church and in the Church, but each through his own special faith, immediately conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit which adheres to the word, apprehending the merit of Christ, and thus united to Christ the head as his only true members. In this immediate union of individuals with Christ, the ministry of the Church being excluded, they are accustomed to boast foolishly that the excellence of their church (which in truth is not Church) consists in this, as against the Catholic Church, which they say intercedes as a mediator between Christ and the individual faithful. As if indeed the infallible doctrine of faith, the holy discipline, the grace of sacrifice and of the sacraments — which have not the Church as their author, but are administered to individuals by Christ the author through the Church — were not the very thing by which the Holy Spirit infuses and preserves faith, hope and charity in the individual sanctified ones and unites them immediately with Christ and God; and as if the union of members among themselves were an impediment, and not rather both a necessary condition for their immediate union with the head and its effect: « that they all may be one, as you, Father, in me, and I in you, that they also may be one in us ... I in them, and you in me, that they may be made perfect in one » (Jn XVII. 21, 23).

According to this theory of the heresiarchs, therefore, men are indeed visible; Scripture and the preaching of the word are sensible, and the sacraments are the sensible « aids of the word »; and these are « external signs » only. And, as far as they are visible, these are not the proper attributes of the true Church, but common also to the condemned mass, which is called the Church of Christ in name only, not in reality: not by truth, but by the dissimulation of truth. For all those things by which men are united to Christ, and so enter into the number of those composing the true Church — faith received, justice imputed through this faith, the priesthood proper to all and only the just, or finally absolute antecedent predestination — all these, I say, are known only to God, but are hidden from men and entirely invisible; and by this very fact the true Church is invisible, since it is nothing other than the counted number of all the saints or predestined. Since therefore the authors of the rebellion needed to reconcile their furious preaching, by which they raged against the Church throughout the whole world as hostile to Christ and a synagogue of Antichrist, with the institution and promises of Christ, by which we are assured that he will be with his Church, indefectible through this institution and presence, all days until the consummation of the age; and since it was necessary to show, or at least to say something, about where that true Church of promises was during so many centuries of dominant Antichrist: they answered that God had always preserved for himself some saints, but hidden, and lying concealed in the midst of a perverse nation; and that the number of these, diffused throughout the world, was and is the true Church.

To this their dogma, connected with the others about the clear word of God that needs no interpretation, by which each man is his own priest and suffices to himself, and about justification by special faith alone, they clung at first, when they strove by every means to turn peoples away from the Church and, if it could have been done, to destroy the Church. But when the confusion of all things, the endless jumble of diverse sects, and the bloody rebellions of fanatical multitudes, arising from those very principles, soon made it manifest that on those foundations no religious society, and no ecclesiastical order even in appearance, could be constituted, and that civil affairs themselves were dragged into ruin; then at last they began to be concerned about the ecclesiastical ministry and its authority, and therefore about the visible Church, and about a new constitution of the Church to be substituted for the old. But this work, this labour — to reconcile at once things evidently contradictory! Too absurd is what they at times attempted, and what those few survivors who call themselves orthodox Protestants attempt to this day: in the fight against Catholics, to retain the notion of the invisible Church expressed in the fundamental principles of the whole heresy; while at the same time, to hold together their religious society and to defend it against other sects of the same origin, to assert and seriously claim for themselves the visible and indefectible Church instituted by Christ, and from the Apostles permanent and brought down even to these « orthodox » themselves. For, the Catholic notion of the visible Church of promises being established, it is evident even to the blind, from the very origin and history of the « Reformation », that the whole defection of the sixteenth century, and consequently all these sects, including the « orthodox, » are nothing but rebellious synagogues against the true indefectible Church of Jesus Christ⁴. In order somehow to escape this evident consequence, which they have determined first and above all to remove, most of them keep whole the fundamental principle from which, as from a womb, they draw their origin: that the Church of promises instituted by Christ was and is invisible. Then they distinguish from this true Church of saints or predestined the « ecclesiastical mass, » which is indeed visible. To hold this visible « mass », in which the true Church lies hidden invisible, under some discipline and πολιτείᾳ (polity), certain ministries and ecclesiastical institutions are required, of which the « constitution of the Church » is composed. But this « constitution » is of human origin, and therefore changeable, varying according to times and places. This being posited, there was surely no reason to distinguish this visible Church with its human constitution, as of its own right and different from the earthly state and the political government; whence there necessarily followed what we see done everywhere in Protestantism: that kings or princes, under the name borrowed from the Catholic Church of supreme Bishops, govern no less, and with the same right, the so-called national Church, just as under the name of prince they govern other political and civil matters. But as to what they say, that the prince exercises that supreme episcopate not by royal power but as the principal member of the Church: it is plain that this fiction, devised to deceive the people, is of no value as regards the thing itself; especially since, from the principles of Protestantism expounded just above, it cannot be established that any king or magistrate is a member of the true Church. And if they say only that he is the « principal member » of that mass which is not the true Church, then evidently this whole business of the « supreme episcopate » is political, founded on royal and civil power, and in no way on a prerogative of a member of the Church. From this historical exposition of the state of the question, three things are manifest.

1°. From the fundamental principles of the Deformation itself every notion of the Church divinely instituted by Christ is excluded; and thus in these sects, whether singly or all together, there is not, even in appearance, a Church of Christ. For if they call that visible congregation the Church, it, with its whole constitution, is a human and earthly work; but what they say is of divine origin yet invisible is certainly not Church, since there the individuals, independent of all others and unknown to them, stand by themselves and suffice to themselves, and so constitute indeed a number known only to God, but by no means a Church, in which, formed by divine institutions, ministries and powers, « many, one body we are in Christ, and individually members of one another » (Rom. XII. 5).⁵

2°. There is an evident contradiction in the very principles from which the whole Deformation arose and on which it rests. Not to speak now of many other contradictions: on the one hand they affirmed that Scripture is clear and manifest, so that no interpreter is needed as to what is to be believed and followed; and on the other hand they denied the very fundamental dogmas about the Church, which in Scripture, at least as to their substance, are truly clear and manifest⁶, and substituted in their place principles necessary for their apostasy, which are contained in Scripture not only neither clearly nor obscurely, but are most manifestly excluded.

3°. It is plain from the very state of the question how great is the importance of the doctrine of the visibility of the Church of promises: both for retaining and vindicating the whole revealed doctrine against all heresies, and for rightly perceiving not only the impiety but also the absurdity of the rebellion begun in the sixteenth century and made ever more manifest in its ultimate consequences. We now proceed, therefore, to the declaration of this dogma.

« The Church of the New Testament is, not by human making but by divine institution, a visible religious society; for Christ, God-man, founded divine religion for men, not only lying hidden in souls but as it were incorporated in visible things and institutions, which themselves join their religious society of men by the profession of one faith, by the discipline of morals, and by the sacraments of sanctification and divine worship. Whence the Church on earth is not one visible and another invisible, but the very visible Church of Christ has invisible properties also; nor is one Church conspicuous and another to be believed through faith, but the very Church which is visible is believed by faith, as the object of divine revelation and the subject of supernatural attributes; and therefore that one and the same visible Church is also the Church of the divine promises. »

I. The question is not, if we examine the matter more carefully, whether the Church which Christ instituted is visible, but the question is whether Christ instituted the Church as visible; the question concerns not materially the visibility of the Christian Church, but formally the Christian visibility of the Church. No human society is given, no religious society among men, and to narrow the comparison more closely, no heretical sect is given, which is not held together by its own bonds, necessary to composite human nature for forming any society whatsoever, and especially a religious one, and therefore also external and sensible. « Men cannot be gathered into any name of religion, true or false, unless they are joined by some fellowship of visible signs or sacraments, and the power of these sacraments avails inexpressibly much » (St. Aug., Contra Faust. l. XIX. c. 11.). Yet those sensible bonds and ties follow the nature of the society itself, whose own formal reason they are, inasmuch as it is a society; and so in natural societies instituted by men such bonds are of human institution; in false religions and in heretical sects (as the religions themselves) they are not only human inventions but also contrivances of impiety; if any things, however, have been retained by the sects as remnants of the divine religion, these pertain not to the sects formally as such, but to the divinely instituted religious society, from which they have fallen away and to which nevertheless, though rebellious, they remain always bound¹. Certainly therefore also in the society instituted by Christ, in the Church of Christ, the bonds of union by which the society of the united is formed and constituted intrinsically must, according to the nature of this human-divine society, be visible; otherwise the human society and Church on earth would not exist; and they must have been implanted by Christ himself the founder, otherwise the society and Church would not be divine and Christian. For without such a « fellowship of visible signs » one can perhaps conceive in the mind (by a certain abstraction) a number of those who worship God by divine religion, but no society of men worshipping God, since the essential form of society is lacking; and if then a number of men, as if compelled by nature, came together into fellowship through such a form of visible signs, that society would be instituted not divinely but by human work. Therefore the very name Church, when we speak of the Church among men, implicitly carries the meaning of essential visibility, not only by reason of its matter, because it is made of visible men, but chiefly and properly by reason of its form, because it is a society of men. Wherefore to ask whether Christ instituted the visible Church is exactly the same as asking whether he instituted the Church on earth; and those who speak of a Church on earth that is invisible as divinely instituted join terms that mutually exclude one another. Hence it is that Luther and his followers, in those documents in which they defend their concept of invisibility, after even the sacred name Church was erased, called it by the profane name community (gemeinde). For, the number of saints, which they said is known to God alone and is wholly invisible and unknown to us, being set aside, the Church which they afterwards tried to form could be nothing other than a « community » coagulated by political institutions. Hence they can dispute, without any contradiction, so much about changing the constitutions of their « communities »; but the contradiction is all the greater in words, and the unjust cruelty in deeds, since now they are wont to profess openly that they are waging war « not against the Catholic Church but against the hierarchy, » in which the sacred constitution, implanted immutably by Christ in his Church, is contained; and they imagine that the constitution of the Church can be changed while the Catholic faith and Church are preserved.

II. These things having been premised, it is now no less manifest from our whole preceding treatment that Christ founded his Church as visible than it is certain that Christ instituted some Church of his on earth. Speaking absolutely, God could have given his supernatural revelation and religion to men in such a way that he himself, by immediate revelation or inspiration, constituted each individual prophet in doctrine, saint in discipline, and priest sufficient to himself in divine worship, and so joined to no authentic magisterium, to no divinely instituted government, to no peculiar priesthood. The agreement that in such a hypothesis would exist among many in faith, in discipline, and in divine worship would not be contained by visible bonds, but would be wholly owed to the invisible inner inspiration of each one, which in all would be the same from the one Spirit; nor would there then be a divinely instituted social unity, and therefore no divinely instituted Church in the biblical sense of the word; for although one could speak of a number of the faithful, the individuals, standing each by himself, would not be parts and members of any organically united whole, which is the kind of Church exhibited in the Scriptures. « He himself gave some Pastors and Doctors for the perfecting² of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the building up (εἰς οἰκοδομήν) of the body of Christ, until we all meet in the unity of faith..., that we may now no longer be little children, tossed about and carried round by every wind of doctrine in the cunning of men... Christ, the head, from whom the whole body, compacted and connected through every joint of supply... makes increase of the body unto the building up of itself in charity » Eph. IV. 11–16.

That purely spiritual economy, proper to each individual and independent, congruous perhaps for the blessed at the term³ but not for redeemed men on the way, would be, already a priori at least, improbable in every respect; a posteriori, from history, from revelation itself, and from the perpetual evident fact, it is wholly certain that never, either in the Old Testament or much less in the New, has God communicated to the human race revelation and religion in the manner described, which can be admitted only in some special cases, and then only in part, through an extraordinary providence hidden from us⁴. « What is done with individuals (by that extraordinary providence), God who acts and those with whom he acts know; but what is done with the human race (by ordinary providence) he wished to be commended through history and through prophecy » (that is, through supernatural facts and public revelation). St. Aug., De vera religione, c. 25. n. 46.

Yet from these facts and this revelation it is most certain that Christ the Lord (since we are treating only of the Church of the New Testament) instituted his whole religion in no other way than as a form standing forth and presenting itself in the visible Church, so that the Christian religion is, as it were, incorporated in the Church and through her the religion itself is made visible ⁵, and so that the whole work of Christ can be traced back to the foundation of this his social and therefore visible Church, which he acquired by his blood and presented to himself (αὐτήν ἑαυτῷ) glorious (see theses VI, n. 1; VII, n. II.).

Indeed the whole Christian religion is contained in the truth of revealed doctrine to be believed in faith; in the holiness of precepts and in the discipline to be lived by the work of the agent (opere operantis) in hope and charity; in the mysteries of sacrifice and sacraments for adoring God in perfect worship and for sanctifying men in grace by the work worked (opere operato). Now all these things, and therefore his whole religion, Christ did not institute except as elements informing his Church: in the authentic magisterium of the Apostles and of their successors until the consummation of the age, to which, by the same institution, there corresponds for the whole Church not only inward faith but also unity of preaching and profession; in the sacred government, that is the power of ruling, of these same legates of Christ, by which, through their own laws, judgments, and sanctions, Christian life is directed throughout the Church not only by inward virtues but also by discipline and external acts, which, both as manifesting fruits and as incentives and aids of virtues, are the proximate object of sacred government; finally, in the peculiar priesthood, by which the same sacred teachers and pastors are invested, so that they may sacrifice the real body of Christ under visible species, in the name and with the participation of the whole Church, to divine worship, for the whole Church, for the common fruit; and so that they may sanctify the mystical body of Christ, that is the Church itself, in its individual members by visible sacraments.

Moreover all these elements, from which and in which Christ formed his Church, coalesce into unity in so wonderful a combination that the same persons who, under one aspect, are set over as teachers, pastors, and priests given by Christ to teach, rule, and sanctify, these same individuals, under another aspect, are subject to teaching, ruling, and sanctifying; and so, under one aspect, they belong to the teaching Church, and under another aspect they belong to the learning or listening Church, with the exception of the supreme pastor and teacher, the visible head of the Church. Of him, however, this too holds in a certain measure: namely as regards the definitions of doctrine already made by the magisterium, as regards jurisdiction of the internal forum, and as regards sanctification through the sacraments ⁶.

That the Church is such as we now indicate, and therefore that religion was instituted by Christ only under this concrete form, is most manifest from the preceding theses, so that it needs no further demonstration. See theses VI–IX. In these visible elements, therefore, the Church was instituted by her divine founder himself and is composed of them; so that if you remove even one of them, and still more if you deny and take away all the visible elements insofar as they inform and shape the society, as the Protestants have done and as necessarily follows from their principles, no Church of Christ would remain. Hence the character of visibility is so essential that the Church of Christ on earth cannot even be conceived in the mind without it; she must be called either none at all or visible.

It is quite different to say that the elements of the Church are visible and therefore that there is no other Church of Christ on earth than the visible one, and to say that in these elements there are no properties, no virtues, and no efficacious powers, which are invisible in themselves. The second statement is manifestly absurd from the given description of the elements of the Church; for the Church is not a corpse but the body of Christ, living by supernatural virtue and vigour. Just as Christ, head and exemplar, is not Christ if, with the Photinians or Nestorians, only his visible humanity is regarded; nor is he Christ if, with the Monophysites, only the invisible divinity is regarded; but he is one Christ in and from the invisible and the visible nature « (out of two and in two natures, unconfusedly and undividedly) », so the mystical body of Christ, the Church, is not, except insofar as her visible elements are informed and constituted in their own proper reason by divine properties and gifts, which in the visible elements themselves, invisible in themselves, are perceived only by faith and by the intellect illumined through faith. Thus the teachers, pastors, and priests instituted by Christ are distinguished by external signs from the same institution of Christ, in perpetual succession; but the infallibility of the magisterium, the authority of the sacred government, and the power of the priesthood indeed inhere in the visible bearers themselves and are exercised by visible acts, yet in themselves they remain invisible, the object of faith alone. The same holds of the visible sacraments and of sacrifice, with respect to their efficacious power of sanctifying and with respect to the victim under alien species; and no less of the members of the Church in their visible initiation, profession, discipline, and Christian life, if these visible elements are compared with the inward and in itself invisible faith and sanctification. In brief it can be said that the Church is visible as a whole, but not in every respect. See these matters more fully demonstrated above.

The heresy of the Protestants therefore does not lie in their affirming that there are some essential invisible elements in the Church of Christ; for that is most true and most certain from the Catholic faith. Indeed those invisible elements are far more numerous, and more noble and more efficacious, than those the Protestants admit; so they err no less in denying or perverting what is truly invisible in itself and inheres in the Church by the institution of Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit, than in denying or perverting what, from the same institution of Christ and the operation of the Holy Spirit, is the conspicuous element of the Church and perpetually remains.

IV. From what has been said it is now also apparent how the visible Church of Christ is an object of faith. This must be explained, not only to remove that utterly absurd conclusion of the adversaries, « the true Church is believed by faith, therefore it is invisible, » but much more to illustrate the very genuine notion of visibility.

Just as in the objects of the natural order, visibility in relation to a human act is to be regarded not as mere sensible perception but as sensible perception joined with rational intelligence, since the human act of perception through the senses is rational and not merely material as in brutes; so religious things, even those that are visible, insofar as they are religious, are constituted as objects of an intelligence that is not merely natural but illumined by faith. We can say: just as reason distinguishes human consideration from the merely animal perception of these same sensible objects, so faith distinguishes the Christian consideration of the sensible objects belonging to revealed religion from mere human perception, so that the same sensibles, by that very thing by which they are constituted objects of revealed religion, are constituted also objects of supernatural faith. Thus the Christian sacrament is undoubtedly a sensible rite, visible no less to the unbeliever than to the believer; but that by which the sensible rite itself is constituted within the notion of a Christian sacrament, namely its divine institution and supernatural efficacy, is not open to the senses but must be believed by faith; and by this faith the Christian consideration of the faithful differs wholly from the human perception of unbelievers regarding the same visible rite. Nor, because the supernatural dignity and power of the sacrament is not perceived by the senses, will anyone deny that the sacrament in which that dignity and power is believed is visible; or conversely say that the sacrament which is visible is not an object of divine faith. By faith we believe that this conspicuous rite is a sacrament divinely instituted and efficacious for sanctification; not by faith but by the senses is perceived, here and now, the performing of an action, for example of ablution and the utterance of words. So too, in the Church universally, the formal reason under which she is visible in a human manner, that is, by the senses joined with the intellect, is not divided, but is distinguished, from the formal reason under which she is the object of divine faith.

1°. The Church is visible as a society existing in this determinate manner and order, and propagated through the course of history.

a) Indeed the hierarchy is visible, with its claim, profession, and function: the magisterium and doctrine, in all forms of preaching, and the profession of the peoples as well; government, with sacred discipline and external Christian life; the priesthood, with sacrifice, sacraments, and divine worship.

b) Historical evidence establishes that in this its constitution the Church was visible in all ages up to the Apostles, and that she has been propagated down to us by a continuous series of successions. Therefore the visible Church is seen not only in the present, but by a simple historical view, which is equivalent to sight, and which unbelievers who use reason can have, far differently from divine faith, the Church is understood to have been visible in all the preceding ages. For the present time she is visible to the physical senses together with the intellect; for all times, to the historical and intellectual sense, the Church is visible.

c) In the same way there belong here the external deeds and charisms, which are themselves sensible and which sprout in and from the Church, like fruits from a tree, in every age: on the one hand, the wonderful preservation and propagation of the Church, the transformation of the pagan world into the Christian world by the Apostolic spirit without any corresponding human support, bloody martyrdoms in the persecutions of all her enemies, bloodless victories in the struggles and snares of all errors; on the other hand, the uninterrupted multitude of miracles in bodily deeds, and the manifestations of charisms and of heroic virtues in spiritual deeds and in the perfect life. All these things, so far as they are visible, are not the object of faith but motives of credibility of those things which are believed about the Church by divine faith; so that the Church who is believed and to whom belief is given presents herself, in her own elements and sensible deeds, to all nations as worthy of trust, both as an object to be believed and as a witness to be followed. In exactly the same way Christ himself, visible on earth, the founder, exemplar, and head of the Church, showed himself through his sensible deeds from his birth to his ascension into heaven, both as a witness of the truth who must be believed and as the truth itself and the Son of God, in whom one must believe. « If I do not the works of my Father, do not believe me; but if I do, and if you will not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and believe that the Father is in me and I in the Father » Jn X. 38.⁷ As it is written of Christ: « I have given him as a witness to the peoples, a leader and teacher to the nations »; so it is said of his Church immediately afterwards. « Nations that knew you not shall run to you, because of the Lord your God and the Holy One of Israel, because he has glorified you » Is. LV. 4, 5. As it was said of Christ: « I have given you for a covenant of the people and for a light of the nations » Ib. XLII. 7; so of the Church it is said: « the nations shall walk in your light, and kings in the brightness of your rising » Ib. LX. 3. As « the root of Jesse, who stands for a sign of the peoples... and shall lift up a sign to the nations » Ib. XI. 10; so the Church is the city on the mountain of Sion, which all nations see, and to which all flow who seek truth and salvation. « And it shall come to pass in the last days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be prepared on the top of the mountains, and shall be lifted above the hills, and all nations shall flow to it; and many peoples shall go and say: come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of the God of Jacob, and he will teach us his ways, and we will walk in his paths, for out of Sion shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem » Ib. II. 2; Mich. IV. I. Cf. Vatican Council, sess. III, cap. 3.

2°. This very Church, visible in the manner just stated, with her hierarchical constitution, her magisterium and profession of faith, her government and discipline, her priesthood, divine worship, and sensible charisms, is also described and revealed by the word of God; so that the Church itself, which under one aspect is visible and historically intelligible, under another aspect is the object to be believed with divine faith on account of the authority of God who reveals. That is, she is an object not only to be seen in her elements and deeds, so far as they are sensible, and to be understood by the natural intellect, but to be believed, in those same elements and deeds and in all her attributes so far as they are revealed by the word of God, by the intellect illumined through faith.

For a) the divine authority in the magisterium and in government, the truth, holiness, and efficacy in the priesthood, sacrifice, and sacraments, and the other supernatural properties, are known only from the word of God, and therefore are believed by faith. b) The existence of this Church, which we now see present, through the course of the centuries back to the Apostles, her propagation through the Apostles, and indeed her institution by Christ visible on earth, can indeed be known historically and without divine faith, which, from what has been said, pertains to visibility; but just as the divinity of Christ himself, so the divinity of the institution of the Church, both in general and in the abstract, and specifically and in the concrete of this Church, is believed by faith alone. Indeed those things too which can be understood historically and naturally, the institution by Christ, the propagation through the Apostles, and the other facts, are the object of divine faith, insofar as they are contained in history not merely human but revealed.

From these things the absurdity is manifest of the distinction between the true Church, invisible, which must be believed by faith, and the visible « ecclesiastical mass, » as they used to say, to which natural sense and in no way supernatural faith is referred. Rather, the visible Church herself is an object of faith, although under one aspect and consideration she is visible and naturally intelligible, and under another aspect she is to be believed by supernatural faith. So too, in Christ the Lord, the Head of the Church, the Apostles did not see one and believe another; but the very one whom they saw under the aspect of sensible humanity they believed under the aspect of divinity: not another and another, which was afterwards the heresy of Nestorius, but one thing and another. « Thomas saw a man and confessed God, saying: my Lord and my God. He believed by seeing, therefore, who, considering the true man, cried out that this very man is God, whom he was not able to see. » St. Gregory, in Evang. l. II, hom. 26, n. 8.

V. That this very visible Church is the Church of the promises, to whom namely the promises are made and to whom alone all the promises made by Christ the Lord concerning the Church and for his Church are referred, needs no further proof; for from what has been shown, no other Church of Christ on earth besides the visible one has been instituted, and so none has ever existed. Indeed, in the same words in which Christ, God, announced the institution of his visible Church, he also declared its infallibility, its authority, and its perennial and indefectible power in the teachers, pastors, and priests whom he instituted and who would discharge his legation; so that if these promises were taken away, no words of the institution of the Church would remain, or they would have no meaning; and conversely, if the institution of the visible Church were taken away from the same words, no subject would remain for the promises, and so the promises themselves would vanish.

Surely Christ the Lord never said: I will preserve my doctrine without a teacher, my religious life without a pastor and without subjection, active sanctification and divine worship without ministers and priests, in certain saints known to no mortal, who, each independent, are sufficient to themselves; and I will call the number of these, known to me alone, in the midst of an ecclesiastical mass which does not belong to my Church but is a damned mass of hypocrites, my Church, to be preserved perpetually. This was not the speech of Christ but of the Deformers, as long as they intended to accuse the whole visible Church in the world of defection and to tear unhappy peoples away from her, as we declared above.

Christ the Lord says that his Church is the one which he has built upon Peter; in this Church, as in the kingdom of heaven on earth, he commits to Peter the keys, or supreme power, so that by binding and loosing he may exercise it over whatever pertains to the kingdom of heaven, throughout that whole kingdom. The Church of Christ is therefore not an unknown number of self-sufficient saints, but a kingdom completely known, administered by its visible head from power received from Christ, with acts exercised by that power on known subjects, which acts are therefore themselves external and visible. To this Church built on Peter, and to this kingdom established under Peter, and so to his one visible Church, he promises indefectibility, in the very reason and property of the Church and kingdom of Christ, so that the visible Church itself can never cease to be the true Church and kingdom of Christ: « and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. » Therefore indefectibility is promised also to the visible foundation, to the administrator and the administration of the supreme power, and to the functions of binding and loosing. Matt. XVI.

Likewise the Lord commands the Apostolic college, constituted under Peter and with Peter, the visible pastor of all the sheep and lambs of Christ, to make all nations disciples and to baptize each one in them, and to lead all the baptized into the observance of the whole doctrine and discipline. On the other side, therefore, he commands obedience and subjection toward the Apostles who teach, administer the sacraments, and lead into observance of all his commands. This same visible Church, so arranged, he promises shall be perpetual and indefectible in the preaching of doctrine and in faith, in government and discipline, in the sacraments and sanctification, under his protection and under the assistance of the Spirit of truth, all days until the consummation of the age. « Teach all nations, baptizing them... teaching them to observe all things... and behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the age. » « He will give you another Paraclete, that he may abide with you forever, the Spirit of truth. » Matt. XXVIII; Jn XIV. See thesis XI.

The same Church, so arranged, he commanded to be heard, and rebels to be punished as heathens and tax collectors, with the universal power promised of binding or loosing on earth whatever pertains to the Church, so that what is bound or loosed is so in heaven. As certainly as this authority and power is not from human polity but from the institution of Christ, so evidently can it be neither exercised nor understood except in the visible Church. Matt. XVIII.

This very thing must be repeated concerning the Apostolic description of the Church, in which pastors and doctors are given by Christ himself, so that we may not be carried round by every wind of doctrine, and that until the consummation and fullness of the body of Christ. In the same way the Church is presented as the house of God, which the Bishops administer, together with the inferior ministers subject to them according to a fixed rule of conduct, which is therefore visible; and the same Church, so described, is proclaimed as « the pillar and ground of the truth. » Eph. IV; 1 Tim. III.

Finally, to pass over the rest, Christ the Lord instituted the unbloody sacrifice of his body given and broken for us, and of his blood, as it was in the chalice, poured out for us at the last supper, to be done in the same way as he had done it, by the Apostles in his Church and for his Church, in his remembrance. But this priesthood, or rather these visible priests in concrete, he instituted to offer the visible sacrifice in the visible Church herself, in perpetual succession until his second coming; so that the priesthood itself, the sacrifice, and the sacrament are one of the most illustrious bonds, and the most sublime manifestation of unity, in the visible body which is the Church, far more excellently than in the Old Testament, when the priesthood, the temple, and the sacrifices constituted the bond of the one visible religious society of the people of Israel. « Because the bread is one, we, the many, are one body, all who partake of the one bread. Look at Israel according to the flesh: are not those who eat the sacrifices partakers (κοινωνοι) of the altar? » (1 Cor. X. 18.). Wherefore the promise of indefectibility also pertains to the continuous series of priests and to the perpetual sacrifice, and so to the Church and her visible worship, not to some unknown saints whom no one has ever known or will know. « This do in my commemoration, » in which words the perpetuity is already included from the very nature of the institution, and is also expressly declared by the Apostle: « For as often as you shall eat this bread and drink the chalice, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes » (1 Cor. XI. 26.).

Scholion. In denying the visible Church the Protestants take refuge in certain speculative principles, and then in a positive doctrine drawn from some texts torn from their context and from the analogy of faith.

1°. The whole business of sanctification, they say, is personal for each individual, and it is internal and spiritual: « the kingdom of God is within you » (ἐντὸς ὑμῶν); « the flesh profits nothing; it is the spirit that gives life; » « the kingdom of God is not food and drink, but justice and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit » Luke XVII; Jn VI; Rom. XIV. They add that this spiritual character is proper to the New Testament in comparison with the Old, which was carnal, set in external institutions and a mere preparation for the spiritual: « the hour comes, and now is, when true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth » Jn IV. Then they twist this very inward sanctification and union with God into an altogether different sense, and devise at will means to it beyond and against the manifest doctrine of Scripture and of all revelation. For according to this heresy, as we have already set out above, the justification of man is accomplished by faith alone, by which the justice of Christ is imputed to man, excluding any magisterium, ministry, and priesthood of the Church; and they call this an immediate union of individual saints with Christ, excluding the « mediation of the Church. » They say therefore that the true Church consists only of these saints, who are knowable by no external sign, and so to no man but to God alone. They have persuaded themselves that this fiction is sufficient for the purpose for which it was devised, so that these light-shunning saints and this invisible Church could be said to have persisted through many centuries, lying hidden everywhere on earth within the visible Church « of Antichrist ».

But a) if the ultimate consequences of these principles are drawn, one will have to go over to the opinion of certain Gnostic sects, of medieval pseudo-mystics, and of other fanatics of our own time, who, perverting the very notion of human nature and the whole supernatural revelation, wished the reality of the flesh assumed by the Word to be eliminated, and likewise the redemption through his passion and death, all the sacraments, external divine worship, indeed the existence and usefulness of inspired Scripture; and who referred everything to contemplation and to an inner sense under the immediate operation of the Holy Spirit in individual souls. b) The proximate end of all divine institutions is undoubtedly spiritual sanctification, union with God, and the salvation of souls; but what this sanctification is, and what are the means instituted for it, is not to be devised by the deluded minds of men, but must be learned from the whole divinely revealed economy; nor are the means to be confused with the end itself.

Sanctification and union with God, however, is certainly not an empty shadow arising from the foolish persuasion that God does not see us and judge us as we really are, just or sinners; but it is accomplished by a true transformation of the soul through the infusion of grace and of the virtues in faith, hope, and charity. « But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image, from glory (of the Lord) to glory (proper and inherent to us), as by the Spirit of the Lord » 2 Cor. III. 18. ⁸

The means to this sanctification, and to the eternal salvation of souls, instituted by Christ the Saviour himself, we have shown to be in the visible magisterium, with its manifest acts for preaching, preserving, and explaining the revealed truth; in the visible ministry for ruling the faithful by sacred laws and discipline on the way of salvation; and in the visible priesthood, ministering through visible sacraments, sacrifice, and public worship for the sanctification of the faithful. All these, in one word, are called the means of sanctification placed by Christ in the visible Church and administered visibly through the visible Church. The Church therefore intervenes between God the sanctifier and the sanctified faithful as minister, not as author of grace; by which grace they are indeed united immediately with God dwelling in them. « But you are Christ's, and Christ is God's. Let a man so account of us as ministers of Christ and dispensers of the mysteries of God » 1 Cor. IV. 1. « What then is Apollos? And what is Paul? Ministers of him in whom you believed... For we are God's fellow workers; you are God's husbandry, you are God's building (οἰκοδομή) » ib. III. 5, 9. « He has given us the ministry of reconciliation... For Christ, therefore, we are ambassadors » 2 Cor. V. 18, 20.

c) Those hidden saints whom they imagine, they say, have lain hidden either in the Catholic Church itself or in certain sects cast out from the Church. But in the Catholic Church, in all places and times, all professed that faith, practised and shared that worship, by which faith and worship they say the whole Church had fallen away from Christ and become Antichrist's. So whether those whom they call hidden saints are said to have simulated that defection from Christ, in public profession and worship, merely outwardly and through hypocrisy, or to have truly admitted it in their hearts, they would certainly be no less alien from Christ; « for whoever shall deny me before men, I will deny him before my Father. » As for the heretical sects, there never existed any which either agreed with the principles of the Protestants or differed from the Catholic Church for those reasons which these men put forward; whence also those sects all were condemned by the founders of Protestantism no less than by the Catholic Church, as heretical and alien from Christ. Since therefore all the adherents of the sects, whether feigning or in earnest, embraced both their profession and their worship, the fictitious saints of the Protestants cannot be found any more in the sects than in the Catholic Church. Finally, what is the head of the matter: that « hand of faith, » or foolish persuasion, that God does not see and judge man as he is in himself, but by a certain fiction of law reckons man just without making him just by his own inherent justice, was not thought of by anyone at all until the Deformers of the sixteenth century, or, not to need proof, certainly for many centuries, just as Luther himself used to boast of his invention. Therefore for at least many centuries these hidden saints, justified by confidence in the merit of Christ imputed to them while they remained sinners in themselves, did not exist at all; and so nowhere on earth was that fabricated monster to be found which they call the invisible Church. Since therefore Christ the God promised and established his Church, built on the rock, indefectible until the consummation of the age, it is none other than the visible Church, always kept whole and handed down from him and from the Apostles onward, which itself is nothing else than the perpetual Catholic Church in the successors of Peter and of the Apostles; and those who separated from her, whether in the course of the centuries or in the sixteenth century, all evidently defected from the Church of Christ. They are therefore in neither the visible Church, from which they fell away, nor in the invisible, which Christ did not institute on earth at all.

2°. The texts of Scripture by which they said this hidden Church of theirs is set forth are hardly worth explaining, so manifestly do they pertain nothing to the matter at hand. For to persuade from Scripture that the Church on earth is invisible, or can ever be invisible, it would be necessary to demonstrate from them that the office of magisterium, ministry, and priesthood, and the objects of these offices, namely the preaching and profession of the true faith, the vigilance of the rulers (Heb. XIII. 17.), and the direction of morals by salutary laws, and the sacraments and sacrifice, are not instituted by Christ, or are going to cease at some time. For these are what essentially constitute the visible Church. But whoever affirmed that these offices would not merely at times be rendered more difficult and less free in their exercise by the persecutions of the enemies of the Church (which was indeed foretold by Christ himself, the Apostles, and the prophets), but would simply fail, either in themselves or in their external exercise, would certainly be arguing that the deeds and promises of Christ, by which he established his own Church and promised her perpetuity under his protection, which we have shown from these same Scriptures, were fallacious; and he would overturn and deny the whole internal history of the Church, which flows in a perennial stream from Christ and the Apostles down to us. If therefore some texts of God's word can be found in which the internal operation of the Holy Spirit in the souls of individuals is seen to be preached in opposition to the external ministries in the Church, it is certain that in those texts there is contained a comparison of invisible gifts with visible institutions, of spiritual operation with the external operating means, and so not an exclusion but indeed an affirmation or supposition of these institutions and means; or in them (as in many texts which they were accustomed to produce of old) the discourse is not even about the invisible elements of the Church but about something altogether different. For, as in the works of God, so in his words, there can be a diversity indeed, but no real contradiction.

Concerning such passages, in which grace and inner anointing is celebrated, the magisterium and ministry of the Church being presupposed and not excluded, we have said enough in the Treatise on Tradition (th. XII, p. 106 sqq., ed. 2). But what the Protestants were accustomed to produce of old to demonstrate the invisible Church, namely the one family of Noah in the ark; the seven thousand men « whose knees have not bowed before Baal » in the time of Elijah (3 Reg. XIX. 18.); the kingdom of God, which Christ said: « is within you » (Luke XVII. 21.); the Church in the symbol of the woman « fleeing into the desert, where she had a place prepared by God » (Apoc. XII. 6. 14.): all these things have nothing whatever to do with the matter in question, and only show that when people have recourse to such things, nothing even of the appearance of proof can be found in the Scriptures for that fiction used to excuse apostasy.

The times of Noah, Gen. VI. VII. (cf. Matt. XXIV. 37. 39.), contain nothing about the constitution of the Church of the New Testament, except that from the bodily destruction of all who were outside the ark the Fathers are accustomed to deduce the necessity of belonging to the Church, and that visible Church in which alone spiritual salvation is given. Cyprian, describing the Church, whose « proof for the faith is easy, by a compendium of truth from the words of the Lord: you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, » whose « episcopate too is one and undivided, » and which is itself « one Church, extended in multitude by the increase of fecundity, and bathed in the light of the Lord, sending its rays over the whole world, » adds: « whoever leaves the Church (the one founded upon Peter and cohering in the unity of the episcopate) is alien, is profane, is an enemy; if anyone outside the ark of Noah could escape, so also whoever is outside the Church will escape. » Cyprian, De Unitate Ecclesiae, p. 195. As to the visibility of the Church, the perfection of the Church of Christ the incarnate Word is one thing, and the imperfection of the patriarchal Church is another. Moreover, even in this period the patriarchs were priests by worship and visible sacrifices, and « preachers of justice » (2 Pet. II. 5.) for preserving, preaching, and explaining, with new increments divinely received, the revelation (see the Treatise on Tradition, th. XX.), among whom Noah is expressly numbered as priest and preacher. Certainly therefore the patriarchal Church also, however far distant from the perfection of the institutions of Christ, was visible in the preaching and profession of faith, with priesthood and magisterium, sacrifices and sacraments corresponding to that imperfection (see above, th. III, and cf. th. II–IV, on the Sacraments in general). If they insist on reducing the Church to « a few, that is eight souls, » it must be answered first that the catholicity which was promised to the Church of the New, and not of the Old, Testament is one thing, and the visibility which essentially belongs to the Church in every stage is another, though in a different mode according to the diversity of the economy. Second, they must be asked: how do they know that all who were sinners at the time of Noah had fallen away from the true worship of God and from the Church? We read that all flesh had corrupted its way, and that Noah, preaching divine vengeance, was not believed, nor did they then do penance (Gen. VI. 1–12; 1 Pet. III. 20.); but that all or most of them had then fallen into idolatry is nowhere written. Indeed, it is written, and this persuades the contrary, that many of those who perished bodily in the flood were saved spiritually, and so by true faith and penance (1 Pet. III. 19.).

What is next brought forward about the seven thousand faithful in the time of Elijah is no more to the point. First, here too there must be no confusion between the catholicity or extent of the Church (which was promised and instituted for the Church of the New Testament alone) and her visibility. Next, attention must be paid to the different perfection of visibility itself in the Church of the Old, even the Mosaic, and in the new Christian economy (th. III.). Finally, if the passage 3 Reg. XIX. 18., which is objected, is examined, nothing is taught in it about the invisibility or visibility of the Church of Christ, since this Church is not discussed there; and not even a shadow of an argument for the invisibility of the Church, even of the Old Testament, can be drawn from it. For this alone is said: that in the kingdom of Israel also, from its constitution under Jeroboam I, which was politically divided from the kingdom of Judah and schismatic and idolatrous in its religious institutions, there remained still many faithful, who were united in religion and divine worship to the true Mosaic Church. For they remained under the ordinary ministry of priesthood, magisterium, and government, whose centre was Jerusalem; and they celebrated the legitimate worship itself, in solemnities and sacrifices, in that very centre of religion, as appears from several other passages: 2 Paral. XV. 9; XXX. 11. 25; XXXI. 6; XXXIV. 9. 33; Tob. I. 6. With the ordinary ministry, however, for sustaining religion, according to the manner of that economy, there was joined the extraordinary ministry of the prophets, of whom many, like Elijah himself and Elisha, flourished in the kingdom of Israel, powerful in word and deed.

As to the third passage brought forward, the word of Christ to the Jews: « the kingdom of God is within you »: if it is understood of the Church itself, it certainly signifies the visible Church, which was already being prepared among the Jews and was contained as in a fruitful root in the person, power, preaching, and works of the divine founder himself. But insofar as the kingdom of God is meant as internal in the soul, it is not the Church considered adequately, but some property of her, which, although invisible in itself, is nevertheless to be made manifest by its effects in the visible Church itself (see th. XI, n. I.).

Finally, in the passage Apoc. XII the Church of martyrs is described: either in the literal sense, according to the persecutions of the last times still future, or (as it seems to me, considering the contexts) in the immediate literal sense, according to the persecutions of the idolatrous empire in the first three centuries, now already past; and in the typical sense, which is fuller, according to the persecutions still future at the consummation of the age. But the Church of martyrs, in the three powers and their functions, in which (often described by us above) visibility essentially consists by Christ's institution, remains no less conspicuous as the kingdom of God on earth. While she « is fed » by her pastors with doctrine, discipline, and sacraments in the « solitude » of the catacombs, there she begets and prepares « male sons » (υἱὸν ἄρρενα), who by the shedding of their blood « are caught up to God and to his throne, » so that with the Lamb, in whose blood they have washed and whitened their robes (VII. 14.), they « rule all nations with a rod of iron »; and while in time of peace she shines also with external splendours ⁹, these, though indeed connected with visibility, and also promised, though not in a determined manner or measure, do not however constitute the essential visibility of the Church itself. The Apostles and their nearest successors, Clement, Polycarp, Ignatius, Irenaeus, Cyprian, and with them the presbyters Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Tertullian (see th. XV.), describe this very Church of martyrs, fleeing into solitude amid the persecutions; but they knew her as no other than « one church diffused throughout the whole world by the concordant numerousness of many bishops » (Cyprian, ep. 52, to Antonian.). Whence those who separate themselves from the visible Church of priests and people, as long as they remain in the crime of heresy or schism, cannot be martyrs of Christ. « What peace do the enemies of the brethren promise themselves? What sacrifices do the rivals of the priests believe they celebrate? Do they think Christ is with them when they gather together, who gather outside the Church of Christ? Even if such people are killed in confession of the name, that stain is not washed away by blood; the inexpiable and grave guilt of discord is not purged by suffering. He cannot be a martyr who is not in the Church... They cannot remain with God who have not wished to be of one mind in the Church of God. Though they be given up to flames and fires, or cast to the beasts and lay down their lives, it will not be the crown of faith but the punishment of perfidy, nor a glorious end of religious virtue but a death of despair; such a one can be killed, he cannot be crowned. Thus he professes himself a Christian, as the devil often lies about Christ... Does he seem to himself to be with Christ, who acts against the priests of Christ, who separates himself from the fellowship of his clergy and people? He carries arms against the Church, he resists the arrangement of God. An enemy of the altar, a rebel against the sacrifice of Christ... he dares, having despised the Bishops and the priests of God, to set up another altar, to make another prayer with unlawful words, to profane the truth of the Lord's victim by false sacrifices, and does not know that he who strives against the ordinance of God is punished by divine vengeance for the boldness of his rashness » (Id., De Unitate Ecclesiae, p. 198–201.). Therefore this visible Church alone, by the unity and succession of the Episcopate, by sacrifice, sacraments, worship, and discipline, amid the persecutions, is the one which, as is described in the Apocalypse, bears the martyrs of Christ.

The doctrine concerning the members of the Church pertains to the declaration of its visibility: partly indeed necessarily, namely for the very defence of the dogma against heretics, lest the conditions constituting members be placed in such hidden gifts, known only to God, that from this very fact the invisibility of the Church, and so the denial of the dogma, would follow; partly, however, only for a fuller understanding of what kind of visibility the Church has. Hence, as to the former part: when it is asked which men, however destitute of certain inner gifts of grace, certainly belong, and which men, by reason of the lack of the characters of the visible Church, certainly do not belong as members to the Church, a full consensus is found among all Catholics, since this matter concerns the very dogmas defined against heretics. As to the latter part: if, when the visibility of the Church (whether it is) is already placed safe and the dogma is preserved, there is further asked, for a more distinct understanding, how it is, there occurs among theologians some diversity of opinion as to which of those professing the whole faith of the Church may nevertheless not be counted as her members. Nevertheless these theologians all agree as to the substance of the matter, and, if it is right to speak so, in the practical question: as to the relations and bonds by which those men are or are not referred to the Church. For whatever participations derived from the Church are attributed by theologians who count those classes of men among the members of the Church — for example, to mere schismatics, the excommunicated, and catechumens — all that is freely conceded even by the doctors who exclude them from the census of the members of the Church; and conversely, all the participations which these latter deny them, those former theologians deny too. Hence this controversy among Catholics is reduced to the question whether those bonds which, as is certain, remain with the Church for the men in question suffice for those men to be members of the Church, or to be rightly counted and called as belonging to the Church, though it is equally certain that some other bonds of the same kind with the Church are either broken or not yet existing. So far, therefore, the question could be called one about a manner of speaking rather than about the thing itself. But if you inquire into the inner reason of this dissent, it lies in the different manner in which both the necessity of the means, as it is customarily called, of belonging to the Church — outside which no one is saved — and, consequently, the visible Church of Jesus Christ itself, are conceived, as we already hinted briefly above (in Coroll. ad thes. II.). Therefore the clarification of this theological controversy also can contribute not a little to a clearer understanding of the dogma of the very visibility of the Church, and of the way in which belonging to the visible Church of Christ is of necessity of means for eternal salvation.

« Although by the lawgiving and antecedent will of God all men are called, as to salvation so to the knowledge of the truth and to the Church; yet for actual union with the Church the following conditions are necessary: 1°. integrity of faith together with the sacrament of faith, which is baptism; 2°. hierarchical obedience; 3°. the lasting right of ecclesiastical communion. Hence heretics are not members of the Church, nor in the Church; nor are catechumens; nor schismatics; nor the excommunicated. »

I. The Church is a world supernaturally transformed, the kingdom of truth, and as it were the incorporation (ἐνουσίωσις, embodiment) of the whole revealed religion (th. VI.). All who are called to faith and to the works of revealed truth, and through these to a transformation of salvation begun on the way and completed at the end (cf. 2 Cor. III. 18.), these are all called to the Church: the will of calling and the antecedent destination of God to salvation and to the Church coincide in extent. But our Savior God « wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth; for there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all » 1 Tim. II. 4. (see the treatise On God, th. XLIX.). Therefore all who have human nature, and in this nature God as Creator and Christ as Mediator, are called by the antecedent will of God to the Church of Jesus Christ, from the time when he instituted it. Hence also the command and institution of Christ in founding his Church, « Go, teach all nations, baptizing them » (Matt. XXVIII.), is stated in other words: « Go into the whole world and preach the gospel to every creature (πάσῃ τῇ κτίσει); he who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned » (Mark XVI.).

Paul states the universal and therefore antecedent will, both of the end « (wills all men to be saved), » and of the means « (and to come to the knowledge of the truth), » and joins a twofold reason for this universal will in God: namely, that God is the God of all men, and that Christ Jesus, the man of men, that is, of all whose nature he assumed, is the mediator « (for there is one God, one mediator also of God and of men, the man Christ Jesus). » In Mark, the mediator himself, present, who had given himself as ransom, commands the Apostles and their perpetual successors to carry out that universal will. As to the means, he includes the earlier ground of universality in the very term used, because they are God's creature, and sets forth the second ground, « because there is one mediator, » himself present in his own person: « preach the gospel to every creature; » but as to the end, which here is not a question of the antecedent will (which is indeed included in the command to preach universally) but of attainment in its actual effect, the Lord Christ distinguishes the will according to men's cooperation, and states the conditional consequent will: « he who believes and is baptized will be saved. »

All the human creatures of God, all men, are therefore called to the Church through the merits of Christ the mediator, by God's antecedent will, as much to eternal salvation as to the kingdom of truth and of faith; they ought to be members of the Church, and therefore by reason of this calling and office we may call them members of the Church by God's antecedent will. Hence those who, though they are not yet, will at some time be members of the Church in act, ought to be called members by the consequent eternal calling; and as long as they are not so in act, as Augustine is wont to say, members of the Church according to foreknowledge ¹. They belonged not in themselves but in this foreknowledge of God, not in act but in proximate potency, to the fold and to the people of Christ; of them he himself said: « I have other sheep that are not of this fold, and I must bring them also » Jn X. 16; and to Paul, when he first taught at Corinth: « for I have much people in this city » Acts XVIII. 10. In this same sense, even before Paul's preaching at Antioch of Pisidia, those were members of that Church of whom it is written: « as many as were ordained to life everlasting believed » ² Acts XIII. 48.

But this universal will, and also God's particular destination, considered in itself, contributes nothing to the proper notion of the visible Church. To illuminate its concept, the question before us is who all and only are actually members of the Church of Jesus Christ on earth, that is, of the visible Church, since no Church other than the visible one exists on earth (th. XIX.). To answer this question more fully, a twofold inquiry is needed. First, we shall show what conditions are such that without them no one can be, and be called simply, a member of the Church; or, what amounts to the same, which men simply do not belong to the Church. Second, we shall speak of the conditions that are not further required to constitute truly and simply a member of the Church. For both considerations are necessary to us, so that we may understand which men all and only are truly members of the Church.

Moreover, we cannot understand those necessary conditions without which no one simply belongs to the Church, unless we consider at least in general the nature of the Church itself, the kingdom of Jesus Christ on earth, as already declared in the preceding theses. From this it will appear that the conditions are three: the unity of faith with the sacrament of faith; the unity of legitimate subordination, which the Fathers are wont to call the unity of charity (social); and the unity of juridical or canonical communion; although the lack of each of these does not sever the bonds with the Church in equal degree, of which we shall speak in the following thesis.

II. The kingdom of Jesus Christ on earth is, by its essence and its fundamental element, the kingdom of revealed truth, to which divine faith corresponds. But this truth, since the kingdom is visible on earth, is not a revelation immediately in the minds of individuals; it is truth in the custody, preaching and explanation of a visible teaching authority, instituted by Christ for this end and with this authority, for all days until the consummation of the age. Hence also the corresponding divine faith in this kingdom is not a faith conceived only in the mind, apart from the instituted teaching authority, whether inspired or formed by a person from some other source and remaining independent of that same teaching authority. It is « obedience of faith, » and the profession of the one faith by individuals and by all, under the teaching authority of the guardians, heralds and teachers of the deposit. « For with the heart one believes unto justice, but with the mouth confession is made unto salvation... How then shall they call upon him in whom they have not believed? or how shall they believe him of whom they have not heard (πῶς δὲ πιστεύσουσιν, οὗ οὐκ ἤκουσαν)? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they be sent (ἐὰν μὴ ἀποσταλῶσι)?.... So faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ » Rom. X. 10 sqq. Hence the objective rule of faith is the common and universal preaching of Christ's envoys: « preach the gospel to every creature; he who does not believe will be condemned. » Christ declares that this preaching, this gospel, to be taught by the envoys and believed and practised by the faithful, is « all things whatsoever he himself commanded, » or « all things the Apostles were taught by the Spirit of truth. » Moreover, so that this objective rule of faith may always remain uncorrupted, and the obligation of « obedience of faith » may always remain the same, toward the dispensers of the mysteries of God who are sent, in the Apostles as in their first roots, the assistance of Christ himself and the abiding of the Paraclete in and with the teaching envoys has been promised, « all days until the consummation of the age, » and to be « for ever. » This universal, perpetually living and infallible preaching of Christ's envoys is therefore « the faith once delivered to the saints, » and « the form of doctrine » into which the Church of Christ has been delivered unchangeably; and into which, therefore, each one who wishes to be and remain a member of that Church must be delivered and must obey: « but thanks be to God that you were servants of sin, but you have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine into which you were delivered » ³ Mark XVI; Matt. XXVIII; Jn XIV. 16, 17, 26; Rom. VI. 17. From this « obedience of faith » arises the unity of faith in its universality, so that the faith of the whole Church is also the faith of its individual parts, whether the greater parts, such as the particular Churches, or the lesser, such as the individual members. Conversely, from the necessity of the unity of faith « (one God, one faith), » the inner necessity of « obedience of faith » is understood, instituted by Christ and by the Holy Spirit through the Apostles, in the very institution and declaration of the perpetual and infallible teaching authority. « We have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all nations » (εἰς ὑπακοὴν πίστεως ἐν πᾶσι τοῖς ἔθνεσι). « According to the command of God, for the obedience of faith among all nations, the mystery having been made known » Rom. I. 5; XVI. 26. Therefore this very preaching of the living teaching authority is set up as the rule by which, and to which, one must yield in faith: « having hope that our faith may grow... according to our rule » (κατὰ τὸν κανόνα ἡμῶν); and so that « we may think the same and abide in the same rule » 2 Cor. X. 15; Phil. III. 16; Gal. VI. 16. Hence, just as « one faith » is necessary, so as long as one abides in the established rule of the obedience of faith, by that very fact one faith is preserved: not only the faith of the Romans, but also that of the Colossians and Thessalonians, and by the same reasoning that of all the particular Churches and all the members, which faith is in the whole world. Rom. I. 8, 12; Col. I. 6; 1 Thess. I. 7, 8. See above th. XI. and the treatise On Tradition, th. IV.

Just as faith belongs to the very essence of the Church, and the profession and preaching of faith is the first fundamental manifestation of the whole life of the Church, so the first property and condition, without which no one can be a member of this body or a citizen of this kingdom of Jesus Christ on earth, is « obedience of faith, » explicit, or at least the implicit profession of the whole faith proposed and preached by the Church ⁴.

III. Christ, however, also instituted the sacrament of faith, baptism, by which not only is the habit of faith infused and the objective real profession of faith contained, but an indelible character is also imprinted, as a consecration into the member of the body and the citizen of the kingdom of Jesus Christ (cf. On the Sacraments in general, th. XIII. n. II.). Hence faith is required first, but with it the sacrament of faith is always joined to form the members of the Church. « He who believes and is baptized will be saved; » « when they had believed him who preached the kingdom of God, men and women were baptized; » « what prevents me from being baptized?.... If you believe with your whole heart, it is allowed; » « hearing, they believed and were baptized » Mark XVI. 16; Acts VIII. 12, 36; XVIII. 8. Moreover, the sense of this union of faith and baptism is declared even more expressly: once faith is received, the sealing and union with the body of Christ, which is the Church, is completed through the sacrament. « In whom (Christ) you also, believing, were sealed (ἐσφραγίσθητε) with the Holy Spirit of promise » Eph. I. 13. ⁵ (cf. On the Sacraments, th. XII.) « One body and one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism » ib. IV. 5. Namely, the one body, which is quickened by the Spirit and belongs to the Lord, holds its members consigned and inserted into itself not through one faith only, but equally necessarily through the one baptism of Christ. « Teach (μαθητεύσατε, make disciples), baptizing them » Matt. XXVIII. 19: « those who received his word (Peter's) were baptized, and (by this baptism) there were added (προσετέθησαν) on that day about three thousand souls » Acts II. 41. « In one Spirit we were all baptized into one body » 1 Cor. XII. 12, 13. ⁶

Therefore, just as faith is presupposed as the first conception in the womb of the Mother Church and the necessary preparation for birth, so birth itself, the insertion into the visible Church and real union with the body of Christ, is not completed except through the sacrament of faith. « The Spirit of God pours out the new man, stirred in the mother's womb (the catechumen) and received by the birth of the font, into the hands of the priest, yet with faith nonetheless serving as the bride's attendant » Pacian, serm. de baptism. n. 6. « Unless one is born again of water and the Holy Spirit he will not enter the kingdom of heaven. There are therefore certain beginnings of faith similar to conceptions; but it is necessary not only to be conceived but also to be born, so that one may come to eternal life » Aug. to Simplician, l. I, q. 2. « Whoever we read as belonging to the kingdom of heaven in the body of Christ, which is the Church, we must understand only as baptized » Id. to Seleucian, ep. 265, n. 4.

Catechumens are said to be « in the vestibule » (ἐν προθύροις), who must yet « enter into the hall itself » (εἴσω γενέσθαι σε δεῖ): Greg. Naz. or. 40, n. 16; Cyril of Jerusalem, Procatech. n. 1. They are still « to be inserted into the Church » Cyril, ibid. n. 17; Augustine, de peccat. merit. et remiss. n. 39; to Simplician, l. I, q. 2, n. 2. Assemanius, in the liturgical codex, vols. I and II, gathered prayers over catechumens who already believe and are soon to be baptized, from various Churches, Latin, Greek, Syriac, Chaldean, Armenian, Coptic, which all agree in one sense: « that they may be renewed by the font of baptism, and be numbered among the members of your Church; » « to you, in your Church, may they be reborn by the grace of baptism; » « add to the new Testament the offspring of a new progeny. » From the Sacramentaries of Gelasius and Gregory down to the most recent recension of Paul V (vol. I, pp. 3, 5, 20, 22, 74; vol. II, p. 21). « Those who are disposed for baptism, unite them (ἕνωσον αὐτοὺς τῇ ἁγίᾳ σου καθολικῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ) to your holy catholic Church; » « plant them (φύτευσον) in your holy catholic and apostolic Church; » « that they may be grafted into the root of the rich olive, which is the holy catholic and apostolic Church of God » (among Greeks, Copts and Syrians, vol. I, pp. 120, 163; vol. II, pp. 134, 162, 240, 285). « That they may be sheep of the true Shepherd, sealed with the seal of your Holy Spirit, and honorable members in the body of your holy Church; » « receive them into your fold » (among Syrians, Chaldeans, Copts, Maronites, vol. I, pp. 166, 183, 220, 223; vol. II, pp. 268, 330, 348). « That they may become the body and member of your Church » (among Armenians, vol. I, pp. 170, 172). Hence it is that catechumens, though their faith is already received, remain « without part in, and without initiation into, all the hierarchical sacraments⁷, because they have not yet received their subsistence from divine birth » Dionysius, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, c. 7. For « baptism itself is the beginning of all the sacraments, in which we are planted into the likeness of the death of Christ » St. Bernard, serm. de coena Domini n. 2. Gathering all these together, Eugene IV declares: « The holy baptism holds the first place among all the sacraments, which is the gate of the spiritual life; for through it we are made members of Christ and of his body, the Church. » Decree for the Armenians.

IV. If in the Church one considers only the revealed truth that was handed down to it by Christ and the Apostles as a deposit to be guarded, then, besides the profession of the whole faith and the sacrament of faith, of which we have so far spoken, nothing else would seem to be required in order that someone, as a faithful and initiated citizen, belong to this « kingdom of truth. » But in truth, for the kingdom of God on earth, no less than the infallible teaching authority and the unity of profession that corresponds to it through « obedience of faith, » there is essential, by the institution of Christ, power of government, or sacred empire, in legitimate apostolic succession, and specifically, by reason of the monarchy (th. X.), in the successors of Peter. To this power there corresponds obedience, and through it the unity or communion of ecclesiastical intercourse; this unity is commonly called by the Fathers « the charity of peace » (Aug. de Baptism. l. III. n. 19, and often elsewhere), namely social charity. Indeed, this power of government or of jurisdiction is itself what, from the institution of Christ the founder of the Church, forms, binds and contains the whole visible Church, as the « glue » of unity, as Cyprian puts it. « On this rock I will build my Church, and I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. » Christ himself gave Apostles, and afterwards, until the completion of the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ in his body, which is the Church, pastors and teachers for the work of the ministry, to this end and effect: that the saints, namely the sons and members of the Church, may be perfected and intimately joined into one, and thus the body of Christ may be continually built up. « For the perfecting (πρὸς τὸν καταρτισμὸν) of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ. » Matt. XVI; Eph. IV; Col. II. Therefore whoever does not wish to be founded upon the rock is not of the great house of the Church; whoever refuses to submit to the power of the keys is cut off from the kingdom of heaven, both proximately and immediately from that which is on earth, and consequently from that which is in heaven; whoever does not hold the Head through those bonds and connections by which the body of Christ is contained and built up (cf. th. XVI. n. II.) is himself not a member of the body.

Efficiently, therefore (efficiency of the ministerial kind), union with the Church, with the kingdom of God on earth, with the fraternity that is in the world, with the flock of Christ, with the disciples of Christ, with the body of Christ, proceeds from and depends on those to whom it was said by divine institution: « you are the rock; I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; strengthen your brethren; feed my sheep; teach them to observe all things, and behold, I am with you all days; take heed to yourselves and to the whole flock, in which the Holy Spirit has placed you as bishops to rule the Church of God; pastors and teachers for the work of the ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ. » Matt. XVI, XXVIII; Luke XXII; Acts XX; Eph. IV; 1 Pet. V. To this power are subjected and united those to whom it was said by the same divine authority and institution: « and you yourselves, as living stones, are built up as a spiritual house; if he will not hear the Church (namely those to whom it was promised there, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven), let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector; obey your prelates and be subject to them, for they watch as those who must render an account for your souls » Matt. XVIII; Heb. XIII; 1 Pet. II.

Hence what the Fathers often repeat, that the Church is contained in the episcopate, holds indeed, first, of union and subjection toward the successor of Peter and toward the apostolic succession in general, and then of union and subjection toward the individual bishops, insofar as these, in subordination under the successor of Peter, and so in union with the whole apostolic succession, exercise legitimate power. « Where the bishop appears, let there be the multitude, just as where Christ Jesus is, there is the catholic Church » (either simply, if the universal bishop is regarded as representing Christ for the whole Church, or as a part of the catholic Church, if the individual particular bishops are regarded as remaining in union with the universal bishop) Ignatius, ad Smyrn. n. 8. « The Church is the people gathered to the priest, and the flock clinging to its shepherd. » « You must know that the bishop is in the Church, and the Church in the bishop; and if anyone is not with the bishop, he is not in the Church; and in vain do they flatter themselves who creep in without peace with God's priests, and believe that they communicate secretly with certain persons, when the Church, which is catholic, is not split or divided, but is everywhere connected and joined by the glue of priests cohering with one another » Cyprian, ep. 69 ad Florentium Pupianum. Now this glue, insofar as it is the visible glue of one visible Church, is by the institution of Christ Peter himself in each of his successors; this sufficiently appears from what was demonstrated above. « For to this Church, because of its more powerful principality, it is necessary for every Church to come, that is, the faithful from everywhere, in which the tradition which is from the Apostles has always been preserved by those who are everywhere » Iren. III, c. 3. « Our Lord... arranging the honour of the bishop and the order of his Church, speaks in the Gospel and says to Peter: you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church... From this, through the succession of times and of successors, the ordination of bishops and the order of the Church run on, so that the Church is established upon the bishops, and every act of the Church is governed through the same prelates » Cyprian, ep. 33 ad lapsos. Of this episcopate, thus cohering with Peter through the succession of generations, holds what Irenaeus bears witness to: « It is fitting to obey the presbyters who are in the Church, those who have succession from the Apostles, as we have shown, who with the succession of the episcopate have received the sure gift of truth according to the Father's good pleasure; but the rest, who stand apart from the principal succession, and gather in any place, are to be held suspect... From all such, therefore, one must stand aloof; but one must adhere to those who keep the teaching of the Apostles, as we said before, and who, together with the name of the presbyterate, offer sound speech and a blameless way of life » Iren. IV, c. 26.

In this communion of ecclesiastical intercourse under the government of apostolic succession, it is manifest that there is included and contained the communication of the sacraments in the unity of the Church, under the priesthood united to that same Church and legitimately succeeding itself from Christ the institutor and from the Apostles, the first priests, down to the second coming of the great high priest (1 Cor. XI. 26). For true sacraments of Christ can be, and are, outside the unity of the Church, administered validly but illegitimately, and so sacrilegiously; but legitimate administration cannot be except in the unity of the Church, to which the sacraments themselves belong and for which they were instituted. This is not only generally on account of the state of sin, sacrileges of which kind, alas!, are committed even within the Church; but specifically because those men have withdrawn themselves from liturgical power, which constitutes a part of the power of government or jurisdiction, and by this very fact have separated themselves and been cut off from the unity of the Church, since the latter cannot exist without subjection to the power of government by which unity is maintained. Nor is it surprising that this union in the sacraments, no less than in social government, has been so urgently commended by the ancient Fathers from the Apostolic age onward as the proper character of the unity of the Church; for the sacraments are the most sacred bond of unity among the visible things. « For as the body is one and has many members..... so also is Christ. For in one Spirit (ἐν ἑνὶ πνεύματι) we were all baptized into one body... and all were given to drink of one Spirit (εἰς ἓν πνεῦμα). » « Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, all who partake of the one bread » (1 Cor. X. 17; XII. 13). Whence it is easily understood, as we have said, that division itself in the sacraments (since on the part of the schismatics it is a violation of the unity of the body of Christ), and not merely an unworthy participation, formally constitutes sacrilege. « Flee divisions as the beginning of evils⁸. All of you obey the bishop, as Jesus Christ obeys the Father; and the presbytery as the Apostles; and revere the deacons as the commandment of God. Let no one do anything of those things that pertain to the Church apart from the bishop. Let that Eucharist be considered valid which is celebrated under the bishop, or to which he himself has granted permission. Wherever the bishop appears, let there be the multitude, just as wherever Christ Jesus is, there is the catholic Church. It is not lawful without the bishop either to baptize or to hold an agape⁹; but whatever he approves, that also is pleasing to God, so that everything that is done may be firm and valid. » Ignatius, ep. ad Smyrn. n. 8. The same is said in Irenaeus of those « who gather in any place »; and in the same way, in Cyprian, those are declared outcasts « who believe that they communicate secretly with certain persons »; and whoever « dares to set up another altar, to make another prayer with unlawful words, » is said « to profane the truth of the Lord's victim by false sacrifices (sacrilegious on the part of the offerers). »

V. Through the stubborn denial of a doctrine of faith sufficiently proposed by the teaching authority of the Church, defection and withdrawal from the legitimate power of government, and separation from the liturgical power, by which Christ our Savior instituted his Church as a visible kingdom, defection from the Church is contained by the very nature of the thing. It is evident, moreover, that the Church, by its judicial and coercive power (th. XII. n. IV.), can, and it is certain that it has always been accustomed to, pronounce and declare such exclusion against rebels by its juridical sentence as well. Hence from the very beginning of the Church we see in Councils and in the decrees of the Popes heretics and schismatics condemned by anathema, both by law established and also, most often, by special and personal sentences. Now, from the very reason and nature of the Church, insofar as it is a visible society, and from the notion of the power of government, which, being legislative, is also judicial and coactive, it follows that exclusion from the Church can be decreed not only against heretics and schismatics, who by their very offense fall away from the kingdom of truth and unity, but also for other grave crimes. Such legitimate sentences of excommunication deprive, immediately and directly, of external communion in conversation with « the fraternity that is in the world, » in liturgy and in the sacraments, insofar as they exclude from the visible society. But by that very fact they also deprive of participation in those spiritual and invisible goods which are contained in these visible things, because they exclude from the supernatural society. They are held ratified by Christ, the author of the Church's goods, both according to the visible element and according to the invisible spiritual element, insofar as it coheres with the visible: « I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven. » Therefore (as Augustine concludes from this) « when the Church excommunicates, the excommunicated is bound in heaven, » just as conversely, by the power of loosing, « when he is reconciled by the Church, the reconciled is loosed in heaven » Aug. on Jn, tract. 50, n. 12. ¹⁰

Certainly, just as Christ in his Church, insofar as it is the kingdom of sanctification, instituted the power of the priesthood, which is at once judicial to remit and retain sins in the internal forum of conscience (Jn XX. 22, 23), and the retention of such sins by its very nature binds the conscience even for the use of the sacraments and of the visible sacred things in the Church; so in the same Church of his, insofar as it is the kingdom of truth and of sacred discipline or conversation (τῆς πολιτείας: of the commonwealth; cf. Eph. II. 12; Phil. III. 20), he instituted a judicial power of government, even immediately for the external forum, to loose and to bind whatever in the kingdom of God deserves loosing or requires binding (Matt. XVI, XVIII). These things, insofar as the power of binding is considered, are first of all not only those by which rebellion against the kingdom of truth and of unity in holy conversation is already present in itself, but also any others which are opposed to the good of the kingdom itself. Moreover, such bindings can reach as far as the interdiction of all the visible goods and institutions, the administration of which has been entrusted to the universal power of binding and loosing, and so as far as exclusion from the visible kingdom itself.

Certainly in Matt. XVIII the Lord Christ speaks first of « a brother » belonging to the religious society of the Church, as is manifest from the penalty to be inflicted, of which we shall speak presently, and from the following context: « where they are gathered together in my name... there am I in the midst of them. » Moreover, the offense presupposed is obstinate injury against another, and the resulting disobedience, and in no way a spontaneous separation from the Church. Moreover, the power of judging about either offense is conferred upon the Church itself; and this judging Church, with an independent power and without appeal to any other external tribunal, is designated in the Apostles. « Tell the Church; but if he will not hear the Church... Amen I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven. » Finally, the penalty to be inflicted by this judicial power the Lord states in these words: « let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. » This, indeed, from the very force of the words in the context, where it is a question of a brother of the religious society which is the Church, and of the judgment of the Church itself, certainly cannot be understood as anything other than exclusion from the Church, just as Gentiles are excluded from it by the very nature of the thing, and tax collectors by a sentence of the synagogue, confirmed by the Lord through that conjunction and equation with Gentiles ¹¹. This sense of the ecclesiastical penalty designated by Christ himself, expressed by the formula « let him be as a Gentile and a tax collector, » can be confirmed from other places, in which the Apostles exercise judgment and pronounce sentence against those who were most certainly and were declared to be separated from the Church. « They have made shipwreck concerning the faith... whom I have delivered to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme. » « If anyone preaches to you a gospel beside what you have received, let him be anathema. » « Whoever does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, this is the deceiver and the antichrist... If anyone comes to you and does not bring this doctrine, do not receive him into your house, nor say hail to him ¹²; for whoever says hail to him shares in his evil works » 1 Tim. I. 20; Gal. I. 9; 2 Jn 10.

A famous example of the exercise of that power of binding, instituted by Christ, extending to exclusion from the Church for crimes which do not of their own nature induce separation, is given by Paul, 1 Cor. V. The offense to be judged and punished is the incest of one of the faithful, v. 1. Indeed, other sins are also named, which, if they occur among the faithful, are to be punished with a similar penalty according to their gravity, v. 11. Therefore Christ (Matt. XVIII) does not restrict the sentence to the one thing expressly named there, the obstinate offense of a brother; this is in any case clear from the universality of the power conferred: « whatever you bind on earth. » Moreover Paul exercises a true judgment and pronounces a juridical sentence by the power received from Christ, an ecclesiastical power of the kind that can be exercised only over the baptized. « For what have I to do with judging those who are outside? Do you not judge those who are within? (τοὺς ἔξω κρίνειν.... τοὺς ἔσω κρίνετε). For God will judge those who are outside » v. 12. For those to whom it was said, « baptizing them... teaching them to observe all things, » are indeed judges; and conversely, « obey your prelates and be subject to them, for they watch as those who must render an account for your souls » (Heb. XIII. 17). Therefore it is not a question of a judging and punishing power that is extraordinary and given to the Apostles alone, but altogether of an ordinary power instituted by Christ. For he says that it could have been, and ought long since to have been, exercised by the Church of the Corinthians itself ¹³, namely by those who are designated by Christ (Matt. XVIII) under the name of the Church, and who are both the Apostles and those holding the power derived from them: « the presidents of the Church, » as the context of the Gospel demonstrates and as Chrysostom with the other Fathers explains. The juridical form of the sentence pronounced by Paul is most grave: « I have already judged, as present, him who has done this, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, you being gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ » v. 3, 4. Let us now consider the penalty itself decreed, for it is chiefly of this that we now speak. It is expressed in these words: « let him be taken away from among you (ἐξαρθῇ ἐκ μέσου ὑμῶν), he who has done this; » « take away the evil man from among yourselves » (ἐξάρατε τὸν πονηρὸν ἐξ ὑμῶν αὐτῶν); with some further statement of the manner: « do not keep company with them; » « with such a one not even to take food; » not common food, much less, therefore, the Lord's food (cf. XI. 32–34) ¹⁴. In similar formulas, as we saw above, the exclusion of heretics is declared by Paul and by John. Finally, the penalty, either joined with the sentence of excommunication or following it, is « to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, » which 1 Tim. I. 20 pronounces against heretics. But because for a faithful sinner the penalty is chiefly medicinal, there is added, to raise hope: « that the spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ; » but for the heresiarchs the threat is more severe: « that they may learn not to blaspheme. » For in them there is both a fuller excision from the Church and less hope of return.

From the institution of Christ, then, and from the doctrine and practice of the Apostles, the power of binding in the Church exists in such a way that a sinner, though as far as the sin itself is considered he still remains in the Church, may by the sentence of that power be taken from the midst of the Church, delivered to Satan, and excluded from communion and intercourse with the faithful; first in ecclesiastical matters, and then, by reason of the end of this penalty, also in civil matters, so that he is outside the Church just as the Gentiles, tax collectors and heretics are outside it (though by other reasons and modes).

The Catholic understanding and the explanations of the Fathers clearly show that Christ's institution and the Apostolic doctrine are to be received in this sense which we have stated.

Hilary, explaining both passages of the Apostle (1 Cor. V; 1 Tim. I.), writes: « although the Apostle delivers (to Satan), he knows that he himself delivers both in the power of Christ and in his own spirit (power received from Christ)... for those who are cast out from the body of the Church, which is the body of Christ, are delivered as strangers and aliens from the body of God to the dominion of the devil » Hilary, on Ps. 118, letter 16 (Ain), n. 5.

In the same sense, but to forestall the heresy of the Novatians, showing the hope of reconciliation, Ambrose speaks. « The Apostle came with a rod, because he removed the convicted man from holy communion; and he is rightly said to be delivered to Satan, who is separated from the body of Christ. He came also in charity and in the spirit of gentleness, either because he so delivered him that his spirit might be saved, or because the man whom he had earlier set apart he afterwards restored to the sacraments (2 Cor. II. sqq.) » Ambrose, de paenit. l. I, c. 15, n. 78.

Likewise Jerome: « The Apostle speaks of those whom I delivered to Satan, that they may learn not to blaspheme; and in another place, whom I delivered, he says, to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved. We ought not, therefore, if perhaps for some sin we are cast out of the congregation of the brethren and the house of God, to struggle, but to bear calmly the sentence passed upon us, and to say with the prophet (Mic. VII. 9): I will bear the wrath of the Lord, for I have sinned against him, until he judges my cause » Jerome, on Ezech. XVII. 19 (book V, at the end).

Augustine, where he distinguishes a threefold class of sins: « Unless some were so grave, he says, that they are to be punished even by excommunication, the Apostle would not say, when you are gathered together and in my spirit, to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus » Aug. de fide et operib. c. 26, n. 48.

What excommunication means, which Augustine recalls, even where the question concerns not heresy or schism but other sins of the faithful, Cyprian had already declared gravely in this same Africa (not to mention Tertullian, who scattered his Montanist errors through the description of this censure). He writes that Bishop Pomponius acted « deliberately and with vigour » in abstaining a deacon for the sin of incontinence; and so too, that incontinent virgins are « to be cast out with a heavier censure, and such not easily received again into the Church afterwards. » Nevertheless, against the heretical rigour of the Montanists ¹⁵, even such an « adulteress of Christ, » if she has done penance, is « after a just time has been estimated, exomologesis having afterwards been made, to return to the Church. » But if they persist in sin, « let them know that with this shameless obstinacy of theirs they can never be admitted by us into the Church, lest they begin to make an example for others of ruin by their sins. » Therefore, by the very sentence by which they are abstained and cast out, they are truly outside. Wherefore, comparing the old law and the new dispensation, he concludes thus: « God commanded that those who did not obey his priests, and did not obey the judges appointed by him for a time, be slain. And then indeed they were killed by the sword, while carnal circumcision still remained; but now, since spiritual circumcision has begun among the faithful servants of God, the proud and the contumacious are slain by a spiritual sword, while they are cast out of the Church ¹⁶; for they cannot live outside, since the house of God is one, and salvation can be for no one except in the Church. » Cyprian, ep. 62 ad Pomponium.

The Greek Fathers speak, as the Latins do, in the same sense about separation from the Church as declared and exercised by the Apostles according to the institution of Christ. « Hear finally the Apostle himself, saying of the one who had sinned: I have delivered such a man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved. You see, therefore, that God delivered offenders into the hands of enemies not only through his Apostles but also through those who preside over the Church and have the power not only of loosing but also of binding. Sinners are delivered to the destruction of the flesh when for their sins they are separated from the body of Christ... when their offense becomes manifest to the Church, and they are driven out of the Church by the priests, so that, marked by all, they may blush; and that for the one who is converted there may come to him what follows, that the spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ » Origen, on Judges, hom. 2, n. 5 (vol. II).

Gregory of Nyssa has an oration against those who take ecclesiastical penalties hard, and he speaks in particular of a man who, « although he has been cut off from the Church » (κἂν τῆς ἐκκλησίας ἀποκλεισθῇ), shows himself obstinate. As other Fathers do, he appeals to the Gospel and to the Apostle, from which he demonstrates the power of the Church and the value of the penalty even in heaven, and so for the other life. « Through Peter he gave to the bishops the key of penalties, which avail in heaven (τὴν κλεῖδα τῶν ἐπουρανίων τιμῶν). Recognize that, being loosed, you are loosed; and being bound, you are bound with invisible chains. If you had eyes reaching to the substance of the soul, I would show you, the excommunicated (σοι τῷ ἀφωρισμένῳ), the image of a condemned man, weighed down in the neck by the heaviest chains, having no member free or loosed. And would that the punishment ended with life; but now, if anything human happens and death suddenly comes, like a thief in the night, know that the things there are closed to you. The keepers of that kingdom are diligent and not playful: they see the soul bearing the marks of separation (τὴν ψυχὴν τὰ τοῦ ἀφορισμοῦ φέρουσαν σύμβολα); as if marked by a stench and filth of a prison, they drive it from the path that leads to good things, and do not let it behold the companies of the just and the angelic joy... Do not think that excommunication is introduced by the bishop's arbitrary will; it is a paternal law, an ancient rule of the Church, which takes its origin from the law and holds in grace. Consider St. Paul, who by letter pronounces sentences of excommunication (τὰς ἀποφάσεις τοῦ ἀφορισμοῦ) against the guilty, and heals the young Corinthian with such a remedy » Gregory of Nyssa, l. c. (vol. II, pp. 746, 747). Chrysostom agrees with the other Fathers in explaining 1 Cor. V (collated with 1 Tim. I), and so do Theodoret, Oecumenius and Theophylact, who usually reduce his interpretations to a summary. « Hear how he delivered (him to Satan). Assembled, he says, you and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, deliver such a one to Satan. He was therefore at once cast out of the common assembly, he was cut off from the flock; he was left desolate and naked, and delivered to the wolf. For as a cloud marked the camp of the Hebrews, so the Spirit marked the Church ¹⁷. If anyone was then cast outside, he was burned (spiritually under the new law, bodily under the old). But he was cast out by the judgment of the Apostles » ¹⁸ Chrysostom, in 1 Tim., hom. 5, n. 2.

As to the thing itself, the somewhat more recent « formulas of excommunication, » which, to set the gravity of the penalty before the eyes, used to be clothed in various ceremonial solemnities, not always and everywhere the same ¹⁹, contain no other doctrine than what has been set forth so far from Scripture and the Fathers. In all such formulas the substance of the matter comes down to roughly this sentence: « Following the canonical institutions and the examples of the holy Fathers, we eliminate (the violators of the Churches of God) by the authority of God and the judgment of the Holy Spirit from the bosom of holy Mother Church and from the fellowship of all Christendom, until they come to their senses and make satisfaction to the Church of God » (in Baluze, Capitularies, vol. II, p. 670). Thus St. Gregory VII, of Stephen the simoniac: « we have excommunicated him, he says, and separated him from the bosom of the holy Church; » of the excommunicated Venetians: « you have been made outside the fellowship of the members of Christ and of the Church; » of the Ravennese, who dared to adhere to the deposed bishop: « them, as putrid members, we cut off and cast away from the whole body of Christ, which is the catholic Church, with the sword of anathema » ²⁰; of him who has obstructed the efforts to restore peace among the sons of Raymond: « we take away the grace of St. Peter, and as a member of the devil and a destroyer of the Christian religion we shall hasten to cut him off from the communion of Christian society; » of the count of Flanders, if within forty days he were unwilling to withdraw from the defense of Lambert, the invader of the church of Thérouanne: « let him be separated and excommunicated from the body and communion of the holy Church, by the authority of God and the judgment of the Holy Spirit; » of Lambert himself, the invader: « the holy universal Church has cursed and anathematized him as irrecoverably deposed, and has judged him wholly an outcast from the communion of the whole Church. » Harduin, Concilia, vol. VI, part I, pp. 1361, 1367, 1371, 1402, 1408, 1506, 1508. Hence Gregory himself is accustomed to say of those who are absolved from excommunication: « to be called back to the bosom of the common mother Church; » « to be received by the authority of blessed Peter and brought back to the bosom of our mother the Church; » « the bond of anathema being relaxed, to be received into the grace of communion and the bosom of the holy mother Church » Ibid. pp. 1343, 1344, 1356, 1384, 1508. In the same sense Innocent III speaks of those « who, separated from the Church for their excesses, have not been ashamed to remain long in excommunication; » and the excommunicated Count Celano is said to be « expelled from the Church, to wander outside it. » But of penitent excommunicates (he is speaking of Philip of Swabia), « returning to the bosom of the Church, » he says, « we are unwilling to deny the way of pardon » Innocent III, Works (ed. Migne), vol. II, p. 1032; vol. III, p. 1095.

From what has been demonstrated, it is established that the profession of the whole faith together with the sacrament of faith, hierarchical subjection to the visible head of the Church and to the legitimate pastors proper to each, and finally juridical communion, are the conditions necessary to establish the union of the individual members with the Church; so that not only those who lack all these bonds of union, but also those who lack any single one of them, cannot simply be said to be members of the Church or to be in the Church. Therefore not only are infidels entirely outside, as is manifest of itself without ambiguity; but neither heretics, nor catechumens, nor schismatics, nor those excommunicated for any other offenses, can simply be judged members of the Church and in the Church, although in a certain respect all of them cohere with the Church, and some of them can be called members of the Church in some sense, a distinction which remains for us to discuss. Meanwhile let it be noted that among the recalled conditions and bonds of unity there are degrees, so that integrity of faith is the foundation on which both hierarchical subjection and juridical communion rest; and hence it is that heresy involves both schism and excommunication, schism involves excommunication but not in itself heresy, and excommunication involves neither schism nor heresy ²¹.

« Having made the distinction between belonging to the Church of Christ on earth simply and in full, and belonging to her or being referred to her in some respect and from some part, it must be held that all those whom we have named cohere with the Church from some part. For, first: those who are only materially involved in some sect are, in the internal forum and in the judgment of God, through true faith and the character of baptism, members of the one catholic Church of Christ; yet in the external forum and in the judgment of the Church, adults among them are presumed to be heretics or schismatics. Formal heretics and schismatics, by the baptismal character itself, remain subject to the jurisdiction and laws of the Church, and by that same character and by all the institutions of the Church proper to them which they have kept for themselves, are the more strictly bound to return to the fold whose sign they bear impressed; just as, conversely, the Church seeks the straying sheep bearing the sign all the more diligently. Second: excommunicated persons are excluded, by the very intention and nature of the penalty, medicinally and not mortally, so that by satisfying as soon as possible they may seek reconciliation; and by the force of the penalty they are deprived of the visible goods of the visible Church, but not of spiritual goods in themselves, except insofar as these cohere with those. Third: catechumens, however much they can be united by faith, hope and charity with the spirit of the Church, and so by the desire of the will with the visible Church itself on earth, yet since they have not been incorporated into it in act, and by the character of the sacrament of faith, therefore they can neither participate in the visible mysteries of the Church nor are they subject to its jurisdiction and laws; but by divine and natural law they are bound to the teaching of the Church and to the discipline of that teaching.»

I. What has been demonstrated in the preceding thesis holds indeed when heresy, schism and excommunication in the strict sense are considered together with a persevering obstinacy of mind, and when, conversely, the predicates to belong to the Church and to be members of the Church are taken in the proper and fuller sense and, as we said above, simply speaking. On the other hand, there are many bonds by which these same heretics, schismatics, excommunicated persons, and unbaptized catechumens cohere with the Church in some respect, or may cohere according to their differing dispositions, so that without distinguishing this matter a clear declaration cannot be made. And indeed the diversity of opinions and the ambiguous views of theologians in this dispute seem to derive from these distinctions being neglected.

Generally, a) the distinction holds that it is one thing to belong simply to the Church and to be as a member in the body of the Church, as a citizen in the visible kingdom of God; and it is another thing to belong in some respect and, as Augustine says, to belong from some part, to this Church and to this kingdom of God on earth. But this very thing we call belonging in some respect to the Church requires explanation. Therefore b) it is one thing to be subject by right to the lawmaking, judicial and coercive power of the Church; and it is another to be a participant in the goods which Christ conferred on the Church « as a rich storehouse » (cf. Iren. III. 4. n. 1; 24. n. 1.). Further, c) a distinction must be made between those who both are and are considered members of the Church even in the external forum, in which the Church judges by external social judgment, and others who, if any, belong to the Church in the internal forum alone before God, in which the Church does not judge except sacramentally. Lastly, d) it is one thing to be a participant in the goods and visible gifts which Christ instituted in his Church and for the members of the Church alone, for the sake indeed of the invisible graces and charisms and of eternal blessedness itself; and it is another thing to be able to become a participant in these graces and eternal blessedness without actual participation in those visible gifts. This latter can indeed happen, but (on account of the very connection of visible and invisible gifts ordained by Christ) only with reference to those visible gifts, and so to the Church to which they are proper; and therefore only through a desire, at least implicit, of visible union, in the here-and-now inculpable defect of the visible gifts.

In accordance with these distinctions let us now examine how those whom we demonstrated in the preceding thesis not to be actually members of the Church, and therefore not simply belonging to it, can nevertheless be said to belong to it according to something; and how that something, and therefore that very belonging to the Church, is related differently in different cases.

II. The sacraments were indeed instituted by Christ in and for his Church; indeed they are one of the principal elements by which the Church of Christ is founded and built up on earth (th. XIX. n. II. 2.). Hence the sacraments, even if conferred by a heretical or schismatic minister outside the Catholic Church, and so unlawfully and sacrilegiously, nevertheless remain sacraments of Christ their institutor and principal dispenser, and sacraments of the Catholic Church, for which and in which they were instituted ¹ (see the treatise On the Sacraments in general, th. X., XV.). By these sacraments, therefore, and by the other institutions of Christ, if as rebels they have carried off any of them from the Catholic Church, to which they are proper, as from their mother's house, they have a relation to the Church itself ².

1°. For the reason just stated, the sacraments of the Church, wherever they are validly conferred, have all those effects which an obstacle in the recipient does not impede. If, then, we speak specifically of baptism, that conferred by a heretical or schismatic minister on infants, in whom no obstacle can exist, has all the same essential effects as if it had been conferred by a Catholic minister. Thus they are not only marked with the character of Christ, but are also regenerated as sons of God through grace and incorporated into holy Mother Church; and they remain her members, at least in the internal forum and before God, for as long as they have not adhered to heresy or schism by their own act (which would be mortal sin). Concerning those who are called heretics or schismatics materially (that is, in the external forum only), what Augustine teaches in many places holds in the full sense, about the sacrament by which Mother Church generates sons not only through her own womb but also through the womb of the handmaids. « There is one Church, which alone is called catholic; and whatever it has of its own in the communions of diverse persons separated from its unity, through what it has of its own in them, it, certainly, generates, not they. For their separation does not generate, but what they have kept with them of this one; but if they also give that up, they do not generate at all. So she generates in all, she whose sacraments are retained, whence such a thing can be generated anywhere; although not all whom she generates belong to her unity, which will save those who persevere to the end... Therefore she herself generates both through her own womb and through the wombs of the handmaids, from the same sacraments, as from the seed of her husband... But those who are proud and are not joined to their lawful mother are like Ishmael, of whom it was said: cast out the handmaid and her son, for the son of the handmaid shall not be heir with my son Isaac. But those who peacefully love the lawful wife of their father, by whose lawful right they were born, are like the sons of Jacob, who, though born of handmaids, nevertheless take up the same inheritance » Aug. de Baptism. l. I, c. 10, n. 14.

Therefore those who « are proud, » or who through any wicked desires and culpable negligence do not seek the truth as they ought, or refuse to embrace the truth sufficiently proposed, these already adhere formally or equivalently to error; and so, rebels against God and his Church, they are cut off from it as formal heretics or schismatics, not only in the external forum but also before God and in the internal forum, and are altogether outcasts. On the other hand, even adults are to be judged merely material heretics or schismatics, that is, by reason only of external profession and not of culpable adherence of mind, if in them there truly exists that disposition of good faith which Augustine supposes in certain Donatists. « Those who defend their opinion, however false and perverse, with no stubborn animosity, and especially one which they did not beget by the audacity of their own presumption but received from parents who were seduced and had fallen into error, and who seek the truth with cautious care, ready to be corrected when they have found it, are by no means to be counted among heretics. Unless I believed you to be such, I would perhaps send you no letters » Aug. ep. 43 (al. 142), n. 1. It is easily evident that this good faith, which equals invincible ignorance, has no place in apostates (see the Vatican Council, Constitution Dei Filius, ch. 3, and among the canons, n. III, can. 6). But in those who were brought up in heresy from tender years we can seldom fix the limits where invincible ignorance ceases; the guilt of conscience must be left to the judgment of God, the searcher of hearts, though from the circumstances of things and of persons those who are of bad faith can often be discerned, even by human estimation, more easily than those who are of good faith. « It must indeed be held from faith that no one can be saved outside the Apostolic Roman Church... but nevertheless it must be held equally as certain that those who labour under ignorance of the true religion, if that ignorance is invincible, are not bound by any guilt in this matter before the eyes of the Lord. But now who would presume so much as to be able to mark the limits of such ignorance according to the variety of peoples, regions, talents and other very many things? » Pius IX, Allocution Singulari quadam, 9 Dec. 1854.

In the external forum all who, having attained full use of reason, persist in a heretical sect are presumed and held by the Church to be heretics. « Although one who was baptized in infancy and brought up among heretics and in false doctrine may, once grown to adulthood, for some time not sin against the Catholic faith, as long as the faith is not sufficiently proposed to him so that he is bound to embrace it; yet after the Catholic faith has been sufficiently proposed to him, and the obligation to embrace it and to abandon the contrary errors, if he still persists in them, he will be a heretic » Lugo, de Fide, disp. 20, p. 2, n. 149. Hence Albit. (de inconst. in fide, c. 14, n. 58.) testifies that those under fourteen years of age were usually received into the Church from the sects by profession of faith alone, and those who were older by abjuration of heresy.

2°. From the principles laid down we understand what is to be concluded about a purely internal heresy, if certain persons profess that they remain in the visible Church of Christ without any manifestation of a heretical mind. Such persons are indeed considered members of the Church in the external forum and before the militant Church; they are not bound by excommunication or other ecclesiastical penalties, since the judicial and penal sentences of the Church do not refer to purely internal sins. But just as they are bound by guilt and penalty before God, so such internal sins in the Church belong only to that sacramental judgment which was instituted by Christ, the judge of infinite mercy, for « remitting and retaining sins » (Jn XX. 23). But before God and the triumphant Church the guilt of sin binds according to its whole own nature, and, if it is lawful to speak so, according to its whole intensity of guilt and the corresponding extent of penalty. « By guilt alone one is bound, as to God, before the triumphant Church; but by sentence alone (judicial) one is bound, as to men, before the militant Church; » Innocent III, cited below. Now whoever denies divine faith in his mind subverts entirely, in himself, the first essential condition of a member of the Church, a citizen in the kingdom of truth, the foundation of the whole religious and ecclesiastical life before God and in the forum of his conscience. Therefore, although he is not bound by sentence, and so does not cease to be counted among the members of the Church as to men, before the militant Church in the external forum; yet the guilt of heresy, as long as a man is obstinate in it, is by its own nature such that, as to God before the triumphant Church and in the forum of conscience, he has fallen away from the unity of faith, and by this very fact from the unity of the kingdom of truth, which is the Church. This doctrine is set forth most clearly in the dogmatic Constitution Ineffabilis Deus, and I do not know why some have found difficulty in understanding it. « If any should presume to think otherwise than as we have defined (concerning the immunity of the Blessed Virgin from every stain of original guilt), which God forbid, let them know and further understand that they are condemned by their own judgment, have suffered shipwreck in the faith, and have fallen from the unity of the Church; and moreover, by that very deed, subject themselves to the penalties established by law, if they have dared to signify by word, writing, or any other external means what they feel in their heart. » Cf. Aug. de unitate Eccles. n. 74, which passage we cite below.

3°. In the very followers of sects, who are formal heretics or schismatics either at the reception of baptism or by culpable assent in the course of time, the sacrament is not wholly without effect, and through this very effect it begets some relation to the Church. For Christ instituted the sacrament of faith and regeneration to form the members of the Church in such a way that by its efficacy there is at the same time imprinted an indelible character, as a seal marking the members of the Church; which character, in itself and in its reality, is independent of the disposition, and therefore of the faith and charity, not only of the minister who confers it but also of the man who receives it (see de Sacr. in genere th. XII.). For someone to be actually constituted a member of the Church, a citizen of the kingdom of God on earth, there are required faith, social charity, that is, through acknowledgment of and submission to the power of government of the Church, union with the communion of the saints, and the seal of faith and charity, that is, the baptismal character. Adults, however, who are baptized while knowingly in a heretical or schismatic sect, or who afterwards fall away to it, deprived of faith and social charity (as heretics) or at least of this charity (as schismatics), are by that very fact excluded from the Church. Nevertheless, through the indelible character of baptism, before God and the angels and men, they bear the impressed sign by which they are bound to the Church forever; and so the relation of the Church's jurisdiction toward them, and therefore the corresponding relation of theirs toward the Church, to whose laws, judgments and penalties they are bound however rebellious, remains, together with the character and by the force of the character, unchangeable for this life, for which indeed the power of the kingdom of God on earth is instituted.

Moreover, the character is not merely a seal of union with the Church in just any way, and therefore, where by the guilt of man this holy union is not achieved or has been broken off, a token of obligation to the Church remaining perpetually, branded as it were by the fire of the Holy Spirit; but besides this it is by its essence a participation in the priesthood of Christ, not indeed as in the sacrament of Order, actively to offer sacrifice and administer the mysteries of God, but for divine worship as it is instituted in the Church of Christ, and for the valid reception of the sacraments. « The whole rite of the Christian religion derives from the priesthood of Christ. And therefore it is manifest that the sacramental character is specifically the character of Christ, by whose priesthood the faithful are configured according to the sacramental characters, which are nothing other than participations in the priesthood of Christ, derived from Christ himself. » St. Thomas, 3, q. 43, a. 3. This « configuration » to Christ the great priest, and the ontological deputation to Christian worship and to the mysteries of Christ which he instituted for and in his Church, the Fathers call a perpetual consecration, which remains even when it is separated from sanctification by grace, even in heretics. « The sacrament of Christian baptism, when it is one and the same, is valid even among heretics and suffices for consecration, although it does not suffice for participation in eternal life; which consecration makes indeed a heretic guilty, having the Lord's character outside the Lord's flock; but sound doctrine admonishes that he is to be corrected, not consecrated again in the same way » Augustine, ad Bonifac. ep. 98, n. 4. ³

Therefore, by this obligation to the Church, by this configuration to Christ the priest whose baptism it is, and by this consecration to Christian worship, which is true and lawful only in the Church alone (relations which are constituted essentially and indelibly by the character itself), it does not follow that formal heretics and schismatics are in the Church in act; but it certainly follows that, like a thing carried off by the theft of heresy or schism, it cries out to its owner, that is, to the Church, the lawful mother, outside whose flock of the Lord they wander astray, having the Lord's character. Hence, conversely, the bowels of the Church's charity are directed to them no less than the power of jurisdiction, so that, on account of the « character of Christianity » (Innocent III, ch. Maiores), as for a special reason she calls back her rebellious sons all the more diligently to her bosom. « Those who are outside, held in various errors, let them run while there is time to the lawful mother, who, as she contains and diligently nourishes the sons born from her own womb, so she does not reject those born from the handmaid when they return; but even with the bowels of mercy she seeks the wanderers, and with tender feeling invites them unceasingly, that she may lead them into the fellowship of the paternal inheritance. For she does not regard the condition of the handmaid's womb, but recognizes the truth of the father's seed. For what is the truth of the paternal seed, if not the baptism received in the name of the Trinity? Wherever she finds this, she, as the lawful mother, knows it to be her own by right. For she knows, like Rachel, to bring forth sons not only from her own womb, but also to claim in her own name those begotten of the handmaid, as begotten of the lawful wife. » Fulgentius, de remiss. peccator. l. I, c. 23. With these bowels of mercy Augustine in many places addresses heretics and schismatics. « You answer and say to me: but I have the sacrament. You have it, I acknowledge; on that account I seek you. You have added a great reason why I should seek you more diligently; for you are a sheep of my Lord's flock, though you strayed with the sign; therefore I seek you the more, because you have the sign itself.... We have one sign; why are we not in one fold?..... Therefore I seek you, that you may not perish with the sign; for the sign is of salvation, if you have salvation, if you have charity; for this sign can be in you outside, but cannot profit you » Aug., sermon to the people of Caesarea, n. 4. « They (the Donatists) must observe how devotedly the Catholic root seeks the branch broken from itself with such zeal... Therefore we sweat, therefore we labour... while the tree seeks its branch, while the flock seeks the lost sheep from the fold of Christ. If we are endowed with pastoral bowels ⁴, we must squeeze ourselves through hedges and thorns; with the limbs torn, let us seek the sheep, and bring it back with joy to the Shepherd and to the Prince of all » Id., Gesta cum Emerito, n. 7, 12. In the heretics and schismatics who have been baptized, therefore, there is, compared with those not baptized, a new kind of « title of peace » (as Augustine calls the character, l.c. ad pleb. Caesar.), so that they may return, and the Church may seek them the more. For as a sign impressed on soldiers admonishes them to return to the camp of the emperor, so the character of the King Christ, wherever it is impressed, remains, by which you are made « manifest to God and the angels and the Church, even if you flee as a deserter » (κἂν λειποτακτήσῃς, κατάδηλος γίνῃ πᾶσιν, even if you desert, you are manifest to all) (Chrys. in 2 Cor. hom. 3, n. 7, at the end). See de Sacr. in genere th. XII. n. II; XIII. n. II. III.

III. Excommunicated persons who (as is supposed) retain the Catholic faith, although by what has been demonstrated in the preceding thesis they too are excluded from the Church, the kingdom of God on earth, are nevertheless referred to the Church by more bonds, and by more interior relations, than heretics and schismatics.

1°. In this matter the very nature and purpose of excommunication must above all be noted. This penalty is, by its institution and by the aim of the legislator and judge, not a « killing blow » to root out, but a « medicinal cautery » to heal, so that the sinner, moved by the very gravity of the penalty, may repent, and be reconciled more quickly to God and to the Church. So, by its very nature and its aim, unless the obstinacy of the sinner stands in the way, it is a temporary exclusion. « When any one of the brethren, that is, of the Christians who are established within the society of the Church, is caught in some such sin that he deserves anathema, let this be done where there is no danger of schism... but admonish him as a brother, for not to root out but to correct.... For thus he is both corrected with peace preserved, and is not struck as by a killing blow, but is cauterized medicinally... That, by the correction of separation, every evil man is to be taken away from the congregation of the brethren, but with the aim of healing, not of destroying out of hatred, no one will doubt that it must be done » Aug., against the letter of Parmenian, l. III, n. 13–15. In the same sense the holy Doctor speaks elsewhere: « That very thing which is called condemnation, which the episcopal judgment pronounces, than which no penalty is greater in the Church, can, if God wills, turn to most salutary correction and profit..... Yet pastoral necessity has it that, lest dire contagions creep through many, the diseased one should be separated from the healthy sheep; from him to whom nothing is impossible, perhaps healable by that very separation » Aug., de corr. et grat. c. 15, n. 46 (also cited by Gratian, Causa 24, q. 3, can. 17). Boniface VIII comprehended the whole matter in this decree: « Since excommunication is medicinal, not mortal, disciplining not eradicating, as long as the one against whom it has been pronounced does not despise it ⁵, let the ecclesiastical judge take care, in pronouncing it, to show that he pursues what is proper to one who corrects and heals » On the sentence of excommunication, in the Sixth Book of the Decretals (bk. VI, tit. IX, ch. 1).

2°. Excommunicated persons are indeed bound, for the very aim of the medicinal penalty, to seek reconciliation through penance and satisfaction to the Church and by other means which are sometimes necessary or fitting. Until they have been duly absolved, they remain, even before God and in conscience, deprived of those external and visible goods from which excommunication excludes, and likewise of those internal and spiritual goods which are necessarily connected with those same external ones. But excommunication, although it takes away certain external means to grace, does not of itself take away or impede the charity and grace of God. Whence it can truly be that one who is absolved from guilt before God and the triumphant Church remains bound, as to the communion of the goods we have mentioned, before the militant Church ⁶. Those who are so disposed, on their own part sincerely seeking reconciliation and absolution, although not yet actually, certainly by desire belong to the Church, and so are not outside the way of salvation. For of these what Augustine and others write holds almost in the same way, concerning those whom it may happen that an unjust, but nevertheless valid, sentence excommunicates ⁷. « The purpose of such men is either to return when the storms have subsided; or, if they are not permitted to do so, either while the same tempest persists, or lest by their return a similar or greater one should arise, they hold the will to consult even those to whose agitations and disturbances they yielded, defending without any separation into conventicles, unto death, and helping by testimony that faith which they know is preached in the Catholic Church. The Father crowns these in secret, seeing in secret. This kind seems rare, but examples are not lacking; indeed they are more numerous than can be believed » (in Augustine's time in Africa, and elsewhere in other times, when God permitted certain great disturbances in the Church) Aug., de vera religione, c. 6, n. 11; cf. de Baptismo contra Donatistas, l. I, c. 17, n. 26. To the same effect St. Gregory warns: « The pastor should fear either to absolve indiscriminately or to bind; and he who is under the hand of the pastor should fear to be bound even unjustly, and not rashly reprehend the judgment of his shepherd, lest, although he is unjustly bound (yet validly, for otherwise he would not be bound), he become guilty of a fault that was not there, from the swelling pride of reproach » Gregory, in Evang. hom. 26, n. 6. ⁸.

IV. Just as excommunication is indeed the most grave penalty from justice, to keep the vigour of discipline for the common good, but at the same time has the character of medicine for healing from charity toward individuals; so whatever the Church does with catechumens is wholly from charity alone. And if some severity intervened, especially in ancient times, this had the character not of penalty but of penance, from the solicitude and maternal care toward infants ⁹, whom the pious mother formed, as if still in the womb not yet born, that they might come to the sacrament of regeneration as well disposed as possible.

This maternal care shows itself in many ways, and partly constitutes and partly demonstrates the very disposition and nearness of these catechumens to the Church, although, by what has been demonstrated in the preceding thesis, they are not yet members of the body of the Church and citizens of the visible kingdom of God on earth.

1°. From the very faith by which they already believed in Christ, ¹⁰ from ancient times they even had the name of Christians. « Whoever has been a catechumen... If any of the clergy know him to be a Christian, or if some faithful witnesses have appeared, it has seemed good that baptism should not be denied to him » Council of Illiberis, can. 45. The same appellation appears in can. 7, ascribed to the second Ecumenical Council. In the Gothic and Gallican Sacramentary a prayer is prescribed « for making a Christian: I sign you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, that you may be a Christian » (Assemanius, Cod. liturg., vol. I, pp. 29, 43; and among the Greeks, from the aforesaid canon 7, in the same work, p. 108). Nay, even in the distribution of the orders of the Church, the Fathers list the catechumens last among these grades. For there are three orders of the Church: the first indeed of rulers (τῶν ἡγουμένων), « and two (orders) are of subjects (τῶν ὑποβεβηκότων), since the people of the Church of Christ is divided into two orders, namely of the faithful and of those who have not yet been deemed worthy of regeneration through baptism » (τῶν πιστῶν καὶ τῶν μηδέπω τῆς διὰ λουτροῦ παλιγγενεσίας ἠξιωμένων). Eusebius, Demonstratio evang. l. VII, c. 3; Origen, hom. V in Ezech. n. 4. In the same sense Augustine said that catechumens are already of the great house, yet not as free children and members of the family, but as servants, who are not partakers of the goods of the family. « Because the catechumens have the sign of the cross on their foreheads, they are already of the great house; but let them become sons from servants. For they are not nothing who already belong to the great house... Let them pass through the Red Sea, let them eat the manna, so that as they believed in the name of Jesus, so Jesus may entrust himself to them » Aug. in Jn, tract. 11, n. 4.

2°. The manner in which catechumens belong to the order of Christians and to the great house appears from the discipline observed in them. This is wholly directed to the induction of faith through instruction in the elements of Christian doctrine (whence the name τῶν κατηχουμένων is also derived; cf. Acts XVIII. 25; Gal. VI. 6); to the attainment of charity through holiness of conversation and morals; and to the preparation for the baptism of regeneration and for insertion into the Church, through faith itself and holiness of life, and also through many sacred ceremonies which refer to the sacrament of baptism itself and as it were prepare the way for it. These sacred rites are described in the sacramentary books, and some of them, and among these « the sacrament of catechumens, » Augustine mentions. « I think catechumens too are, in a certain manner of their own, sanctified by the sign of Christ and by the prayer of the laying on of hands; and what they receive, although it is not the body of Christ, is nevertheless holy (namely the salt, which he elsewhere calls « a blessed form », de catechizandis rudibus c. 23; cf. Confessions l. I, c. 2), and holier than the food by which we are sustained, because it is a sacrament.... ¹¹ The sanctification of a catechumen, if he has not been baptized, is not valid for him to enter into the kingdom of heaven, or for the remission of sins » Aug. de peccat. merit. et remiss. c. 26, n. 42.

The rigour of discipline was sometimes observed more severely, especially in the last stage of the catechumenate (of those to be enlightened, τῶν φωτιζομένων, or among the Latins competentes, that is, those who seek baptism together with others). « Let those who are to be baptized give their names, and be examined for a long time with abstinence from wine and meat, and frequent laying on of hands, and then receive baptism » (can. 85, in the « Statutes of the ancient Church, » which were wrongly ascribed to the Council of Carthage IV; Harduin, I, p. 984). Augustine records the same of the days « on which, having given their names, those about to receive the grace (of baptism) are purified by abstinence, fasts, and exorcisms » Aug. de fide et operib. c. 6, n. 8. In the same place, however, he shows that all these things lead finally to inducing repentance and the amendment of vices, « lest what is holy be given to dogs. » « What else, indeed, does the whole time in which they hold the place and name of catechumens do, but that they may hear what faith and what kind of life a Christian ought to have, so that, when they have proved themselves, then they may eat from the table of the Lord and drink from the cup? (the reception of the Eucharist is, indeed, joined with baptism)... What is done throughout the whole time in which it is wholesomely established in the Church that the grade of catechumens receives those who approach the name of Christ (al. accipiant), this is done much more diligently and urgently in these days, in which they are called competentes, when they have given their names to receive baptism. » Ibid. n. 11.

Therefore, if we ask how catechumens were and are subjects of the Church, since (as Eusebius says) « the people of subjects is divided into two orders, of the faithful and of the not yet baptized, » that is, of the catechumens, there is a difference between the two. For the baptized (even those excluded from the Church), by the sacramental character itself (as we demonstrated above), are subject not only to the teaching authority but to the properly so-called power of jurisdiction, lawmaking, judicial, coercive or punitive. But catechumens too are indeed bound to the teaching authority, and therefore to all those dispositions of the Church which refer to instruction and to the fitting preparation for baptism, not strictly by force of ecclesiastical and human law, but from the obligation of divine law and, that being supposed, of natural law, by which they are bound to faith, to penance, to baptism, and to morals conforming to these laws: « Repent, and let each one of you be baptized. » Acts II. 38.

By the same principle must be explained, and to the same end were ordered, the penalties also to which the catechumens were subjected. For all those penalties which are said to be imposed on catechumens are finally referred to the prolongation of the catechumenate and to the deferment of baptism, so that those who, having committed graver sins, seemed not yet sufficiently disposed, might more carefully prepare themselves for baptism and for the Christian life. Thus, in the 5th canon of Neocaesarea, for sins committed ¹², and in the 14th Nicene canon ¹³ for lapse in persecution, catechumens are relegated to the first stage of the catechumenate, which was that of hearers. In the Council of Illiberis, in which also many other matters are obscure or abnormal, for adultery and infanticide (can. 68), baptism of a catechumena is deferred until the end of life: « it has pleased that she be baptized at the end. » Moreover, that only those who show that they are unwilling to renounce sins, either by deeds or even by open profession, are to be repelled from baptism, and that the whole discipline of catechumens refers to this « renunciation, » St. Augustine demonstrates throughout the whole book On Faith and Works. Persons of this kind, who after a suitable probation give no hope of amendment, are obviously to be cast out even from the order of catechumens, as the cited Neocaesarean canon prescribes.

3°. It is clear that catechumens can conceive, and especially the sincere competentes have already conceived, the true faith and the desire of union with the Church, outside which there is no salvation. Faith being supposed, especially along with so many external helps to which inner grace is joined, they can also advance to acts of perfect charity, and so be justified before God before the real reception of the sacrament. This is still more evident in martyrdom for Christ, which catechumens, before they could be baptized, sometimes underwent. Whence theologians customarily distinguish baptism of water, of blood, and of the Spirit or of penance, as St. Thomas (3, q. 66, a. 11) and Alexander of Hales (P. IV, q. 8, m. 9, a. 4) call them; or, as others speak with St. Bonaventure (4, dist. 4, P. II, a. 1, q. 1), baptism of water, of the Spirit and of blood. These two (desire and martyrdom) are called baptism not properly but metonymically, insofar as they have a relation to baptism through the implicit desire for it; and so there always remains in this life the obligation to the sacrament of baptism itself ¹⁴. But it has received the name of baptism principally insofar as it is substituted in the place of baptism properly so called, not indeed for all its effects, but for the effect of justification. Martyrdom, indeed, is also called baptism metaphorically, from the likeness. « As many of us as have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death (εἰς τὸν θάνατον αὐτοῦ)... for if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also (planted together in the likeness) of his resurrection. » Rom. VI. 3, 5. But this similitude, which is symbolic in baptism, is perfected as a real likeness in martyrdom, through the imitation of the passion and bloody death of Jesus Christ, which he himself called baptism: « with the baptism with which I am baptized, you shall be baptized. » Mark X. 39; cf. Luke XII. 50. St. Thomas explains the likeness and efficacy of the death of Christ: « the passion of Christ's death works indeed in the baptism of water through a certain figurative representation... but in the baptism of blood through imitation of the act » St. Thomas, 3, q. 66, a. 12.

Hence the effect of justification is entirely certain, both in the baptism of the Spirit, « or (St. Thomas, l.c. a. 11) of the Holy Spirit, insofar, namely, as the heart of someone is moved by the Holy Spirit to believe and to love God and to repent of sins, » and still more in the baptism of blood, which indeed has efficacy ex opere operato even in infants (see Suárez, On the Sacraments, disp. 29, sect. 1).

« They object the catechumens to us: if any of these, before being baptized in the Church, has been apprehended in confession of the name and killed, whether he loses the hope of salvation and the reward of confession, because he was not previously reborn of water. Let them know, then... that those catechumens are not deprived of the sacrament of baptism (that is, of its effect), since they are baptized with the most glorious and greatest baptism of blood, of which the Lord also said that he had another baptism to be baptized with » (Luke XII. 50). St. Cyprian, ep. 73, ad Jubaianum, p. 136.

Although the Fathers at times mention only martyrdom, by which salvation can be obtained without actual reception of baptism ¹⁵; it is nevertheless certain that inchoate salvation or justification is also attributed to an act of charity, which by its nature, namely by the will to observe all divine precepts, includes the desire of baptism. Already in the third century the author of the book On Rebaptism, contemporary with Cyprian, deliberately distinguishes three kinds of the one baptism (as he says): baptism of the Spirit, of water and of blood. Citing Acts X. 44, he first demonstrates the effect of baptism of the Spirit. « And there will be no doubt that men can be baptized in the Holy Spirit without water, as you notice these (Cornelius and his people) were baptized before they were baptized with water... since these too received the grace of promise without the laying on of hands of the Apostles and without the washing which they later obtained; and so God, by their faith, also granted them the remission of sins at the same time, their hearts having been cleansed a little before. » Then he discusses baptism of blood from Matt. X. 32, thus: « But what will you decide concerning a man who hears the word, who, perhaps seized in the name of Christ, immediately confessed, and was punished before he was permitted to be baptized with water? Will you pronounce that he has perished, because he was not baptized with water?... It makes no difference whether this man who confesses to the Lord is a hearer of the word or one of the faithful » (namely by confession of martyrdom). Anonymous, among the works of Cyprian, ed. Baluzius, pp. 356, 361. Very well known is Ambrose's « consolation on the death of Valentinian » the younger, who while still a catechumen perished by the treachery of Count Arbogast in Gaul. « Or if this disturbs you because the mysteries were not solemnly celebrated; then neither would martyrs be crowned if they were catechumens, for they are not crowned if they are not initiated. But if they are washed in their own blood, this man too his piety and his will have washed. » Ambrose, de obitu Valentiniani, n. 53; cf. n. 30, 51, 52, 75. Augustine teaches the same doctrine. « I find that not only passion for the name of Christ can supply what was lacking of baptism, but also faith and conversion of heart, if perhaps help cannot be given in the straits of time to celebrate the mystery of baptism..... but then it is fulfilled invisibly, when the ministry of baptism is excluded not by contempt of religion but by the necessity of the moment. » Aug. de Baptismo, l. IV, n. 29; cf. in Leviticum q. 84. St. Bernard demonstrates this truth excellently in his treatise on baptism and in other questions to Hugh of St. Victor, ch. 2. Finally, the Council of Trent, sess. VI, c. 4, after defining that justification is a translation into the state of grace and of adoption of the sons of God, adds: « which translation after the promulgation of the Gospel cannot be made without the laver of regeneration or its desire, as it is written: unless one is born again of water and the Holy Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. » To this belongs the condemnation of the propositions of Baius 31, 32, 33, 43, 71.

4°. Undoubtedly, those who are already imbued with the true faith, and still more those already justified by charity, and who seal the true faith by the blood of martyrdom, even if they could not be initiated into the sacrament of faith, would pertain to the Church of God taken in the wider sense, of which we spoke in thesis II, if such a Church on earth existed now, in the time of the New Testament. But since Christ founded his universal Church on earth in its own visible form, with its own institutions and laws, there is no other Church of Christ on earth besides this visible one (th. XXI.). All those, therefore, who are not initiated by baptism, which is the gate to the Church, cannot be said simply to belong to the visible Church of Christ, nor are they participants in its visible mysteries, nor subject to its laws (formally, as the laws of the Church are). Hence catechumens, whether martyrdom is imminent or whether they are justified by charity without it, are bound by divine precept to be « incorporated into the Church » (these are Augustine's words), as far as is in their power. If they knowingly and willingly refused to fulfil this, the necessary condition of charity, and therefore of justification, would already be lacking. Therefore Augustine said that the effect of the sacrament is then fulfilled invisibly in the conversion of heart, « when the ministry of baptism is excluded not by contempt of religion but by the necessity of the moment. » But in the same place the holy Doctor warns that a catechumen, however much already justified, like Cornelius who had already received the Holy Spirit (Acts 2. 4. 44.), is not yet in the Church until he is baptized. « We ought not to disapprove the righteousness of the man, which began before it was joined to the Church, just as the righteousness of Cornelius had begun before he himself was in the Christian people » Aug., l.c., n. 28. ¹⁶ Concerning the same Cornelius he declares elsewhere the necessity of baptism for this effect, that he might be incorporated into the Church; and therefore, if baptism is neglected through the catechumen's own fault, the antecedent righteousness does not suffice to obtain the kingdom of heaven, because that very justification would be abolished through the fault. « In some there is so much grace of faith as does not suffice for obtaining the kingdom of heaven: as in catechumens (unless, namely, the conditions are present of which we heard Augustine's teaching above), as in Cornelius himself (the obligation of baptism remaining), before he was incorporated into the Church by participation in the sacraments » Id., l. I, q. 2, n. 2, to Simplician.

What the Apostle said, therefore, of the members of the Church, « one body, one Spirit... in one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism » (Eph. IV. 4), is verified in those justified persons of whom we speak according to all that is spiritual. For there is one spirit, and therefore one charity, in one faith and in one hope of calling, and therefore they adhere to one Lord (cf. 1 Cor. VI. 17). Yet that visible element which the Apostle joins with the invisible, and which by itself, by the institution and law of Christ, ought to be joined, is not verified in them in act, but only by the desire of the will: « one body and one baptism. » For since, as the Apostle teaches, « we were baptized into one body, » those who lack baptism belong not in act but only by desire, and so not simply but in some respect to one body; yet by charity itself and by the very desire of the will they are in one Spirit. This is what is commonly said, distinguishing the body and soul of the Church. Therefore those who die in that state, whether by martyrdom or without martyrdom, joined with the Lord and with the Spirit whom he gave to his Church, although without fault of their own they lack the visible element and its character, are united to the triumphant Church and the communion of all the Saints (see th. II.). Hence it is understood that, just as the martyrs of the Old Testament, so too martyrs who were catechumens, no differently from baptized martyrs, are to be honoured by the militant Church; for they are recognized and acknowledged, from the visible act of martyrdom, by the militant Church itself as its members in some respect, by perfection of disposition (which we shall declare in the following thesis), and by that same disposition simply as members of the triumphant Church ¹⁷.

« Although, in the manner just said in the preceding thesis, some may be justified and saved without being recognized in the external forum as belonging to the visible Church; yet, first, those very persons are not saved except through the Church, whose is the word of faith and on whose account the saving graces are given; and they are not saved except in the Church, to which they are joined, not only to its spirit but also to its visible elements, by a will which — before God is reckoned as the deed. — For these visible elements, second, by divine institution are not of necessity of precept only but of necessity of means to justification and salvation; wherefore justification in the New Testament is never effected without reference to them, and without at least a spiritual conjunction of the man with the same visible elements; and so before God and the Church triumphant it exists not without union with the Church on earth. Nor indeed, third, does the union of some such members with the Church — and sanctification without the visible sacraments — stand in the way of the dogma of the visibility of Christ's Church. »

Since the Church of Christ, as we have seen above, is the one and only divinely constituted expression and, as it were, the incorporation of the whole revealed religion, by which God wills all men to be saved in this restored order, and without which no one is saved, it follows from this very fact that to be united to, and to belong to, this Church is not only to be some means, but to be an absolutely necessary means to salvation. The Church, therefore, is a society not left to the morally free option of men, but necessary. Here, however, the connection with what has been disputed hitherto wholly requires that it be declared what sort of union with the Church must be understood from the Catholic dogma, since we profess « that no one is saved outside the Church. » From this very declaration another question arises: how actual union with the Church is said to be necessary not only from the divine precept but also as a necessary means of eternal salvation. Finally, a certain shadow will have to be dispelled, which from this doctrine might occur to someone concerning the very visibility of the Church.

I. From what has been demonstrated above it is certain that catechumens and excommunicated persons, before the former are « incorporated » by baptism, and the latter restored to the Church by absolution, may, given true faith — explicit at least in the necessary articles and implicit in all the revealed truths — by God's grace attain to an act of charity and contrition; and with this charity, as the proximate disposition, justification is infallibly connected, and with justification, if they die thus before actual union with the visible Church of Christ, eternal salvation. « For those who are led by the Spirit of God, they are sons of God..... And if sons, also heirs » (Rom. VIII. 14. 17.). It is manifest, moreover, that this holds equally if baptized heretics, or unbaptized unbelievers, are converted to the true faith — either by an internal proposition with internal grace, or in an extraordinary manner by internal illumination alone, which supplies the external word (see the treatise On Tradition and Scripture, Appendix, ed. 2, c. 3, p. 609; c. 5, p. 691, and the doctrine of St. Thomas cited there, De Veritate q. 14, a. 11; 3 dist. 25, q. 2, a. 1, sol. 1); for such heretics would then be on a par with excommunicated faithful, and unbelievers with catechumens. These things stand together in their truth and are to be reconciled with the other Catholic doctrine, defined in the Fourth Lateran Council against the Albigenses, and often defined elsewhere: « There is one universal Church of the faithful, outside which absolutely no one is saved » (chapter Firmiter credimus). Lest, however, in such definitions the name Church be taken in the wider sense, in which faith is assumed as the sole essential and sufficient bond of the members of the Church (cf. th. II.), both many other things ensure, and also the explicit declaration of Pius IX in a solemn allocution (delivered on 9 December 1854 to the Cardinals and Bishops who, from the whole world, had been present at the definition of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin); for in these words the Pontiff enunciated the dogma: « It must indeed be held from faith that no one can be saved outside the Apostolic Roman Church. » The whole reconciliation comes to this: from indubitable Catholic doctrine the bonds and connections with the Church are explained, by which it comes about that those very persons who cohere with the Church of Christ only « in part » and in some respect can be saved, and are saved by the merciful grace of Christ through the Church, and not without regard to their relation to the Church.

1. True faith, which must be supposed in all those of whom we speak as the foundation on which charity and justification, and therefore eternal salvation, rest, can be considered according to the external proposition « (faith comes by hearing) » and according to the internal grace of illumination and motion « (no one comes to me unless the Father draw him). »

a) The word of God, the object of faith in the present economy, was, according to Christ's institution, first promulgated by Christ and the Holy Spirit revealing it through the Church; and it has been kept, by the same Church assisted by the Spirit of truth, through the course of the centuries, sincere and entire as a deposit committed to her. The very credibility of the word is constituted through the charisms of the Church; for to her, in whom the divinely revealed religion is incorporated, all the motives of credibility refer and from her they proceed, so that the Church is a certain complex of these, and herself, in herself, a great and perfect motive of credibility. (Vatican Council, Const. Dei Filius ch. 3. Cf. treatise On Tradition, Appendix, ch. V.) To all those, therefore, who conceive true faith « from the hearing of the word of God » the preaching does not reach, nor is the word proposed to them (even without their knowing it) as credible and to be believed, except insofar as it is preserved through the true Church of Christ. In no way does this proposition of the word as credible and to be believed come about, or can it come about, through sects, which have fallen from the Church, that is, from the sole divinely constituted guardian and herald of truth, and from that great motive of credibility which is always conspicuous, and are exiles from it; of whom not only does the rebuke hold, « did the word of God come forth from you? », but that much graver sentence: « they hold the truth of God in unrighteousness. » (Rom. I. 18; 1 Cor. XIV. 36.)¹

b) The internal grace of illumination and motion extends indeed more widely than the visible Church; otherwise every conversion to the Church itself would be impossible, since faith and the very beginning of faith cannot be received by anyone, as is fitting, without this grace (Council of Orange II, can. 5). Whence also the propositions of Quesnel (26, 27, 29) and of Pistoia (22) were condemned, which restricted the aids of grace to the faithful alone: « Outside the Church no grace is granted »². But just as the ultimate end which God intends from himself in bestowing all graces is eternal salvation, so the nearer end of all the graces which are granted outside the Church is conversion to the Church itself. For the two stages, the kingdom of God begun on earth, which is the Church, and the kingdom of God consummated in heaven, succeed one another and are connected in the divine economy into one communion of saints: « he who believes and has been baptized (in the kingdom of sanctification) will be saved; » « he wills all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth (in the kingdom of truth). » (Mark XVI. 16; 1 Tim. II. 4.) Just as, therefore, graces are granted outside the Church to form the members of the Church, if men are willing to cooperate, so all those same graces can most truly be said to be given with regard to the Church. Whoever, therefore, outside the body of the Church are led to faith and charity, and thus seem able to be saved outside the Church, in fact do not attain those supernatural dispositions, and consequently justification and salvation, except through the word of the Church as guardian of the deposit, and through the grace of the Church, not indeed as its dispenser but as the proximate end for which and with regard to which graces are granted by God. This first sense is the fundamental one, in which it must be said that absolutely no one is saved except through the Church³.

2. This sense is most true indeed, but it must be supplemented by another consideration, so that we may understand the dogma by which we profess that no one, not even those very persons just spoken of, is saved outside the Church. We saw in thesis XIX that the whole Church, and each of its institutions, after the pattern of its head, the incarnate Word, is composed of a twofold element, one visible and by its nature natural, the other invisible and essentially supernatural in itself, by which the former is informed and supernaturally raised: « one body and one spirit. » The end, moreover, of all these institutions and of the whole Church militant is the transformation and sanctification of the world, and its glorification into the Church triumphant; and in all these, the glory of Christ and of God: « that God may be all in all » (th. XX.). The conjunction of both elements, visible and invisible, body and spirit, in the Church is so intimate that sanctification, and consequently eternal salvation or glorification, can be hoped for or had, for all men and for each individual, only through union with the Church itself, insofar as she is not spirit only but body and spirit: « Christ is the head of the Church; he himself is the savior of her body... and gave himself for her, that he might sanctify her... and present to himself the glorious Church. » Therefore, just as the body, or visible elements, in the Church neither sanctify nor save without the spirit, that is, without the informing divine and invisible elements, so the spirit does not work sanctification and salvation without union and relation to the body of the Church. Nevertheless, in the manner of this necessary union with the body, and so in the necessary use of the visible elements, justification by the work performed (ex opere operato) and justification by the work of the one working (ex opere operantis) must be distinguished. About the work performed nothing needs to be said here; for it is plain that this is not accomplished except through the visible sacrament of baptism, by which, faith being supposed, incorporation into the Church is completed, or through other sacraments which already presuppose that those to be justified are actually members of the Church. Whence for those who are incapable of the work of the one working there is left no other way of salvation besides this justification in the Church. But if we speak of the work of the one working, the necessity of the use of visible elements, and in general of union with the body of the Church, remains indeed, yet it does not have the same character.

Let us consider first, for some clarification of this matter, the justification of a sinner within the Church itself. The power of sacramental jurisdiction, or the power of the keys in the internal forum, and so the sacrament of penance, is by divine institution of Christ a means necessary for the remission of sins for the faithful themselves within the Church; nevertheless a sinner can obtain remission of sins and justification by the work of the one working, and he does so whenever he elicits an act of perfect charity and of contrition in it, without being absolved from his sins in the sacrament by the power of the keys.

Yet in this justification there remains not only the divine precept but also that necessity of the sacrament which is called the necessity of the means, of which we shall speak in a moment; and therefore there remains not only the obligation to submit all sins to the keys, but also the inward relation of the justification itself to the same power of the keys and to the sacrament⁴, which is itself the cause why, in every act of perfect contrition for sins not yet remitted by absolution, the will to receive the sacrament is implicitly contained. This most certain Catholic doctrine shows that the actual use of the external and visible means can be supplied by internal acts of charity in justification by the work of the one working; yet in this very thing the sinner, by divine positive right, has a bond and connection with the visible sacrament as the necessary means of justification⁵.

Now, with respect to the reason of necessary means for justification and consequently for salvation, the condition of the sinner within the Church, as regards the sacrament of penance, is on a par with that of those who are outside the Church, with respect to baptism and in general to union with the visible Church. Just as, therefore, in the former case, so also in these, perfect disposition by the work of the one working can supply for the sacrament of faith actually received and for actual union with the visible Church, so that this union is completed in the internal forum and before the Church triumphant, without being so in the external forum before the Church militant. Augustine calls this (l. qq. 50. in Levitic. ch. 84.) « invisible sanctification without the visible sacraments. » Although it is most true that such men are united with the invisible elements, with the spirit, and, as is commonly said, with the soul of the Church, yet this itself is not accomplished without relation to the body itself, that is, to the Church visible on earth. For just as the justification of a sinner within the Church, which is by the work of the one working, is not to be ascribed to contrition without a desire of the sacrament of penance — on account of which the sinner has a necessary relation and, as far as in him lies and by his own desire, a conjunction with the sacrament — so in those who are outside, justification is not to be ascribed to contrition without a desire of baptism, and through this to union with the body of the Church, if they have not been baptized⁶; and if they have been baptized, the same justification is not accomplished without a desire of the sacrament of penance, and by this very fact of reconciliation and reintegration in the visible Church. They therefore have a necessary relation for justification, and, as far as in them lies and by their own acts, a conjunction not only with the soul but with the very body of the Church. For it holds, as St. Bernard follows through with many examples (Tract. to Hugh of St. Victor, on baptism and other questions, ch. 2, n. 8), that just as for evil, so for good, and by their nature necessary, external acts, « the will (before God) is counted as the deed, where necessity excludes the deed. » Those, therefore, who are thus justified and saved are saved not only through the Church in the sense we have said above, but also (insofar as it lies in them) in the Church, and certainly not outside the Church. They are always known before God and the Church triumphant; and sometimes, through manifest external acts, such as martyrdom for the faith and for Catholic union, they can be recognized and acknowledged also by the Church militant. « Certainly the shedding of blood for Christ is an indubitable proof of great faith, yet not before God but before men... For surely, since martyrdom has obtained that prerogative from no other source than the merit of faith, that it is singularly and securely accepted in the place of baptism, I do not see why faith itself should not equally avail just as much before God even without martyrdom, to whom it is doubtless known even without the proof of martyrdom. » St. Bernard, l. c.

Having said these things, we have nearly already anticipated the solution of another question: how the conjunction with the Church is required not only by necessity of precept but entirely by necessity of means for salvation.

1°. Means, in the manner of speaking of theologians, has here the sense of cause. Those things, and only those, are therefore necessary for salvation by necessity of means which lead to salvation by way of cause, whether formal, or efficient and disposing, in such a way that without them salvation cannot be obtained. There are, however, these in a threefold order. a) Fundamentally, and by way of formal cause, the necessary means is sanctifying grace. The necessity of this means, in the present supernatural order, is fundamental, since this grace alone suffices, and without it nothing suffices for salvation; the other means are necessary insofar as they are required to build this very foundation of sanctifying grace. Thus b) for adults, in order to sanctifying grace itself, and through this to salvation, the necessary means are actual graces by way of disposing cause. Both these causes are necessary from the very proper nature of supernatural beatitude, and so far from the very nature of the thing, apart from any other special institution of God as sanctifier and beatifier. But c) in the present order there are certain other necessary means, by way of efficient cause, for acquiring sanctifying grace and therefore eternal salvation, by a special positive institution of God: namely the sacrament of baptism, and through it union with the kingdom of Christ, which is the Church; and, for sinners who are already enrolled in the Church, the sacrament of penance. These sacraments are instituted in such a way that baptism indeed, for those who are incapable of the work of the one working, and either sacrament for those who by the work of the one working have removed the obstacle to grace but have not attained the perfect disposition of charity, are necessary means in themselves, that is, in actual application, by which they effect sanctifying grace, and baptism together with it the formation of a member of the Church, instrumentally, by the work performed (ex opere operato). Nevertheless, because these instruments of grace are external, and because (as the Fathers Ambrose, Augustine, Bernard and the rest teach in this matter) before God a perfect « will is counted as the deed; » hence it comes about that God takes up the perfect disposition through an act of charity, insofar as it includes the will for the sacrament instituted in the Church and, from this institution, necessary in itself for justification, « as the deed of the sacrament » for the effect of justification and (as regards the will for baptism) for the effect of union with the Church before God and before the Church triumphant. God therefore justifies, and (in the manner explained) invisibly forms a member of the Church, not on account of the act of charity alone considered in itself and precisely, but at the same time on account of the will or desire of baptism, which is included in the act of charity, « counting the will as the deed » of the sacrament instituted by him and necessary for the effect of justification and of union with the Church.

Such, without doubt, is the doctrine of the Council of Trent mentioned above. From the words of the Saviour, « unless one is born again of water and the Holy Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God, » the Council proves that translation into the state of grace and of the sons of God « cannot be accomplished after the Gospel is promulgated without the laver of regeneration or its desire. » The holy Synod therefore teaches that in the words of Christ by which the act itself of the laver of regeneration, or baptism, is expressed, and so is instituted as a necessary means, there is included also the desire of baptism (namely perfected by charity), because the will is counted as the deed before God; and therefore sanctification is also then effected with regard to baptism, insofar as the man before God becomes spiritually a participant by the desire itself in « water and the Holy Spirit, » so that it always remains true that no one⁷ can enter the kingdom of God, whether begun on earth or consummated in heaven, or be transferred into the state of the sons of God, unless he is born again of water and of the Holy Spirit: per se indeed by the actual application of baptism, but, as it were per accidens, at least by its spiritual application through the desire of perfect will. The same therefore holds of translation into the state of the sons of God as regards the unbaptized as the Council expressly teaches of the justification of baptized sinners: in both cases, indeed, justification is effected by an act of perfect charity or contrition, yet after the Gospel, that is, after the institution of both sacraments as necessary means for justification and salvation, « the reconciliation itself is nevertheless not to be ascribed to contrition itself without the desire of the sacrament which is included in it. » In this sense, therefore, must be understood what St. Thomas said, that remission of sins can be obtained through the acts of the penitent « nevertheless insofar as these acts are in some way ordained to the keys of the Church; » that is, insofar as a man is spiritually joined to the sacrament, as a means necessary by Christ's institution for justification, through the desire of the sacrament of baptism or penance, which is included in contrition. This sense seems quite clearly expressed in the doctrine of the Tridentine synod, and Cardinal de Lugo defends it in a somewhat subtler discussion (On the Sacrament of the Eucharist, disp. III, sect. 1).

2°. Lest importunate difficulties be thrust upon us, three things are to be noted. a) The desire of the sacrament is included in the act of perfect charity or contrition, insofar as it is a general will to fulfil all divine precepts and to use all the means instituted by God as necessary for reconciliation. Whence it is not required that this desire of the sacrament be conceived as special and explicit; but indeed, in an act of charity elicited even by a man who knows nothing of, or does not think about, the necessity of the sacrament, that will, or that desire, is necessarily contained implicitly. b) Hence the difference between justification by an act of charity in the Old and in the New Testament is not on the side of man, as if in the New Testament a different and more explicit act were required than in the Old economy; but the difference lies in the objectively different economy itself, in that now there are some precepts and necessary institutions which previously did not exist; and therefore the general will to observe and to perform all things necessary now contains the implicit desire of the sacrament of baptism or penance, which previously it did not contain. On God's side, however, the act of forgiving sins and sanctifying by infusion of grace, now after the institution of the sacrament as a necessary means to justification, regards the spiritual conjunction of man with the sacrament itself through its implicit desire. c) This is not to be understood as if the sacrament, which is not actually conferred, exercised some efficacy and power by the work performed; but the whole power lies in the perfection of the disposition by the work of the one working. God, however (as has been said, and is plain from the doctrine of the Council), takes this work of the one working as the ultimate disposition for infusing grace, insofar as perfect charity includes the desire of baptism and, through this, union with the Church; and so, « counting the will as the deed, » he justifies the man and spiritually unites him before himself to the Church, not without relation to the visible sacrament as a necessary means instituted by himself.

3°. From what has been said it is clear how necessity of means differs from that which is only necessity of precept, not only as regards the internal grace, about which the matter is clear in itself, but also as regards the external means of the sacrament of baptism and of penance. For a) those which have only the necessity of precept are not instituted as causes for infusing grace, but are necessary only to avoid sin and to remove the obstacle to grace; whereas those which are of necessity of means have, by divine institution, the character of a cause for the infusion of grace. Although, therefore, in an act of charity and contrition there is implicitly contained, for example, the will to restore another's goods, as the will for baptism is contained, yet that is included only to exclude the will to sin, and thus to remove the obstacle to grace, without restitution itself being the cause of grace; whereas the desire of baptism is a will for a thing not only commanded but also instituted, so as to be per se an instrumental cause of grace. Hence the Council of Trent never said that justification is not to be ascribed to contrition without the will to fulfil all precepts, for this is already understood of itself and is contained in the very name of contrition, by which the will to sin is excluded; but on the contrary, although among all those precepts there is contained also the precept of the sacrament of baptism and penance, the holy Synod expressly distinguished these, and taught that no one can be transferred into the state of the sons of God without baptism or its desire, not only because, as in the other precepts, the will to sin must be excluded, but because Christ instituted baptism as the cause of regeneration: « unless one is born again of water and the Holy Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God; » and by a like reasoning the justification of a sinner within the Church is « not to be ascribed to contrition itself without the desire of the sacrament which is included in it » (see above, n. I.). b) Because of this character of cause, a second difference arises: namely that those which have only the necessity of precept⁸ are necessary so that no one sins and sets up an obstacle to grace, not as though they were themselves efficacious of grace; therefore all the conditions which excuse from sin, for example inculpable ignorance, also bring it about that they are not, and cannot be called, necessary for justification and salvation. But in those which are of necessity of means, conditions of this kind do indeed excuse from a new sin, yet by no means bring it about that they cease to be necessary means to the grace of which they are the cause, and consequently to salvation. Although, therefore, one who is invincibly ignorant of the existence or necessity of the sacrament is excused from sin on account of this his ignorance, yet he is not justified nor saved from sins otherwise contracted except through the implicit desire of the sacrament, as we have said, « which is counted as the deed before God. »

III. From the distinction declared, when we say that some are joined to the Church of Christ in the internal forum alone, « before God and the Church triumphant, » but not also in the external forum before the Church militant, and so not visibly but by « invisible sanctification without the visible sacraments, » and by the desire of the sacrament alone, « which is counted as the deed before God, » there could arise a doubt about how this doctrine is reconciled with the visibility of the Church.

But, first, the property of the Church by which she is conspicuous consists chiefly in conspicuous teaching, ministry and priesthood, and consequently in the visible exercise of authentic doctrine, sacred government, sacrifice and sacraments (th. XXI.); that all of these remain whole, and suffer no harm from the doctrine proposed in this thesis, is plain in itself.

Second, as regards the members of the Church, its visibility is by no means of such a kind that it must be known with infallible certainty, distributively of each one, that they truly and before God belong or do not belong to the Church; since with such certainty we know neither of each one's baptismal character, nor of their internal faith, nor of their immunity from excommunication. For the divine promise and revelation concerns not each of the members but the visibility of the Church. By it we are made certain, generally and cumulatively, of the whole body of those who are distinguished by external signs, that they belong not feignedly only but truly and before God to the Church of Christ on earth, with that infallible certainty by which God has promised that he will preserve his Church on earth — which is none other than visible and gathered from believing men — until the consummation of the age, and that by this very fact he will never permit that in her true faith, true administration of sacraments and sacrifice, and true communion under sacred government should fail. Nothing, however, is taken from this visible union and communion because some individuals in it are perhaps not true but feigned members; and much less does anything stand in its way that certain individuals are constituted members of the same Church only in the internal forum and before God, and not also in the external forum before the Church militant. With the visibility of the body of the Church safe, certain individuals can seem to be members of the Church and not truly be such before God; conversely, certain individuals can truly be members before God and not be seen as its members by the Church militant, because, as in the bad, so in the good, « the will is counted as the deed » before God, but not before men.

« It has been revealed, both practically by the divine institutions in the Church and theoretically by explicit doctrine in the Scriptures, and luminously explained in Catholic tradition, that not only the just but all sinners, except those whom in the preceding theses we demonstrated to be outcasts from the Church, are truly and simply members of the visible Church. Nor do the Fathers, and Augustine by name, contradict this truth, when¹ they seem to deny that sinners belong to the Church; but they consider the Church in some respect, namely according to the proximate end of actual sanctification, and according to the gift of holiness. »

So far it has been proved which men do not belong to the Church of Christ on earth, and therefore not to the visible Church. But now it is further asked whether this enumeration and removal, as a kind of negative list, from the roll of the members of the Church, is complete; or whether rather, just as heresy, schism and excommunication inflicted for crimes exclude from the kingdom of God on earth, that is from the Church, so other sins also, whether all or at least notorious and public sins, exclude before and apart from the sentence of excommunication? For no less than the truth of faith and social charity, holiness and theological charity seem to be the proper form of the Church; whence, as those who lack the former do not seem to belong to the Church celebrated in the Scriptures and in tradition, so neither do those deprived of this holiness seem to belong to the Church which is celebrated in the Scriptures and in tradition, and which by its very foundation and by its end is proved to be the kingdom of holiness just as much as the kingdom of truth.

But that sinners guilty of any crimes whatever, except those described in the preceding theses, are and remain truly and simply members of the Church, is so clear from the very nature of the visible Church, from her whole life and history, and from her doctrine and institutions, that it is remarkable this truth could be attacked by heretics, both ancient — Montanists, Novatians, Pelagians², Donatists — and in the Middle Ages by the many sects of the Cathars, and more recently by Protestants and Jansenists, though by different ones in different ways. But indeed the ancient sects and the Jansenists perverted the true reason of the holiness of the Church and of sanctification through the Church; and for the deformers of the sixteenth century, and now for their disciples who still profess themselves Christians, setting aside also their absurd theories of justification, it was and is necessary to have that fiction of an invisible Church consisting only of saints or of the predestined, in order to persuade men that their sect, newly fashioned, had always existed from Christ and the Apostles, though known or knowable to no mortal; or rather in order to affirm this, as stubbornly as foolishly, against Catholics, who convinced them by an unavoidable argument of defection from the faith and communion of the perennial Church of Jesus Christ. Partly, therefore, for the further vindication of visibility, and partly for the declaration of the inner condition and end of the Church on earth, belongs this demonstration of the union and mingling of sinners with the just and holy members in one body.

I. The end of the Church, and of all her institutions, is indeed the perfection of holiness and of union with God; but the Church on earth is still on the way, and consummation will not be except at the term of the blessed vision and enjoyment. Hence the Church on earth militates that she may become triumphant in heaven; she strives in the contest that she may win the prize; the kingdom begun strives toward the consummated, faith toward vision, hope toward enjoyment, charity still changeable and in pain toward unchangeable charity in full blessedness. In this twofold state, the former is indeed imperfect even as regards the whole body, in comparison with the second, perfect state ³, just as the Apostle compares what now is only in part (ἐκ μέρους, in part) with what is to come, perfect (τὸ τέλειον, the perfect): the state of faith on earth, as children, with the state of vision, as grown men (1 Cor. XIII. 9-12). Nor yet, because of this imperfection, which is called negative, does the Church cease to be the bride and body of Christ; so also the imperfection privative of sin in many single members, who are indeed sick, yet not finally dead and torn from the body⁴ but to be healed in the body itself, does not take away from them the character of members ⁵, and the less does it destroy the truth of the body of Christ, which is still « being built up » and growing, and has not yet come « to the perfect man, to the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ » (Eph. IV. 12-16).

1°. Indeed the Lord taught his Church, and in it and for it instituted a form of prayer, by which its members are commanded to cry out unceasingly, in union and communion: forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors. This prayer, as appears from the very universality of its words, is not referred only to those daily sins, which do not take away grace, and of which the disciple whom Jesus loved testifies: « if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us » (1 Jn I. 8); but rather even more to grave sins, namely to obtain the disposition necessary for remission ⁶. This is manifest as much from the words of the prayer and from the far greater need of grace for the remission of grave crimes⁷, as from the parable of the one among the king's servants « who owed him ten thousand talents » (Matt. XVIII. 23 ff.). For in that parable the divine Master declared that very connection between our forgiving and our obtaining from God the remission of debts, which he had expressed in the form of the prayer ⁸; and debts are there adduced as an example, not now slight but most grave, to be remitted by God.

In accordance with this norm divinely prescribed, the Church, mindful of the weakness of her sons, pleads with God in her public and private prayers almost more urgently and frequently than anything else, both for preservation from sins to be committed and for purgation from sins committed: « God, the institutor and ruler of your people, drive out the sins by which it is assailed; » « may the confession of our guilt obtain the indulgence of its offences; » « mercifully grant us the indulgence of all our faults; » « restraining our sins by voluntary mortification, may we be chastised temporally rather than be assigned to eternal punishments; » « may we deserve, by your protection, to be rescued from the imminent dangers of our sins, and by your deliverance to be saved. »

These things, and their twins repeated in the liturgical books of all the rites of the West and the East, are not only a truthful and humble prayer according to the law of praying, but at the same time a confession of faith according to the law of believing; and it is connected with that faith by which we believe the Church as she now is on earth. For with faith in the Father, and in the Son incarnate and redeemer, and in the Holy Spirit, is joined in the apostolic creed, and in the others that follow, the faith by which we believe not indeed in the Church but the Church, and the communion of the saints, as a complex of supernatural works of the Holy Trinity: the price of redemption through the incarnate Son, the kingdom and temple sanctified in the Holy Spirit. And in this Church, insofar as she is on earth, we believe that from the same redemption and sanctification the remission of sins will perpetually be granted in the future ⁹.

2°. For the very members of the Church Christ instituted, as with the other sacraments for increasing and preserving holiness, so the sacrament of remission of sins (Jn XX. 23; cf. Jas. V. 15, 16). Thus in the kingdom of sanctification there are both sacraments of the living, for nourishing and preserving the supernatural life by which they already live: « he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day » (Jn VI.); and sacraments of the dead, not only for regeneration, by which they are first born in the Church, and which renewal (ἀνακαινισμός, renewal) can happen only once: « for it is impossible for those who have once been enlightened (τοὺς ἅπαξ φωτισθέντας, those once enlightened)... to be renewed again (πάλιν ἀνακαινίζειν, to renew again) to repentance » (Heb. VI.)¹⁰; but also for reconciliation (καταλλαγή, reconciliation) with God, of which the Apostle, crying out to sinners in the Church, says: « we beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God » (2 Cor. V. 20), while at the same time he fears lest perhaps he may find among them, the cause of his sorrow, some impenitent people in the Church: « lest I mourn many of those who sinned before and have not done penance for the uncleanness and fornication and impurity which they committed » (2 Cor. II. 3; XII. 20, 21).

Hence on the divine institution of the remission of sins rests penitential discipline, which, derived from apostolic times, was already observed in the second and third centuries according to certain norms, universal in their substance, in the Western and Eastern Churches. In this matter, however, two things are to be noted. First, in many ecclesiastical documents it is directly concerned only with public penance, to which only the guilty of the gravest and public crimes were subjected; then, moreover, the removal of penitents from the mysteries, according to their different degrees, is not to be confused with excommunication properly so called and with severance from the body of the Church. For they were excluded from reception of the Eucharist before absolution, from the very end of this sacrament and by the divine law promulgated by the Apostle (1 Cor. XI. 27, 28); they were kept from the mysteries and other functions in order also to render a fuller satisfaction to the Church ¹¹ and for a more salutary preparation for the sacraments. In Book II of the Apostolic Constitutions, which, written in the third century, exhibit the most ancient laws of the Church, this distinction between the discipline of penitents in the Church and excommunication is most clearly shown. First the Bishop is taught not only how penitent sinners are to be absolved « by the imposition of hands, » but also by what remedies they are to be healed and prepared for absolution, whether by harsh or by gentle means, even if « the wound is deep and has swollen, » and « if the ulcer creeps, use the cautery and draw out the putrefaction, afflicting them with fasts, that is. » But when all these things have availed nothing, and moreover a danger of infection arises for the other members, then at last it is prescribed that one must come to excommunication. « When you have done these things, and perceive that from the feet to the head there is no plaster to be applied, nor oil nor bandages, but the ulcer spreads and anticipates all medication, like gangrene putrefying all the members; then with much circumspection and consultation, with other skilled physicians also called in, cut off the putrid member, so that the whole body of the Church may not be corrupted. Therefore do not be easy and ready to cut off... But if you see someone impenitent and hardened, then with sorrow and mourning cut him off from the Church as incurable » (ἀνιάτως ἔχοντα τῆς ἐκκλησίας ἀπόκοπτε, cut off from the Church the one who is incurable), Apostolic Constitutions, II, ch. 41.

The distinction of Augustine belongs here as well: between other sins, even the gravest, by which a man is not cut off from the Church, and heresy, by which, as long as he persists in it, he is already cut off. « For then each one is unfruitful and not yet cut off from the root, when he does those works with evil desire, of which it was said that those who do such things shall not possess the kingdom of God (Gal. V.); but when¹² he has begun, for those same works, also to resist the most manifest truth by which he is refuted, then he is cut off... Thus also, before he is visibly excommunicated, whoever bears a hostile spirit against the truth by which he is convicted and reproved is already cut off. So it comes about that both the good seed and the bad seed grow together through the field until the harvest, that is, both the sons of the kingdom and the sons of the evil one (who by evil desire do those works of which he spoke a little before) grow together through the world, in the Church throughout the whole world, until the end of the age. » Aug., On the Unity of the Church, n. 74.

II. What we have indicated sufficiently shows the demonstration, as it were practical, manifest in the very elements and acts of the Church: that in the kingdom of sanctification are included not only those « who are just and holy, that they may still be justified and sanctified » (cf. Apoc. XXII. 11), but also those « who are in sins, that they may be remitted for them » (cf. Jas. V. 15). No less clearly does Christ the Lord, in his theoretical teaching, describe and confirm this still imperfect state of his kingdom on earth, so that in the kingdom itself, until the consummation of the ages, sinners are mingled with the just and holy.

This doctrine is contained in the parables explained by Christ himself concerning the character of his kingdom on earth, and so manifestly that the African Councils and Augustine, in asserting Catholic doctrine and refuting the error of the Donatists, regarded these parables of the divine Master, as regards the diversity of the members of the Church, of the just and of sinners, as an ineluctable argument and almost the foundation of the Catholic demonstration. The kingdom of heaven is like a field in which wheat and tares grow together until the harvest, when the reapers will gather the tares to burn, but the wheat they will store in the barns of the Lord. Christ explained this parable at the disciples' request. « The field is the world »: that is, the whole time of the state of the kingdom of heaven in this age; for the harvest is « the consummation of the age. » In the kingdom of God, for its present state, there are « sons of the kingdom, » indeed worthy of the eternal kingdom, like the wheat, and « sons of the wicked one » (υἱοὶ τοῦ πονηροῦ, sons of the evil one) in the same field, who by their works follow the devil ¹³, and by these works the tares have been sown by the devil. At the consummation of the age, finally, « the Son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all scandals and those who work iniquity, and will cast them into the furnace of fire. » Therefore there are, and will be, in the kingdom of Christ on earth, scandals and workers of iniquity until the consummation of the age, at which last the separation of the sons of the kingdom and the sons of the wicked will be full, both in merits and in eternal rewards and punishments. Matt. XIII. 24, 38-41.

Other parables are of the same kind. « The kingdom of heaven is like a net cast into the sea, gathering from every kind of fish. » Two kinds of fish are explained, good and bad. The net is drawn up to the shore « when it is full », that is, when the number of saints in the Church of God, and consequently also of the reprobate, is complete; then the fish are separated from the same net, which is the kingdom of heaven. As the wheat into the barns, so the good fish are gathered into the vessels of the Lord; as the tares to be burned, so the bad fish are cast out (ἔξω ἔβαλον, cast out) of the net in which until now they had been mixed with the good. The conclusion and explanation of the parable is given by the Lord in the same words as before: « so it will be at the consummation of the age. » Matt. XIII. 47-50.

At the coming of the Son of man, at an hour which is not expected, whether at the particular judgment at the death of each, or at the universal judgment at the consummation of all, « then the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins. » All and only those by whom the kingdom of heaven on earth is constituted are represented by the ten virgins, who all, by the very fact that they are in the kingdom of heaven, « went out to meet the bridegroom and the bride » (the bridegroom Christ, and the bride who is to be « adorned for her husband », Apoc. XXI. 2 ff.). But of all those who go to meet him in the kingdom of heaven, « five are foolish », who have indeed the vessels of dead faith but not the oil of shining charity; and when the door is already shut and the time is no more, they knock in vain and are answered: « I do not know you. » Hence those are warned who are represented by the parable of the virgins, and who therefore are in the kingdom of heaven, and in it took up their lamps going out to meet the bridegroom and the bride: « watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour »; for, of course, among these too there can be, and are, those who did not take oil in their vessels. Matt. XXV. 1 ff.

Besides these, the Fathers, against the Donatists, often press the comparison, set forth by John the Baptist, of the wheat and the chaff on the same threshing-floor (Matt. III. 12). « Your bishops (the Donatists') certainly tried to deny that it is written in the Gospel that the Church is compared to a threshing-floor; but soon, convicted by the recitation of the Gospel words, they turned to this, that there too, they said, hidden wicked people are signified, not manifest ones, of whom it is written: he will come bearing his winnowing fan in his hand and will cleanse his floor, will store the grain in the barn, and will burn the chaff with unquenchable fire. Judge, therefore, you, open your eyes, attend to the truth with your ears. If for this reason, as they themselves said, the Lord compared the Church to nets, because he wished the evil in her to be understood not as manifest but as hidden, which the priests do not see, just as fishermen do not see the fish within the nets under the waves; does the threshing-floor also get threshed under water or under the earth? Or certainly in the nighttime hours, not in the sun, or does a blind farmer work on it? How much better, therefore, would they correct themselves than pervert the holy Gospels, and try to twist the Lord's words to the vain error of their own mind..... God, moreover, guards the innocence of his saints and faithful, as of the good fish, as of the fat grains, so that the mingled kinds to be rejected may not harm them within those nets, and the mingled chaff to be winnowed may not harm them in this floor. » Augustine, book after the Carthaginian conference, n. 14.

Augustine argues similarly about the banquet, at which there had also come a guest not having a wedding garment, Matt. XXII. 11 ff.¹⁴ « How is this true, he says, unless because in that one great body was prefigured all the wicked mingled in the Lord's banquet before the Lord's judgment? » Augustine, ibid. n. 27. St. Gregory explains very splendidly this signification of the wedding banquet, in Gospel homily 38, nn. 7–14. « Behold, now from the very quality of the guests it is clearly shown that through this king's wedding the present Church is designated, in which good and bad meet together. For she is mixed with the diversity of sons, because she begets all to faith, yet does not bring all, by change of life, to the liberty of spiritual grace, as their sins require. For while we live here, we must journey mixed along the way of the present age; but then we are separated when we arrive. For the good alone, unmixed, exist nowhere except in heaven, and the bad alone nowhere except in hell; but this life, which is placed between heaven and hell, as it stands in the middle, so receives the citizens of both parts together; whom nevertheless holy Church now receives indiscriminately, and afterwards separates at the exit. » Gregory, ibid. n. 7. The same doctrine is presented by the parable, or rather metaphor, of the sheep and the goats, Matt. XXV. 32: « We were doing this, that the cause and person of the goats should not prejudice the cause and person of the sheep, although both herds are kept on common pastures, until by the chief shepherd in the last judgment some are separated to the left and others to the right. » Augustine, loc. cit. n. 6. They explain in this way also the comparison of the Apostle (2 Tim. II. 20) about the great house, in which there are vessels both precious and vile. Cyprian reproaches the Novatians for the exclusion of such vile vessels from the Church: « What a swelling of arrogance it is... that anyone should dare, or believe that he can do, what the Lord did not grant even to the Apostles, that he can distinguish tares from wheat; or as though it were granted to them to carry the winnowing fan and purge the floor, should try to separate the chaff from the wheat; and while the Apostle says that in a great house there are not only golden and silver vessels but also wooden and earthen ones, he seems to choose the golden and silver vessels, and to despise, cast aside and condemn the wooden and earthen ones, when only on the Day of the Lord are the wooden vessels burned in the fire of divine heat, and the earthen ones are broken by him to whom the iron rod has been given. » Cyprian, ep. 52, p. 74; cf. ep. 51, p. 65. To this sense Pacian argues from the same testimony, ep. 1, n. 5, and ep. 3, nn. 4, 26; Augustine, On Baptism, Book VII, n. 99; sermon 15, n. 2; Ambrosiaster on the same passage of the Apostle.

The Catholic bishops of Africa, in the « mandate » by which they prescribed the norms that eighteen selected men were to follow in disputation with the Donatist bishops at the conference held at Carthage in June of the year 411, comprehended the Catholic doctrine on this matter in a lucid compendium drawn from the holy Scriptures and Catholic tradition: the state of the Church, in which sinners are mingled with the just in the communion of profession, of government and of the sacraments until the consummation of the age. ¹⁵ First, they say, let the chosen bishops demonstrate that the true Church of Christ was foretold and celebrated in the law, in the prophets, in the psalms, and in the Scriptures of the New Testament, from which they should bring forward the principal testimonies; and that she is the one which is among all nations, so that her essential mark is catholicity. Then, which now concerns us, they proceed thus. « This Church, which in this manner, as was foretold and fulfilled, took its beginning from Jerusalem, and from there spread through Judea and Samaria and the other parts of the world by the preaching of the Apostles... those men, against whose error we command our colleagues to confer and defend, say that the bishop Caecilian, formerly of the Church of Carthage, and his associates perished, polluted by I know not what sins, and that its remnants remained in the party of Donatus ¹⁶. Let those to whom we here give this mandate refute and confute this vain and sacrilegious accusation in such a way that they first distinguish the cause of the Church from the cause of certain men. For since the Church is foretold to have evil men mixed in with her until the time of the harvest, when the tares are separated from the wheat, or the chaff departs from the grain when winnowed, or the sheep are separated to the right and the goats to the left, who are now mixed in the same pastures; or the evil fish are separated from the good, who are now together drawn into the same nets to the shore, on that same shore, that is, at the end of the age. Now any men in the Church, if they are good, are her wheat or grain, her sheep, her good fish; but if they are evil, they are her tares, her chaff, her goats, her evil fish. Therefore the whole harvest, the whole threshing-floor, the whole flock, the whole fishing, is not condemned on account of them; lest we, rashly judging the evil before the time, and objecting the sins of some to others, by sacrilegious separation abandon the good on account of the evil, whereas rather we ought to tolerate the evil on account of the good with pious unity. They must, therefore, be pressed, these enemies of these evangelical likenesses and of so plain a truth, to teach what they intend, and first to show, if they are able, how the Church... of whomever they accuse, perished by contagion and remained in the party of Donatus. » Therefore it is not on the refutation of crimes, which they heap falsely upon Caecilian and others, that the hinge of the defence must be placed; and it is not so much juridically, about the particular deeds of men, that one must dispute with heretical accusers, but rather theologically one must demonstrate that in the true Church of Christ there can be, and are, sinners, and these not only hidden but also manifest.

To this demonstration belong, besides the Gospel parables, the things which they further enjoin their deputies to bring forward, among whom Augustine was by far the most eminent. « What we say, they say, in order to repel their crimes, should be shown most evidently, and more abundantly (namely beyond the doctrine contained in the parables adduced), by those to whom we impose the office of this defence: that is, that the Church of Christ can be neither polluted nor destroyed by a corruption, as if pestilent, of any evils mingled with her to the end, not only unknown but even known. » They bring forward examples of this kind from the holy prophets, « who did not separate themselves from that people, in which indeed the good were among the wicked, by bodily discrimination (by breaking off religious communion), judging it better to bear the wicked by patience than to abandon the good through calumny. » Indeed we have the most evident demonstration in the Apostolic college itself. « The Lord Jesus Christ himself showed a singular example of patience: his traitor, certainly the worst, he bore, not only known in the number of the disciples (in the number and census, namely, not only of members of the Church but of members also distinguished by apostolic dignity), but also foreknown (destined at last to be reprobate¹⁷ through his own fault) he assumed into the number of the disciples. » The same is shown most clearly by perennial tradition, namely in the doctrine and discipline of the Church from the apostolic age onward. For « in the times of the Apostles the witness is the Apostle Paul, groaning among false brethren (2 Cor. XI. 26), and noting in his epistle (Phil. I. 15) certain men who preached Christ out of envy, which indeed is a diabolical vice; how the good, for the sake of keeping the unity of Christ with devoted care, bore the wicked in communion of the sacraments without any loss to themselves, although they abhorred their malice far off. That after the Apostles also the good bishops, for the sake of the unity of Christ, tolerated wicked men, not only any laymen but also fellow bishops, the letters of the martyr Cyprian are witness, where he laments the avarice of certain colleagues, even to the cruelty of usury and the robberies of estates; yet he was not made such by the contagion of the wicked, but through love of the good he bore such men, admonishing of this not only by example but also teaching it by precept. For in a certain letter of his (ep. 54, to Maximus) he says: even if tares seem to be in the Church, neither our faith nor our charity ought to hinder, so that because we see tares in the Church, we ourselves should withdraw from the Church » ¹⁸. They conclude finally their « mandate » on this disputation with an argument ad hominem, which Augustine often presses, but which is not necessary for us now. The Donatists had indeed determined that those who had withdrawn from their schism to join another schism with Maximian were not defiled, provided they had not been present at Maximian's schismatic ordination. From this opinion of theirs, absurd though it is, the Catholics argue thus for the true doctrine. « Let them be compelled, even if late, to understand from this (by the Catholic deputies) that much rather in Catholic unity the evil cannot be absent from the good, as chaff from the grain,¹⁹ if in the schismatic division (sect), where there is chaff alone, Maximian was held to have been unable to stain the companions of his own division, provided only they were not present at his ordination. »

So that we may not proceed further in a matter already sufficiently clear: it is established from the holy Scriptures, from the institutions and discipline of the Church, and in this from apostolic tradition, from the very end and very nature of the holy and sanctifying Church; and in the Donatist controversy especially, in the fourth and fifth centuries, it was wholly brought to clarity and explicitly defined that any baptized sinners who keep the true faith without heresy and social charity without schism, as long as they are not excluded by ecclesiastical sentence of excommunication, are truly and simply members of the visible Church and citizens of the kingdom of God on earth. Hence among the dogmas — « which so agree with the Catholic faith that whoever wishes to oppose them not only in all but even in each one, in that he obstinately resists any one of them and does not hesitate to teach things contrary to them, appears a heretic and an enemy of the Christian faith, and on this account to be anathematized by all Catholics » — St. Fulgentius rightly also sets down this article. « Hold most firmly, and never doubt, that the threshing-floor of God is the Catholic Church, and that within it, until the end of the age, the chaff is contained mixed with the wheat, that is, the bad are mingled with the good in the communion of the sacraments... and that the bad are usefully tolerated by the good within the Church, if this is done by living well with them and by admonishing them well, so that, seeing and hearing what is good, they may reject their evils, and tremble at being judged by God for their evil works, and so, anticipated by the gift of grace, be confounded for their iniquities and be converted to a good life by the mercy of God. But the good ought not to be separated from the bad who are established within the Catholic Church, except by dissimilarity of works, so that they do not have in common with those with whom they share the divine sacraments the evil works by which those are criminal. » St. Fulgentius, On the Faith to Peter, chs. 43 and 44.

III. Although these things are so, it cannot be denied that there is a great difference between the way in which the just and holy and the way in which sinners, sons of God and sons of the devil, are united in the framework of the holy Church, in the communion of saints; and they are and are called members of the body of which Christ is the head, and so members of Christ. We have seen above that the bonds of union with the Church are manifold, and not all of one kind but, speaking generally, of two orders. For a) there are external bonds, conspicuous in themselves, which, although they have the character of means to the end, namely charity and holiness, are nevertheless, by the institution of the founder of the Church, essential elements by which the Church on earth is formally constituted as visible. b) There are internal bonds, wholly spiritual, not conspicuous in themselves, which, although they are nobler and are the proximate end of the holy and sanctifying Church, yet, precisely because they are manifested only through those former things, do not constitute the visibility of the Church and her conspicuous society. We have demonstrated that the conspicuous elements essential by Christ's institution are: the sacrament of faith, baptism; communion in the profession of faith under legitimate teaching authority; social charity, or obedience of discipline, under legitimate hierarchical government, or sacred rule; communion in divine worship and the sacraments under legitimate priesthood. So those who lack even one of these — the unbaptized, heretics, schismatics, the excommunicated — do not simply belong to the Church on earth, although they can belong to her in some respect, namely by the bonds they still retain, and be « united to her in some part », as we heard Augustine say. Indeed it can also happen per accidens that, by the perfection of spiritual dispositions and internal bonds before God, « to whom the will is reckoned as the deed, where necessity excludes the deed, » actual external bonds are supplied, in the manner declared above. Hence conversely it comes about that sinners, although they remain truly and simply members of the visible Church on earth through all the external bonds, nevertheless are unlike her according to her nobler spiritual elements and according to the proximate end, which is sanctification; and therefore, if the Church is considered according to this form of holiness, according to the end of actual sanctification, and so according to the Spirit, they can and ought to be said not to belong to the Church.

If therefore we compare the manner of speaking about sinners in the Church with that about those who, standing outside, are nevertheless referred to the Church in some respect, the order is reversed. The latter are simply, that is, without added explanation, to be said, and ought to be said, to be outside the Church and not in the Church; but they cannot be said to belong to the Church except by an explicit declaration, or at least one manifest from the context, in some respect, that is, according to the bonds still remaining by which they are said to be referred to and to belong to the Church ²⁰. On the contrary, the sinners of whom we are speaking are simply members of the Church, and they cannot be denied to belong to the Church except in some respect, namely as considered under a certain formal aspect and by a spiritual gift. Unless some declaration is added or tacitly understood, they ought to be said, and cannot be denied without error in faith, to be in the Church; if, however, it is either explicitly declared or implicitly understood that the Church and the union of her members are regarded not universally but singly and solely according to the vivifying Spirit and the participation in and union with this life of the Spirit, nothing prevents sinners from being said, according to this manner of considering, not to be in the structure of the Church, not to be of the Church, not to belong to the Church, to be outside the Church.

These things hold, not as if it were permitted to use this manner of speaking everywhere, but so that certain expressions found among the Fathers may be rightly understood — for example in Optatus of Milevis, and very frequently in Augustine, who, against the Donatists, held the first place in defending the Catholic doctrine on sinners in the Church, mixed with the saints and the just, until the consummation of the age, as we have sufficiently shown from these same Fathers. The reason, for these Fathers, for considering the Church in such a way that sinners are not included was first indeed that general one of which we have spoken: namely that the chief adornment of the bride of Christ and body of Christ, and the end intended in itself, is actual holiness, to which only the just correspond, while sinners are contrarily opposed. Then there was for these holy doctors a second, particular and polemical reason, arising from the very nature of the Donatist heresy and of the arguments by which they were accustomed to defend it. For there was a double error on their part: that notorious sinners are not members of the Church; and further, that whoever are outside the Church, since they do not have the Holy Spirit, promised and given to the Church alone, cannot validly administer sacraments — for which opinion it was their solemn custom to appeal to the authority of the martyr Cyprian. Now against the former part the Fathers, and above all Augustine, as we have seen, demonstrate that the dogma is revealed in Scripture and explained in Tradition: tares with wheat in one field, sinners with the just in one Church communicate not in works and bonds of holiness, but in teaching and doctrine, government and discipline, priesthood and sacraments. As to the other part of the heresy, since another consideration of the object is now introduced, and the refutation has changed, there is a transition from the visible elements to the internal element of the indwelling Holy Spirit. Augustine is accustomed to reply that from the Church so considered, all sinners — not only notorious ones but also hidden ones, whom the Donatists did not exclude from the Church — are equally outcasts from this bond and this structure of the Holy Spirit; while Cyprian always acknowledged that the sacraments can be validly administered even by manifest sinners. Therefore, since sinners do not belong to the Church considered as containing the spiritual element of holiness, any more than heretics or schismatics, and yet sinners themselves, as Cyprian acknowledges entirely and the Donatists in part, validly administer the sacraments, although deprived of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the same power cannot be denied even to heretics and schismatics, because the sacraments are and remain the sacraments of Christ and of the Church, not of the men by whom they are administered.

Thus Augustine argues, both often elsewhere and especially in Book III from n. 22 and in almost the whole of Book IV, On Baptism, against the Donatists, so as to join these two things: that sinners are within and are in the Church; and yet that they are not in the unity of the Church, which is formed by peace in the Holy Spirit, and do not belong to the one dove, which is without spot. « For neither are those devoted to the Church who seem to be within, and who live against Christ, that is, who do things against Christ's commandments; nor are they to be judged as belonging at all to that Church which he himself cleanses by the washing of water in the word, so that he may present to himself a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind. If they are not in that Church, to whose members they do not belong, they are not in the Church of which it is said: one is my dove, one is to her mother; for she is without spot and wrinkle²¹. Or let him say, if he can, that they are members of this dove, who renounce the world in words and not in deeds... But we, according to what each man is at present, ask whether they are to be reckoned today among those members of the Church that is called one dove and spotless and wrinkle-free bride, of whom Cyprian says, in the letter I have mentioned, that they do not keep the way of the Lord, nor observe the heavenly commandments given for their salvation (he brings forward more from Cyprian's letter 7 to the clergy, letter 73 to Jubaianus, and from the book On the Lapsed)... But if that dove does not recognize them among its members, and if they persist in the same perversity, the Lord will say: I do not know you, depart from me, you who work iniquity. They seem to be in the Church, and are not (considered in the manner here discussed); indeed they even act against the Church. How then can they baptize with the baptism of the Church (Cyprian himself confessing it), which profits neither them nor those receiving it, unless they are changed by a true inward conversion, so that the sacrament, which did not profit those receiving it when they renounced the world in words and not in deeds, begins to profit them, since they have begun to renounce also in deeds? So also those whose separation is open (from the Church considered simply), because they are not today in the members of that dove, neither these (openly separated) nor those (sinners); but some of them perhaps will be in the future... Just as I seem to be pressed when it is said to me: therefore does a heretic forgive sins? so I too press when I say: therefore does one who does not keep the heavenly commandments, a covetous man, a robber, a usurer, an envious man, who renounces the world in words and not in deeds (all of whom Cyprian himself confessed in the same words to be in the Church and to confer and receive sacraments validly), forgive sins? If by the power of God's sacrament, then as much the one as the other; if by his own merit, neither the one nor the other. For that sacrament is known to be Christ's even in bad men; but in the body of the one dove, incorrupt, holy, chaste, not having spot or wrinkle, neither the one nor the other is found. » Augustine, On Baptism, Book IV, nn. 4, 5.

Augustine explains the distinction more clearly in the same work: the just constitute the house of God itself, considered according to its beauty and according to its fruits or end, and are in the structure of the house, which is held together by fruitful righteousness; sinners are in the house, but do not constitute it, because they do not belong to the structure of righteousness; heretics, schismatics, and the excommunicated, who are to be held as heathens and publicans, are not in the house but out of the house, that is, they have gone out of the house. The just therefore are in the Church bodily and spiritually, by communion of sacraments and holiness of morals; sinners are in her bodily and not spiritually, by communion of sacraments, not by holiness of morals; while others, « more separated », are in her in neither way. « I think, he says, I do not speak rashly, that others are so in the house of God that they themselves are also the same house of God, which is said to be built upon the rock, which is called the one dove, which is the beautiful bride without spot or wrinkle, and the enclosed garden, the sealed fountain, the well of living water, the paradise with the fruit of apples; which house has also received the keys and the power of loosing and binding²². If anyone has despised this house when it corrects and rebukes, let him be to you as a heathen and a publican. Of this house it is said: Lord, I have loved the beauty of your house... and blessed are those who dwell in your house; they will praise you for ever and ever; and innumerable such things. This house is also called wheat, bearing fruit thirtyfold or sixtyfold or a hundredfold with patience. This house is in vessels of gold and silver, and precious stones, and woods that do not rot... For it is in the good, faithful and holy servants of God, everywhere scattered, bound together by spiritual unity in the same communion of sacraments, whether they have known one another by sight or not. But others are said to be in the house in such a way that they do not belong to the structure of the house, nor to the fellowship of fruitful and peaceful righteousness, but are said to be like chaff in the wheat; for we cannot deny that these also are in the house, the Apostle saying: in a great house there are not only golden vessels and silver, but also wooden and earthen ones, and some indeed to honor, others to dishonor. From this innumerable number (of sinners), there comes not only a crowd pressing within upon the heart of a few, in comparison with so great a multitude of saints; but also, the nets having been broken, heresies and schisms arise among those who must already be said to be more out of the house than in the house, of whom it is said: they went out from us, but they were not of us. For those already segregated even bodily are more separated than those who inwardly live carnally and animally, and are spiritually separated. » Augustine then goes on to teach that, both in the great house, even « by the feigned whom the Holy Spirit flees », and by heretics and schismatics, « who, more separated, are not more in the house than out of the house », the sacrament is truly received, but uselessly; « which, that it may become useful, he says, one must withdraw from heresy or schism, and cling to that house; which not only heretics and schismatics, but also those ought to do, who are so in the house by communion of sacraments that they are outside the house by diversity of morals. » Ibid., Book VII, nn. 99, 100.

Therefore Augustine never contradicted either himself or Catholic doctrine, that sinners are truly and simply members of the Church on earth; but he considered the same Church in different ways: either according to the visible elements and the unity of the body, in which sinners are joined and mingled with the just; or according to the proximate end of the actual sanctification of the members and the holiness of the Spirit, in whose structure of righteousness the sinners are not yet, but toward which doctrine, discipline, sacraments (visible elements) and internal invisible graces in the Church itself promote and lead them. « Whoever has grown cold in charity is weakened in the body of Christ; but he is powerful, who has already exalted our head, to heal even weak members, provided they are not cut off with too great impiety, but cling to the body until they are healed. For whatever still clings to the body is not of hopeless health. » Aug., sermon 137, n. 1.

So far the illustrious author; the rest is lacking.