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The soul of the apostolate
apostolateTHE SOUL OF THE This talk was given at the Voice of the Family conference Created for heaven: the mission of Catholic young adults in today’s world, which was held in Rome on 1 October 2019. THE UNEQUAL LAW OF THE UNIVERSE
On 17 June 2019, the Vatican issued a preparatory document for the Synod on the Amazon which presents the earth in which we live as a gigantic biosphere, an ecosystem, which includes God within it and in which the supreme law is that of the equality and interconnection of all things. The forest of the Amazon is said to constitute the model to which the Church ought to look for inspiration.
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In the document we read that the Amazon is the land where “everything is connected” (no. 20); everything is “constitutively related, forming a vital whole” (no. 21). There is no qualitative difference between God and nature, just as there is no qualitative difference between, animals, plants and men. A rapport of interconnection is said to link man to his habitat, but this rapport excludes any sense of primacy or hierarchy.
In reality, the law of the universe is inequality. In the Book of Genesis, which is the Biblical account of creation, God demonstrates his anti-egalitarianism, creating different kingdoms at their respective times.
There is a mineral kingdom, a vegetable kingdom, an animal kingdom, each distinct from the other, but each of them with their particular characteristics which make a common kingdom of them, ordained as a hierarchy towards the same end, which is God. The ordinatio ad unum, non-inter-connection, is the supreme law of the universe.
Quaestio 47 of the first part of the Summa Theologiae is dedicated to the plurality and diversity of things in general. The distinction and multiplicity of
by PROF. ROBERTO DE MATTEI things, Saint Thomas explains, comes from God “who has brought things into being in order that His goodness might be communicated to creatures and be represented by them.”1 Every created thing comes from God and tends toward God, this is their common element. But each thing is distinct from other things because it partially reflects a diverse attribute of God.
Let’s consider, for example, the star-filled night sky, the spectacle which most closely unites us to God. Each star is distinct from the other, but a myriad of stars make up the sky. The same is true if we contemplate the ocean, immense in its unity and its variety. It is one single expanse of water, but there are different movements of the waves, different depths and colours of the water, and the sound of the ocean is different depending on whether it is tranquil or in a tempest.
Now let’s imagine a day in winter when snow is falling from the sky. Not one snowflake is the same as the other. If we look at them under a microscope, each one has its own unique form. Some of these have the perfect symmetry of a star, others resemble hexagons, prisms, or other geometric forms, but together they form one substance: snow.
Then there is man. Everyone is different, but also unique and unrepeatable. It is impossible for two people to have the same DNA. It is never perfectly identical in two people, not even the DNA of two identical twins. Or, more precisely: the genetic sequence is the same, but it functions differently. And yet all people, who are each physically, psychologically, and
morally different from one another, have something in common: human nature, which makes each one a rational person, endowed with soul and body, sharing a common destiny. To man, as Saint Gregory says, God gives something of each creature: “being, in common with the stones; life, in common with the trees; feelings, in common with the animals; and understanding, in common with the angels.”2
From the arid sands of the desert and the tiniest living microorganisms to man and the angels, every creature has its own grade of perfection which, according to an ascensional dynamism, leads to the Creator, the ultimate transcendent and uncreated good of the universe.
THE FRUITS OF GRACE In men, the inequality between souls is greater than that between bodies.
Every soul is different because each one has a different vocation and receives a different level of grace from God. Loving the legitimate and just inequalities means loving the work of God.
St Thérèse of the Child Jesus writes:
“I often asked myself why God had preferences, why all souls did not receive an equal measure of grace. I was filled with wonder when I saw extraordinary favours showered on great sinners like St Paul, St Augustine, St Mary Magdalene, and many others, whom he forced, so to speak, to receive His grace. In reading the lives of the saints I was surprised to see that there were certain privileged souls, whom Our Lord favoured from the cradle to the grave, allowing no obstacle in their path which might keep them from mounting towards Him, permitting no sin to soil the spotless brightness of their baptismal robe. And again it puzzled me why so many poor savages should die without having even heard the name of God.
“Our Lord has deigned to explain this mystery to me. He showed me the book of nature, and I understood that every flower created by Him is beautiful, that the brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy. I understood that if all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would no longer be enamelled with lovely hues. And so it is in the world of souls, Our Lord’s living garden. He has been pleased to create great saints who may be compared to the lily and the rose, but He has also created lesser ones, who must be content to be daisies or simple violets flowering at His feet, and whose mission it is to gladden His divine eyes when He deigns to look down on them. And the more gladly they do His will the greater is their perfection.
“[...] As the sun shines both on the cedar and on the floweret, so the Divine Sun illumines every soul, great and small, and all correspond to his care – just as in nature the seasons are so disposed that on the appointed day the humblest daisy shall unfold its petals.”
Thus there exists a divine predilection by which there are souls who receive greater graces because they are more loved by God. There exist people who are greater than others, but no one would be greater than another if they were not more loved by God, who is the cause of every good.3
We must not imagine that it happens in an extraordinary manner. The error of the charismatic movements is that they seek impossible shortcuts, they seek the extraordinary without understanding the ordinary movement of grace.
God, who is the first cause of all that exists, speaks to us each day through secondary causes, through all creatures, both material and spiritual, who daily exercise an influence on us which are called actual graces. God does not show us the path of our life, but he has preordained it from all eternity for our good, in every tiniest detail, because even the hairs of our head have been counted (Mt. 10:30) and not one of
The grace of God is not lacking to anyone, and if grace is taken away from someone, the cause is not God but the creature who deliberately resists his gifts. True, even fidelity to the grace of God is a gift of God, because the good that we do comes only from God, but man alone is responsible for his infidelity because we alone are responsible for the evil that we do. God distributes his graces in different ways, but why does Our Lord love each one of us with a unique and unrepeatable love? Because each creature reflects a fragment of the infinite divine perfection. For this reason, the beauty of the Church consists in the variety of vocations which are expressed within her. The number of vocations is as big as the number of rational creatures, but they all converge toward a single end, which is the glory of God, the first cause and final end of the created universe. One’s vocation is not the self-determination of a man who chooses what he wants to become. It is not what we want, but rather the response to what God wants from us. But how are we able to know what God wants from us? them falls without His permission (Lk. 21:18). The union of our will with the will of God, that comes to us by means of actual graces, produces an increase of sanctifying grace, which we receive with the sacraments of the Church.
It is worthwhile to make every effort to acquire the smallest degree of sanctifying grace, and if we do not it is because the grace is not visible to our eyes. And yet, says Pope Pius XII, the world of grace is a world which we cannot grasp with our external physical senses, but which is no less true than the light of the sun which illumines our world.4
What is certain is that there is no greater good than grace, and the smallest degree of grace is worth more than all the goods of this world. Thus to bring grace to a soul means to give it a gift that is worth more than all the goods of this world.
To convert a soul, mortally wounded by sin, says Fr Scheeben, is a work that is greater than raising someone from the dead.5 Such miracles, in fact, confer material life, but grace gives spiritual life. It is only God who converts, but we must be instruments of divine grace, in order to work the miracle of the conversion of souls. For this reason, Cardinal Merry del Val said:
“Da mihi animas coetera tolle” – “Give me souls and take everything else away from me”. Every member of the Church militant ought to have this spirit of the apostolate. For Dom Chautard, the essence of the apostolate is for the apostle to superabundantly develop the grace of God in his soul and transmit it to others.6 Indeed, man’s true life is not his superficial and external bodily existence that is destined to decay and die, but the immortal life of the soul. “What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” the Gospel asks (Mk. 8:36-37).
Each of us ought to be a conqueror of souls, by word and example. The success of this apostolate is not born from what Cardinal Mermillod called the “heresy of good works”, but from our interior life. Our interior life bears fruit that is not only personal and individual but also social.
The Christian civilisation that we are defending, the Christianity that we want to restore in the 21st century, is a fruit and a consequence of the interior life of our religion. As a result, the struggle for the restoration of Christian civilisation, and thus the true counter-revolution, necessarily takes place by means of the restoration and the development of the interior life.
WHAT IS THE INTERIOR LIFE? What do we mean by the interior life? We may say that the interior life is the life of the soul, but this definition is not enough. We know that man is a composite of soul and body, and we know from the Catholic faith and by right reason that the soul is the uniting and vital principle of man. The body of man lives by means of the soul. Properly speaking the death of man is nothing other than the separation of body and soul: this is not a medical thesis, this is a philosophical thesis which would be sufficient to resolve the problem of transplants or many other pseudo-scientific problems that are discussed in our days. The moment the soul separates from the body, the body is deprived of its principle vital unifier and begins its disordering, its decomposition, and thus its death. But if it is true that the soul is the vital principle of the body, if it is true that man is composed of a body and a soul, what is the vital principle of the soul? The vital principle of the soul is God Himself, and just as the death of the body is the separation of the body from the soul, the death of the soul is the separation of the soul from God; thus the life of the soul is the supernatural life, the life of God in us. This supernatural life, this life of the soul, begins with baptism, through which the sacramental grace implants grace in us. A baptised man is the man who, by means of the supernatural gifts that he receives in baptism and other sacraments of the Church, undergoes an interior transformation, a radical renewal that overturns his scale of values, replacing the principles of the world with the principles of the Gospel. The life of grace is a new life, that unites us to God and makes us similar to Him. It has its foundation in Jesus Christ: “I am the vine, you are the branches.” (John 15: 5) And it is in this life that we understand the other words of Our Lord: “I am the only Way, Truth, and Life.” (John 14:1-6)
There is no true life, an authentic life, that is, a life of the soul, a supernatural life, outside of Jesus Christ who is the only Truth, the only Way. And this leads us to say that a true interior life is not possible outside of the Church and her sacraments. The supernatural virtues that are infused by baptism in our soul develop in a man in a state of grace day by day through the use that we make of these gifts. And it is for this reason that, with a beautiful expression, Monsignor Delassus writes that “the entrance into heaven will be the birth – our birth – just as if baptism was the conception.”7
However, the sacramental life is not sufficient. The interior life means not only constant prayer and assiduously receiving the sacraments, but also an effort to always conform, in thought and action, to the doctrine, practice and examples of Jesus Christ and of the Catholic Church. Dom Chautard defines the interior life as “the state of activity of a soul which strives against its natural inclinations in order to regulate them, and endeavours to acquire the habit of judging and directing its movements in all things according to the light of the Gospel and the example of Our Lord.”8 This definition is important because it sets the spiritual life on an objective foundation, the Divine Law, and not on a purely individual experience.
In an article published in Legionário on 30 April 1939, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira wrote:
“To think as the Church thinks, to feel as the Church feels, to act as the Church commands, and then to recognise in all this the work of God in us: behold the ideal of the interior life.”9
In an article dedicated to Pope Pius XII in the same journal on 14 March 1943, Prof. de Oliveira explained how the interior life presupposes an ascetic effort to fight the inclinations to evil and error coming from our nature corrupted by original sin. To live the interior life man needs to examine himself and his defects with a firm resolution to correct and amend himself.
“Hence the expression, ‘interior life’. Man must be engaged in constant self-analysis. He needs to know how his soul is at all times; why he is acting in this or that way; if it is licit for him to proceed in this or that way; whether feeling in this or that way regarding a certain event conforms to Catholic morals. This effort is called ‘life’ not only because it governs every man’s life but because it is so intense and should be so continuous that it is for man like a parallel existence that unfolds on a higher and deeper plane than his outer existence. And it is called ‘interior life’ precisely because it requires man to have the uninterrupted habit of analyzing and governing himself, acting and living ‘within himself’ incessantly.”10 INTERIOR LIFE IS NOT POSSIBLE OUTSIDE THE CATHOLIC CHURCH If, as we have seen, the interior life is the fruit of the Christian corresponding to divine grace, which has its source in Jesus Christ and its channels in the sacraments of the Church, it is evident that an authentic interior life is not possible outside of the Catholic religion.
Let us consider, for example, what are referred to as the two great monotheistic religions, Islam and Judaism. Islam and Judaism are religions that are abysmally distant from Catholicism, not only in terms of truth and doctrine, but in terms of life, because neither of these two false religions know a true interior life; they are religions that are purely formal and exterior because they do not lead to a transformation, to a “new life” of the soul. Thus Judaism as it developed after the death of Our Lord, after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, is a religion that may be defined as “Talmudism” or as a strictly ritual cult of the law. The same can be said for Islam. For a “conversion” to Islam what is required, apart from a generic rational profession of the so-called faith, by which one recognises in Allah the one true God, is a series of acts that are purely formal such as the pilgrimage to Mecca once a year, fasting during the time of Ramadan, almsgiving and ritual prayer. Outside of these formal prescriptions, no interior transformation of the soul is required. This perhaps explains the very close historical rapport between Islam and Judaism. They are both “religions of the book”, devoid of church, devoid of priesthood, devoid of sacrifice, devoid of supernatural life. Let us consider instead Christianity in its history. It is born as and qualifies as an interior religion.
The mandate that Our Lord gave to his Apostles was to go into the whole world and preach the Gospel to every creature (Mk. 16:15). He did not speak of a holy war, he did not speak of a conquest of the world with armies, but of a propagation by means of the sacrifice and preaching of the Apostles, of the martyrs, of missionaries. In contrast with Islam, which in the course of its history expanded itself from a purely exterior point of view because it knew and knows nothing of the conquest of souls but only of Jihad, the
brutal conquest of force, Christianity has propagated itself during its history and continues to propagate itself still today, not by violence but by means of the conversion of souls, because brute force can impose a purely exterior adhesion, but it cannot produce a profound conversion of the heart. But, for this very reason, because of the fact that Christianity is the one religion that is truly interior, Christianity is the one religion that has civil and social fruits. Why is this? Because Christianity converts in radice, and by converting men in radice it changes them, it transforms their entire mode of being, it produces historic fruits. The fruits are its action in society: Christian civilisation.
We can think of clear examples of this. It is enough to recall the understanding of woman in the pagan world. Christianity profoundly transformed society, recognising in woman the same spiritual dignity as in man, a dignity which is still denied by Islam, it raised marriage to a sacrament and based the Christian family on this, a family that, thanks to this transformation, became a cultural, moral, and social environment that shapes and transforms people.
Another obvious example is that of slavery. No one recalls the brutal conditions in which slavery existed in the pagan world. Today people speak much about the conditions of misery or even of slavery in which people lived in the Middle Ages, but they forget that before Christianity the majority of the human race was in chains. In the so-called “most civilised city” of the classical world, Athens, there were 30,000 free men and 400,000 slaves, that is, a ratio of free men to slaves was 1 to 20. Who was it who in the course of the centuries abolished the institution of slavery? Was it perhaps Plato or Aristotle? Was it the philosophers of the pagan politicians? What was it if not the power of Christianity in history? And how could this extraordinary change that was the end of slavery have taken place, the passage from ancient slavery to the freedom of the mediaeval world, if not thanks to the work of Christianity? The native peoples of South America practiced cannibalism, infanticide, human sacrifice. It was not the arms of the conquistadors but the words and example of the missionaries that converted and civilised them. But what power did Christianity have to produce this? It was certainly not the force of arms, that Christianity did not have and which would not have been sufficient; but it was the interior force of Christianity. Christianity and only Christianity is capable of transforming society, and the society transformed by Christianity is called Christian civilisation, it is called Christendom. Because Christianity is an interior religion, it is able to transform every social aspect of society. It permeates and transforms laws, institutions, customs, politics, art, economy, literature. This is what happened with the birth and affirmation of the mediaeval Christian world. It is what happened beginning with the baptism of Clovis, with the conversion of the great kings and Christian sovereigns, the baptism of entire nations, that was not a purely formal adherence to Christianity but was a complete upheaval of the entire life of these peoples, it was a passage from pagan barbarism to the great and luminous mediaeval Christian civilisation. Christian civilisation is a social body that has a vital principle: a soul, an interior life.
THE DUTY TO DEFEND CHRISTIAN CIVILISATION It is therefore important to understand and emphasise the distinction but also the strict rapport between
these two spheres: the interior sphere and the exterior sphere. We may say that Christianity does not want to impose conversion exteriorly, in the sense that no one can be forced to have faith. But once this faith has conquered souls, and by means of their conversion has transformed the environments in which these souls live, Christians have the obligation to defend the social fruit of faith. Christian doctrine speaks of a just war, it speaks of legitimate self-defence. This just war and legitimate self-defence, which are permitted by Catholic doctrine for the sake of material goods, are all the more so permitted for the sake of spiritual goods. We may give a concrete example in the life of the family. A Christian family can only be born from the conversion of a father of the family or some member of the family. Following the conversion of one man, of the father or mother, a new environment can be born. This is a social reality, the fruit of an interior conversion. This fruit merits to be defended and should be defended, even exteriorly.
Faith cannot be imposed with force, because the kingdom of God is interior. But once the interior reign of God has produced its exterior fruits, one has the right to defend such fruits. Defend them how? Defend them by helping the good to develop where it is spontaneously born and reproving evil wherever it manifests itself exteriorly. There is no right to the liberty of evil and error; only the truth and the good have the natural right to exist. This was the historic role of Charlemagne and his armies, the role of the conquistadors and the crusaders. In this role, the sword did not replace the Cross, as happened in Islam or in external religions, but rather placed itself at the service of the Cross, in the sense that it defended the diffusion of the truth, permitting the social development of Christianity. The soldiers of Charlemagne or the conquistadors permitted missionaries to carry out their mandate, and thus their own work was principally that of defending Christian civilisation. The names of Lepanto, Vienna, Budapest, the names of the great victories in the history of Christianity, are the names of battles fought – not to impose the faith – but to defend Christian civilisation from the enemy’s aggression - Islamic aggression, or any other sort of aggression.
Christian civilisation that is defended with the sword is by its nature expansive, because “bonum est diffusivum sui”. When we speak of expansion we speak of a work of diffusion, of reconquest, of restoration, not with the sword but with the Cross, that is, with the interior life. An interior life that has its foundation
CRUCIFIXION (DETAIL), 1308–1311, DUCCIO DI BUONINSEGNA, MUSEO DELL'OPERA DEL DUOMO, SIENA.
in the Cross, because the sacrifice par excellence, that is the sacrifice on the Cross of Our Lord, is the one that opened the gates of Paradise, restored supernatural life to man that had been lost after original sin, opened to humanity the supernatural treasures that the world had been deprived of until the Incarnation.
By the effect of the Incarnation, Passion, and Death of Our Lord, the soul has received the interior life, true religion, from the Church by means of the sacraments. From the interior life then, there are derived the great social fruits of Christianity, and it is for this reason that we may legitimately say that the Middle Ages, the great Christian civilisation of centuries past, was, strictly speaking, the fruit of the Passion and Death of Our Lord, of His Precious Blood that was shed.
CHRISTIAN HEROISM The Crusaders were so called because they carried on their breast the sign of the Cross, in order to express their will to fight for Our Lord Jesus Christ even to death. Their heroism was supernatural because they fought for a good of a supernatural nature, which was the liberation of the Holy Sepulcher. There is a natural heroism that we rightly admire, but there is also a supernatural heroism that we ought to admire even more than natural heroism. This heroism is the fruit of grace, it is holiness. Heroism, explains Fr Calmel, consists “in the greatness of the soul pushed even to the extreme point of voluntarily undergoing death for the goods that surpass us”.11
Holiness is heroic, explains the French theologian, not because every saint must undergo the torments of the martyrs, but because every saint is ready, for the love of God, to face up to suffering and death. The heroism of holiness differs from human heroism because of its universality. Natural heroism is possible to a few, but supernatural heroism is possible for every man if he decided to correspond fully to divine grace, which is the love that Jesus has revealed to the world. The saint is the one who “has fully accepted to be loved by God as God desires to love him and who has never ceased to respond to his love.”12
Jesus calls everyone to heroism, and heroism consists in corresponding every day to what God asks of us.
Today God asks everyone, priests and laity, men and women, young and old, to fight in defence of the Church, humiliated, ridiculed, and disfigured by the men who have the mission of guarding her. We ask therefore for the grace of heroism and perseverance, turning to the Blessed Mother with the words with which a great apostolic man, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, addressed his prayer to Her:
“O Our Mother and Our Lady, as the soldier does not choose the field of battle, but is ready to make the offering of his life on any terrain, grant also that we may know how to fight against the overt and hidden enemies of Your Name and of the Holy Church, wherever you wish to send us, whether anonymously or in glory, whether in the invisible and impalpable heroism of mundane everyday life or in the tragic clashes and pre-announced events of the message of Fatima. We implore this grace of you as a favour which we are not worthy of, and if we are not afraid of all this it is only because we know that we can trust in your Immaculate Heart with unlimited confidence: the strength of the weak, the hope of the disabled, the refuge and most sweet consolation of the humble.”
Translated by Giuseppe Pellegrino
Roberto de Mattei is a former professor of Modern History and History of Christianity in the European University of Rome. He founded, and oversees, the Lepanto Foundation that operates in Washington and in Rome. He directs the magazine Radici Cristiane and the Corrispondenza Romana News Agency.
ENDNOTES:
1. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 47, a. 1. 2. St Gregory the Great, Homil. 29 super Evang. Gen. 2, 10, in J. P. Migne, PL, 76, 1214. 3. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 20, a. 3. 4. Pius XII, Discourse to Catholic Action, 2 November 1941. 5. Matthias Joseph Scheeben, Le meraviglie della grazia divina, Lateran University Press, Città del Vaticano 2008, p, 49. 6. Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard, The Soul of the Apostolate, Tan Books 1974, pp. 53-60. 7. Mons. Henri Delassus, Il problema dell’ora presente, Italian translation, Cristianità, Piacenza 1977, vol. I, p. 51. 8. Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard, The Soul of the Apostolate, Tan Books 1974, p.14 9. Legionário, 30 April 1939. 10. Legionário, 14 March 1943. 11. “Dans la grandeur d’ame portée jusqu’au point extreme de subir volontairement la mort pour des biens qui nous dépassent” (R. Th. Calmel o.p., Les mystères du Royaune de la Grace, Dominique Martin Morin, Niort 1997, p. 116). 12. “Le saint a pleinement accepté d’etre aimé par Dieu comme Dieu désire de l’aimer, et qu’il n’a cessé de répondre à son amour” (ibid).
