Cardinal de Lubac

[hatcheteer]

Here is a rather lengthy, but excellent excerpt from the Jesuit Cardinal Henri de Lubac from his work “The Church: From Paradox to Mystery.” I know its long, but its worth reading, for the pure beauty of the refelection:

The Church is at once human and divine, at once a gift from above and a product of this earth. She is composed of men each of whom resists with all the weight of a laggard and wounded nature the life the Church strives to infuse. She is orientated towards the past, which contains a memorial she well knows is never past; she tends towards the future, elated by the hope of an ineffable consummation of whose nature no sensible sign gives a hint.

Destined in her present form to leave all behind as ‘the image of this world’, she is destined in her innermost nature to remain intact for the day when what she is will be manifested. Multiple or multiform, she is nonetheless one, of a most active and demanding unity. She is a people, the great anonymous crowd and still – there is no other word – the most personal of beings. Catholic, that is, universal, she wishes her members to be open to everything and yet she herself is never fully open but when she is withdrawn to the intimacy of her interior life and in the silence of adoration.

She is humble and she is majestic. She professes a capacity to absorb every culture, to raise up their highest values; at the same time we see her claim for her own the homes and hearts of the poor, the undistinguished, the simple and destitute masses. Not for an instant does she cease – and her immortality assures continuity-- to contemplate him who is at once crucified and resurrected, the man of sorrows and lord of glory, vanquished by, but Savior of, the world. He is her bloodied spouse and her triumphant master. From his generous heart, ever open and yet always infinitely secret, she has received her existence and the life it is her wish to communicate to all.

How to perceive and grasp her real nature, this is still my question. The harder I try to see, the more I am forced to abandon my false analogies; I am dazzled by her profound truth – and I give up in despair any attempt to define her.

And even if I then ask her to define herself, her answer is a rich profusion of biblical images which I well understand are not mere teaching aids but so many allusions to a reality, in its essence always beyond the reach of my natural intelligence. Yes, even after the splendid achievement of logical, clear exposition that is Lumen Gentium, her most lucid self-definition yet, my meditation is still in the cul-de-sac of mystery.

And yet I do have something to show for my pains, something obvious, literally childlike; something I knew before began and which every reflection confirmed. I can tell it in one word, the first of all words…the Church is my mother.

Yes, the Church, the whole Church, that of generations past who transmitted her life, her teachings, her witness, her culture, her love to me; and the Church of today. The whole Church, I say, not only the institutional Church, or the Church teaching, or, as we still say, the hierarchical Church that holds the keys confided to her by the Lord.

 

[hatcheteer]

No, more broadly and simply, I mean the ‘living Church’, working, praying, active and contemplative, remembering and searching, believing, hoping, loving; the daily forger of innumerable links, visible and invisible, between her members; the Church of the humble, close to God; this ‘secret army’, recruiting from every quarter, braving the periods of decadence, loyal and self-sacrificing, without thought of revolt or even reform, always taking the road that ascends despite a fallen nature that beckons elsewhere, testifying in silence to the continuing fecundity of the gospel and to the already present kingdom.

Much more, the entire Church, without distinction, that immense flock of Christians, so many of whom are unaware of their royal priesthood and of the fraternal community they constitute, all this is my mother too. In this community I find my support, my strength and my joy.

It was here that I first met the Church, at the knees of my earthly mother, and ever since it is here I still best recognize her through the mist of mere events and situations that in the long run defy analysis. Her experience, she tells me, has been the means, down the centuries, of increasing her perception of the sacred truth revealed to her. I too can tell her that my experience, modest and restricted though it be, has allowed me – as it has each of her faithful – to perceive precisely this, that she is my mother. This word which, as I say, is the first, preeminently the child’s word, is also the word that best resumes whatever perception the adult achieves into the nature of man himself.

The Church is my mother because she brought me forth to a new life. She is my mother because her concern for me never slackens, any more than do her efforts to deepen that life in me, however unenthusiastic my co-operation. And though in me this life may be a fragile and timid growth, I have seen its full flowering in others. I have seen it. I have touched it. I can, and will, vouch categorically for it. I am not deaf to the reproaches directed against my mother (truth to tell there are times when I am deafened by them), nor do I fail to see the justice of some of them. But I assert that before the evidence I have just presented all of them – and any others you care to add – are without force and will always remain so. just as the Church is entirely concentrated in the Eucharist, it may also be said to be entirely concentrated in a saint.

For here is the wonder of it: if my eyes had not always been aware of it, I would not have known what to look at.

Happy those who from childhood have learnt to look on the Church as a mother! Happier still those whose experience, in whatever walk of life, has confirmed its truth! Happy those who one day were gripped by (and whose appreciation of it ever grew) the astonishing newness, richness and depth of the life communicated to them by this mother!