The aim of the Incarnation, and, therefore, the aim of every apostolate, is to raise humanity to a divine level. “Christ became man that man might become God.”
Christus incarnatus est ut homo fieret deus (St. Augustine).
“The only-begotten Son of God, desiring us to be sharers of His Divinity, assumed our nature, in order that having become man, He might make men gods.”
Unigenitus Dei Filius suae divinitatis volens nos esse participes, naturam nostram assumpsit, ut homines deos faceret, factus homo (St. Thomas, Office of Corpus Christi).
Now it is in the Eucharist, or, more accurately, in the Eucharistic life, that is in a substantial inner life, nourished at the divine Banquet, that the apostle assimilates the divine life. We have Our Lord’s own words. They are absolutely clear, and leave no room for equivocation: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood, you shall not have life in you.”
Nisi manducaveritis carnem Filii hominis et biberitis ejus sanguinem non habebitis vitam in vobis (Joan. 6:54).
The Eucharistic life is simply the life of Our Lord in us, not only by the indispensable state of grace, but also by the superabundance of His action. “I am come that they may have life, and have it more abundantly.”
Veni ut vitam habeant, et abundantius habeant (Joan. 10:10).
If the apostle is going to overflow with divine life and pour it out upon the faithful, and if the richest source for divine life he can find is the Eucharist, how can we get away from the conclusion that his works will have little efficacy except through the action of the Eucharist on those who are to be, either directly or indirectly, dispensers of that life through these works.
It is impossible to meditate upon the consequences of the dogma of the Real Presence, of the Sacrifice of the Altar, and of Communion without being led to the conclusion that Our Lord wanted to institute this Sacrament in order to make it the center of all action, of all loyal idealism, of every apostolate that could be of any real use to the Church. If our whole Redemption gravitates about Calvary, all the graces of the mystery flow down upon us from the Altar. And the gospel worker who does not draw all his life from the Altar utters only a word that is dead, a word that cannot save souls, because it comes from a heart that is not sufficiently steeped in the Precious Blood.
It was not without a profound purpose that Our Lord uttered the parable of the vine and the branches, right after the Last Supper, in order to bring out with emphasis and precision how useless it would be for men to attempt any active ministry without basing it upon the interior life. “As the branch cannot bear fruit itself . . . so neither can you, unless you abide in Me.”
Sicut palmes non potest ferre fructum a semetipso . . . sic nec vos nisi in me manseritis (Joan. 15:4).
But He goes on at once to show how powerful will be the action of an apostle who lives by the interior, Eucharistic life. “He that abideth in Me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit.”
Qui manet in me, et ego in eo, hic fert fructum multum (Joan. 15:5).
The same, but he alone. God exercises His powerful action through him, not through others. The reason is, says St. Athanasius, “we are made gods by the flesh of Christ.” When a preacher or catechist retains in himself the warm life of the Precious Blood, when his heart is consumed with the fire that consumes the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus, what life his words will have: they will burn, they will be living flames! And what effects the Eucharist will have, radiating throughout a class for instance, or through a hospital ward, or in a club, and so on, when the ones God has chosen to work there have nourished their zeal in Holy Communion, and have become Christ-bearers!
Whether the fight be against the demon with all his wiles, enmeshing souls in ignorance, or against the spirit of pride and impurity, trying to make souls drunk with pride or to drown them in the mire, the Eucharist, the life of the true apostle, will have an influence beyond compare against the enemy of salvation.
Love is made perfect by the Eucharist. This living memorial of the Passion revives the divine fire in the soul of the apostle when it seems on the point of going out. It makes him relive Gethsemani, the scene in the Pretorium, Calvary, and teaches him the science of sorrow and humiliation. The apostolic worker will then be able to speak to the afflicted in a language that will make them share the consolations he has drawn from this sublime source.
He speaks the language of the virtues of which Jesus is the only exemplar, because every one of his words is like a drop of the Eucharistic Blood falling upon souls. But for this reflection of the Eucharistic life the active worker will produce no other effect, by his words, than a passing enthusiasm. It will be merely a matter of captivating the secondary faculties, and occupying the outworks of the fortress. But the stronghold itself, that is the heart, the will, will generally remain impregnable.
The efficacy of an apostolate almost invariably corresponds to the degree of Eucharistic life acquired by a soul. Indeed, the sure sign of a successful apostolate is when it makes souls thirst for frequent and fruitful participation in the divine Banquet. And this result will never be obtained except in proportion as the apostle himself really makes Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament the source and center of his life.
Like St. Thomas Aquinas, who practically entered the Tabernacle, so to speak, when he wanted to work out a problem, the apostle also will go and tell all his troubles to the Divine Guest, and his action upon souls will be simply his conversations with the Author of Life put into practice.
Our wonderful Father and Pope, Pius X, the Pope of Frequent Communion, was also the Pope of the interior life. “Re-establish all things in Christ”
Instaurare omnia in Christo (Eph. 1:10).
was the first thing he had to say, above all to active workers. It summarizes the program of an apostle who lives on the Eucharist and who sees that the Church will gain successes only in proportion as souls make progress in the Eucharistic life.
So many enterprises in our time, and yet so often fruitless: why is it that they have not put society back on its feet? Let us admit it once again: they can be counted in far greater numbers than in preceding ages, and yet they have been unable to check the frightful ravages of impiety in the field of family life. Why? Because they are not firmly enough based on the interior life, the Eucharistic life, the liturgical life, fully and properly understood. Leaders of Catholic Action, at the head of these enterprises, have been full of logic, and talent, and even of a certain piety. They have poured forth floods of light, and have managed to introduce some devotional practices: and that, of course, is already something. But because they have not gone back nearly enough to the Source of life, they have not been able to pass on to others that fervor which tempers wills to their great task. Vain have been their attempts to produce that hidden but powerful devotion to the cause, that active ferment working through whole groups of men, those centers of supernatural attraction for which there is no substitute and which, without noise, unceasingly spread the fire around about them and slowly but surely penetrate all classes of persons with whom they come into contact. These results are beyond such apostles because their life in Christ is too weak.
Infection from the ills of former ages could well enough be countered, and souls preserved in health, by a merely ordinary piety. But the virulence of the pestilence in our own times, a hundred times more deadly and so quickly caught from the fatal attractions of the world, must be fought with a much more powerful serum. And because we have had no laboratories in which to produce any effective antitoxins,
Catholic Action has either done little more than produce a certain fervor of the feelings, great spasms of enthusiasm which sputter out as quickly as they burst into flame, or else, in cases where it is effective in itself, Catholic Action has reached little more than a small minority. Our seminaries and novitiates have not turned out the armies of priests, religious, and nuns, inflamed with the wine of the Eucharist, that we might have expected from them. And therefore the fire which these chosen souls were supposed to spread among the pious lay people engaged in Catholic Action, has remained latent. No doubt some pious apostles have been given to the Church. But only very rarely has she received from us workers who possess by their Eucharistic lives that total, uncompromising holiness based on custody of the heart and on ardent, active, generous, and practical zeal, all of which goes by the name of the interior life.
Sometimes we hear a parish spoken of as good or even wonderful because, in it, the people take off their hats to the priest, speak to him with respect, and show a certain liking for him, even going so far as to do him a favor, and gladly, if need be: and yet in that parish the majority work instead of going to Sunday Mass, the Sacraments are abandoned, ignorance of religion is widespread, intemperance and blasphemy reign supreme, and morals leave everything to be desired. A heart-rending spectacle! Is that what you call an excellent parish? Can these people, whose lives are totally pagan, be called Christians?
Men of Catholic Action, we who deplore these sad results, why have we not been more frequent in our attendance at that school where the Divine Word instructs His preachers? Why have we not drawn deeper draughts from that intimacy of love which brings us close to the God of the Eucharist, the Word of life? God has not spoken by our lips. That is our fatal weakness. Let us no longer be astonished, then, if our human words have proved almost entirely sterile.
We have not appeared to souls as a reflection of Christ, and His life in the Church. Before the people could believe in us, there had to be about our brow something of the sheen of Moses’ halo when he came down from Sinai and approached the children of Israel. In the eyes of the Hebrew people, this halo bore witness to the intimacy of God’s ambassador with the One by Whom he was sent. And the success of our own mission demanded not only that we be known as men of honor and conviction, but also a ray of glory from the Eucharist, to give to the people some intimation of the living God, Whom none can resist. Orators, leaders, lecturers, catechists, and professors: we have all had nothing but a mediocre success simply because there has not been, about us, a strong enough reflection of nearness to God.
We apostles who bewail the futility of our works: did we not know all along that in the last analysis the only thing that moves men is the desire of happiness? Let us ask ourselves, then, whether anybody has seen in us the reflected light of the eternal and infinite happiness of God which we might have secured by union with Him Who, though concealed in the Tabernacle, is nevertheless the delight of the heavenly court.
Our Master, for His part, did not forget to feed His
Apostles with this indispensable food of joy. “These things I have spoken to you that My joy may be in you, and your joy may be filled,”
Haec locutus sum vobis ut gaudium meum sit in vobis et gaudium vestrum impleatur (Joan. 15:11).
He said, right after the Last Supper, to remind them to what an extent the Eucharist was going to be the source of all the great joys of this life.
We ministers of the Lord, for whom the Tabernacle has become mute and silent, the stone of consecration cold, the Host a venerable, but lifeless, memento: we have been unable to turn souls from their evil ways. How could we ever draw them out of the mire of their forbidden pleasures? And yet we have talked to them about the joys of religion and of good conscience. But because we have not known how to slake our own thirst at the living waters of the Lamb, we have mumbled and stuttered in our attempts to portray those ineffable joys, the very desire of which would have shattered the chains of the triple concupiscence much more effectively than all our thundering tirades about hell. God is, above all, Love: yet we have only been able to present to souls the picture of a stern Lawgiver, a Judge as inexorable in His judgments as He is terrible in His chastisements. Our lips have been unable to speak the language of the Heart of Him Who loves men, because our converse with Him has been as infrequent as it has been cold.
Let us not try to shift all the blame onto the profoundly demoralized state of society. After all, we have only to look, for example, at the effect on completely de-Christianized parishes of the presence of sensible, active, devoted, capable priests, but priests who were, above all, lovers of the Eucharist. In spite of all the efforts of Satan’s minions, these priests, a terror to the demons, facti diabolo terribiles
Tamquam leones igitur ignem spirantes ab illa mensa recedamus facti diabolo terribiles (St. John Chrysostom, Hom., 61 ad Pop. Ant.).
Let us therefore go down from that Table breathing fire, like lions, and terrible to the demons. (This passage of St. Chrysostom is used in Lessons ii and iii of the nocturn of the Votive Office of the Blessed Sacrament in the Cistercian Breviary).
drawing their power from the source of all power, the furnace of the Tabernacle, have found a way to temper the steel of invincible weapons which the conspiring demons have been powerless to break. But such priests are, alas, all too rare.
And yet, for such as these, mental prayer before the altar has ceased to be a fruitless and barren affair, because they have become capable of understanding these words of St. Francis of Assisi: “Prayer is the source of grace. Preaching is the channel that pours out the graces we ourselves have received from Heaven. The ministers of the word of God have been chosen by the Great King to carry to the people of the earth what they themselves have learned and gathered from His lips, especially before the Tabernacle.”
Our one great hope is the fact that the present day has seen the genesis of a brand of Catholic Action, in our own generation, which is no longer satisfied merely to get people to go to Communion for the sake of appearances, but works at the formation of real and generous communicants.
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