Yesterday,
I was cleaning out a drawer filled with old Magnificat books and found the
following article from February 2001, (pg 318) that I wanted to share.
Treat the Catholic Church as divine only and
you will stumble over her scandals, her failures and her shortcomings. Treat her as human only and you will be
silenced by her miracles, her sanctity and her eternal resurrections.
Of course the Catholic Church is
human. She consists of fallible men, and
her humanity is not even safeguarded as was that of Christ against the
incursions of sin. Always, therefore,
there have been scandals, and always will be.
Popes may betray their trust in all human matters; priests their flocks;
laymen their faith. No man is
secure. And, again, since she is human
it is perfectly true that she has profited by human circumstances for the increase
of her power. Undoubtedly it was the existence of the Roman Empire, with it is road,
its rapid means of transit and its organization that made possible the swift propagation
of the Gospel in the first centuries.
Undoubtedly it was the empty throne of Caesar and the prestige of Rome
that developed the world’s acceptance of the authority of Peter’s Chair. Undoubtedly it was the divisions of Europe
that cemented the Church’s unity and led men to look at a Supreme Authority
that might compose their differences. There is scarcely an opening in human
affairs into which she has not plunged; hardly an opportunity she has
missed. Human Affairs, human sins, and
weaknesses as well as human virtues, have all contributed to her power. So grows a tree even in uncongenial
soil. The rocks that impede the roots
later became their support; the rich soil waiting for an occupant has been
drawn up into the life of the leaves; the very developed too its power of
resistance. Yet these things do not make
the tree.
For her humanity, though it is
the body in which her divinity dwells, does not create that divinity. Certainly human circumstances have developed
her, yet what but divine Providence ordered and developed those human
circumstances? What but that same power,
which indwells in the Church, dwelt without her too and caused her to take root
at that time and in that place which most favored her growth?
Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson – was a British convert to
Catholicism who is best known for his novels about the faith.
