From the Acts of the Apostles: “And suddenly a sound came
from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind…and there appeared to them tongues
on fire…and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in tongues.”
Quite a scene, quite a bash, hard to follow this with
anything. Tongues of fire, hurricane
force winds within the room, and the babbling in many languages. No wonder the people outside thought that
they were listening to a drunken party.
But they were outside. And those inside, Mary and the apostles, had been
waiting for something or someone, not quite sure, remembering Jesus’ words
about sending the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the Paracelete, they sat there
with a remembrance of that holy fear
they felt on Easter day when Jesus appeared to them and breathed on them: “Receive
the Holy Spirit: Whose sins you forgive are forgiven in heaven and earth and
whose sins you hold are held in heaven
and earth.” That power of Christ, the power of the Cross, but specific. This and
nothing else. But they knew they had to
wait, for it was not over, the event still had not happened. Peter was still Peter, not understanding,
earnest, but not getting it, lacking a college degree, not used to public
speaking. And then it happened in a way
that no one would have expected, in a way that the curse of the multiplication
of languages at the Tower of Babel becomes now the sign of the missionary
calling of the Church to the whole world.
So today is
the feast of Pentecost, the answer of God to his Church, after the answer of
the Ascension to the Life, Passion, Resurrection of his only-begotten Son. And the answer of God is to empower the
Church with the Holy Spirit, with the presence of God himself, to lead the
Church into all truth, that is, to guarantee that the preaching of the Church
about Jesus Christ as the Savior of the world, as the source of eternal life
through faith: that this preaching will be true and efficacious, that it will
do something, will do what has to be done, to inspire repentance, turning away
from sin, and to inspire a turning to the Lord Jesus Christ and to have faith
in his Death, Resurrection and Ascension that are the hope, the only hope of
mankind.
This is the
fundamental role of the presence of the Holy Spirit within the Church: to bear
truthful witness to the person of Jesus Christ and what this means not only for
the individual but for the world for which Christ died. And this witness, this truth, is guided and
witnessed by the presence of the Holy Spirit within the Church. But this cannot be understood in a magical
way, nor in a way that can be claimed to be seen clearly by men at every
instant of human history-- and human history is part of Church history.
When we look
at the history of the patristic Ecumenical Councils—that is, what happened in
detail at the first seven Ecumenical Councils of the Church in which the basic
questions about Jesus Christ, who he is and the meaning of who he is, were
hammered out on that gold foil that we call the Nicene Creed which we will sing
in a few minutes—that history is messy. It is full of intrigue, full of
dissension, full of manipulation. It is a messy process. It is marked by heroes like St. Athanasius
who refused to accede to the light and easy version of Christian faith of
Arianism. But it is also marked in real
instances by a failure by those entrusted with the passing on of the Tradition
handed down from the Apostles, namely the bishops, to see the truth clearly
about the person of Jesus Christ. But it
is also marked by the refusal of the faithful, the man and woman at the Mass,
their refusal to water down the person of Jesus Christ. It is the laity in this crucial time in
Church history that played such an important role in the Spirit-led understanding
of the person of Jesus Christ as true God and true man.
Now what
does this mean? It does not mean that we
cannot trust the bishops who have been chosen in Apostolic Succession to
transmit the Tradition of the Church in which is contained the Truth about
Jesus Christ and the salvation of the world.
It is the bishops who are the successors of the Apostles and who are the
transmitters of the Tradition and who are given the grace to be who they are
called to be. And among these bishops in
the Bishop of Rome who is the successor of St. Peter, the Prince of the
Apostles to whom a special charism was given within the Church: "You are Peter and on this rock I will build
my Church and the gates of heaven will not prevail against it," And it is to the one who is elected to be the
Pope, that the charism of infallibility, a charism that is also given to the
whole Church, that this charism is given in a special way to the Pope as the
head of the Church on earth to be the guardian and defender of the faith. All this is true and therefore must be
believed by all Catholics.
But once
again, the working of the Holy Spirit must be always seen in the context of
human history, that is, must be seen within the messiness that is human
history. And if this is true, and it is,
then we always have to remember that the truth that is the mark of the activity
of the Spirit is most often seen in retrospect, that is, when the Church looks
back and sees what has really happened and how the Church has been brought to a
particular understanding of the Faith or to a particular path in her
relationship to the world in which she lives.
One of the now
long-standing problems within the Church of the past century is precisely to refuse to step back and view things from an unfolding historical perspective. There is a desire to be able to see the
working of the Holy Spirit within the Church immediately and then to claim that
this particular understanding or implication of the Faith that is being expounded
at a particular time is the work of the Holy Spirit and therefore must be true
and accepted by all. What was decided at
those first Ecumenical Councils that hammered out the orthodox understanding of
the person of Jesus Christ was not accepted by many in the Church at that time.
It took time for the whole Church to see the presence of the Spirit of Truth in
the declarations of these Councils. It was not a matter of calling a Council
and then declaring that all that was said at that Council is defined to be the
voice of the Spirit and then have everyone believe it. Truth does not come in that neat way. It took
over 1800 years for the Church to recognize the truth of the Immaculate
Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The Dominicans, including St Thomas Aquinas, opposed this doctrine, and
the Franciscans were the champions of this doctrine concerning our Lady. This
debate was necessary. And only when the
truth of Mary’s Immaculate Conception was seen to be believed by all in the
Church could it be infallibly defined in 1850 by Pope Pius IX.
And Pius IX
could define the doctrine as true because of the Spirit based and led promise made to St.
Peter and his successors that what they define as true in matters of faith and
morals is protected from error by the power of the Holy Spirit in the Office
they hold within the Church. The
definition is the culmination of an historical process guided by the Holy
Spirit within the Church. There has been
a tendency to forget that the role of the Pope in the Church is not to be an oracle
that delivers new truths every day. The
words of the Pope must be listened to and respected at all times, but we must
never fall into that hyper-papalism that reduces the teaching office of the
Church to the papacy, that runs the risk of blurring the Petrine Ministry by a
cult of personality of a particular pope, that, in other words, loses that
historical perspective that is a mark of the work of the Holy Spirit within the
Church. The presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church, which is real and which
is the Advocate of Truth, does not mean that Ecumenical Councils or magisterial
pronouncements are mechanical purveyors of a Truth that is always accessible in
an immediate way. They are binding, but
as Blessed John Henry Newman said, they are the beginning of
a conversation. And it is that
conversation that is missing in the Church today. That conversation has been
eclipsed by shouting over and over again, in the context of the post Second
Vatican Council years, the preposterous notion that whatever happens in the
Church must be the work of the Holy Spirit and cannot be questioned in a
conversation. This is not only
irrational. It is not Catholic.
What we must
remember on this feast of Pentecost is that the Spirit we received in Baptism
and Confirmation, the Spirit that makes the Church the living organism of the Body of Christ, the Spirit that whispers and prods us as we live our lives open
to the grace of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that informs our conscience and
saves us from sentimental subjectivism, the Spirit that breathes upon the Pope and
bishops and priests and religious as well as on every member of the body of
Christ: it is this Spirit that enables
us to confess that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior, and it is this Spirit that
enables us to come here to worship God in Spirit and in Truth in this offering
up of the Body and Blood of Christ to the Father in the power of the Holy
Spirit. It is this same Spirit that
makes it possible for each of us, even in our fallen state, to love, to love God, to love each other and to
love Truth. What more can one ask?
Father Richard G. Cipolla
