Out of the Church and Into the World
Conclusion
Out of the Church and Into the World
Out of the Church and Into the World
And Jesus coming, spoke to them saying: All power is given me in heaven and in earth. Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. And behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.
— Matthew 28:18–20125
“Going therefore to teach all nations.” Here He enjoins their duty; and He enjoins a threefold duty. Firstly, He enjoins the duty of teaching; secondly He enjoins the duty of baptizing; and thirdly, He enjoins the duty of instructing regarding morals.
— St. Thomas Aquinas126
The Church and the World in Our Turbulent Times
These are certainly turbulent times both inside and outside the Church. As scandalous stories seem to break in the news almost daily, I cannot guess what new crises we may face by the time this book comes out in print. Such crises are bound to arise to the extent to which we abandon timeless spiritual wisdom in favor of the modern worldly wisdom of our own age. In the aftermath of the tumultuous decades in the Church after Vatican II, decades that cast off so much sacred tradition and experimented with so much man-crafted novelty, raw statistics such as those we cited in our preface showed the proof of the following quip: “A Catholic aphorist put it thus, ‘The Mass reforms wished to open the doors of the Church to those who found themselves outside; instead, those who were inside ran out.’ ”127
We might think of some of the modern reforms of the 1960s to the 1980s especially, not only in terms of the Mass, in which the Novus Ordo was sometimes celebrated in strange and less than sacred ways, but also in new church buildings. Churches of great verticality that drew one’s eyes up toward heaven were replaced by churches on more horizontal or even more circular plans that draw our eyes toward ourselves.
In so many churches, beautiful painted, stained-glass, and sculptured images of the saints and the angels suffered the fate of iconoclasm and were removed from their pedestals and stored in church basements. And indeed, while massive crucifixes, life-size or greater, once drew all eyes to the summits of high altars, in some churches today, all you might find, if you put on your glasses, is a portable crucifix with a corpus of Christ that might almost fit in your hand. True, He willingly became small for us within Mary’s womb, but must we make Him small for us? Surely, many modern liturgists reasoned that wise and mature “contemporary” men and woman do not need such distractions, such childish reminders of holiness, perhaps forgetting or completely unaware that a very wise, mature man contemporary to his own age wrote of the timeless necessity of visible icons of holiness because “it is part of man’s nature to acquire knowledge of the intelligible from the sensible” (III, 60, 4). Further:
Now the reason for the necessity of finding these illustrations or images, is that simple and spiritual impressions easily slip from the mind, unless they be tied as it were to some corporeal image, because human knowledge has a greater hold on sensible objects. (II-II, 49, 1)
Indeed, while some might still consider such images childish, Thomas wrote that the capacity for being awed by striking images “explains why we remember better what we saw when we were children,” and Christ Himself declared: “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3).
Regardless of the recent rampant denuding and even demolition of churches, and the hemorrhaging of Church members in the Western world, we must never forget that Christ told us He is always with us “even to the consummation of the world.” He is always there to help us recapture our childlike capacities for awe, reverence, and love. He ardently desires to give rebirth to our souls, our Church, and our nations. He does want those of us inside churches to run out into the world, not to abandon His house, but to go forth with the lessons we learned there, and perhaps through our words and the example of how we live our lives, to bring others in the world back into church with us. We should breathe in great draughts of heavenly oxygen every time we are at Mass and share it with a world that is suffocating.
Sharing and Teaching Timeless, Eternal Life Lessons
Thomas said that true mastery of knowledge is demonstrated by a person’s capacity to teach. If we are to share Thomas’s eternal life lessons and help rebuild our families, our communities, our nations, and our Church, we must master them first in our own hearts and minds, by learning them “by heart,” so we can contemplate them with our minds whenever we make time to do so.
In the second-to-last table of our appendix is a very simple aid for remembering them, gleaned from Thomas’s writings on the perfection of memory. As a start on contemplation, I suggest that we also consider how well these life lessons all hang together, supporting and reinforcing each other, through the use of a simple mental image, which I’m pretty sure Thomas would approve of. (And I’m certain his teacher St. Albert the Great would!)128
St. Thomas’s Summa Theologica has been compared by commentators to a great Gothic cathedral, so massive, beautiful, and integrated are all its many parts and adornments. Well, we could think of our twelve life lessons as a cathedral too. The cathedral rests upon God Himself as the foundation in our first life lesson. Christ Himself, the way and destination in our last life lesson, is at the apex upon the high altar in image in the form of a crucifix, in His Real Presence, in the consecrated host, and inside our own very bodily temples of the Holy Spirit. In between, in the nave and the sanctuary, we are taught fundamental lessons of the Faith in the prayers, readings, and sermons, moral lessons informing us in how to live in harmony and peace, how to grow in justice, fortitude, charity, and all the virtues, as we see the images of saints and angels and hear of them in the words of the Mass. There is a whole world — and heaven — to contemplate there every time we attend Mass, or even just think of our own church, or of one of the great cathedrals.129
To contemplate these lessons even more deeply, we have included in these pages a plethora of citations to the exact locations within the Summa Theologica and other of Thomas’s works to help you dig deeper if you so choose. Indeed, if you dig more deeply into Thomas’s writings, you may well uncover a slew of new powerful life lessons to ponder and live!
We saw that Thomas also taught us that “for even as it is better to enlighten than merely to shine, so it is better to give to others the fruits of one’s contemplation rather than merely to contemplate” (II-II, 188, 6). Thomas makes clear that we are not to hoard the spiritual truths we glean through contemplation but are to share them freely with others. He knew well we must “be doers of the word, and not hearers only” (James 1:22). While we are to seek eternal life for ourselves, we should do all that we can so that our families, friends, neighbors, and even those we might now count as enemies can share the bliss with us in heaven.
The kinds of fruits we can glean and share with others will depend to some extent on our God-given individual temperaments, vocations, time, and place on earth. Comparing ourselves with each other may be a case of apples and oranges, so to speak, but every single one of us can share and contribute to the great cornucopia of spiritual merit.130 Thomas shared the exceedingly succulent fruits of his contemplation and the fruits of the Holy Spirit as well.131 As we strive to share these life lessons, we might ask ourselves what we can do to nourish, refresh, and bring joy to all those around us.
Thomas knew well that we must express the love of our neighbors not merely in word, but in deed. Recall his explication of 1 John 3:18: “The love of our neighbor requires that not only should we be our neighbor’s well-wishers, but also his well-doers” (II-II, 32, 5).132
Thomas so shared the fruits of his contemplation through such an amazing quantity of writing, teaching, and preaching that it may have cut his own life on earth rather short. He died on earth and was born in heaven on March 7, 1274, at the age of forty-nine. Thomas wrote extensively about sins that turn us away from God. He wrote magnificently of the virtues and gifts that turn us back toward him. He reported that all of his study, contemplation, his works of spoken and written words, were made possible through prayer. As the theologian of transubstantiation and the poet of the feast of Corpus Christi, Thomas understood and cherished the Blessed Sacrament and the other six sacraments. Finally, we know without a doubt that the words and the deeds of his life were motivated by love, first and foremost by the love of God, and through that love, the love of his neighbors, which include you and me, and, of course, for his own “inward man” or “higher self,” which was made to enjoy God in eternity — and does.
In Thomas’s magnificent writings on the virtues, he acclaimed charity as the highest, as the “mother of the virtues,” which forms, shapes, and moves all of the other virtues of the soul. To love God, others, and ourselves with the love of charity, regardless of how turbulent our times might be, is indeed to love God with all that we are and our neighbors as ourselves.
The End (and the End of the Angelic Doctor)
Many people outside the Church, and, alas, some within it, do not see the value of St. Thomas’s lessons for our modern times. So many of our modern errors and the crises they have wrought amount to a rejection of Thomistic wisdom by those who thought they saw further and knew better than the Angelic Doctor. Some have even claimed that, before his death, Thomas renounced his own writings. Let’s end with a look at a mysterious incident near the end of our saint’s life on earth.
On December 6, 1273, Thomas had an ecstatic experience while saying Mass. The revelation he beheld, perhaps a foretaste of the Beatific Vision, was so powerful that Thomas told his friend Brother Reginald that, after what he had seen, he could write no more, since his writings “appeared as straw.” Four months later, after a short illness and before his fiftieth birthday, Thomas died on March 7, 1274, at the Cistercian monastery at Fossonova, leaving his great Summa Theologica incomplete.
By calling his writings “straw,” he did not renounce them. Thomas had written of three degrees of charity. At the first stage, we fight against sin; at the second stage, we focus on the development of virtue; and in the highest and last stage, we seek only union with God. Indeed, it was this schema that inspired our lesson plans including pulverizing sin, practicing virtue, and seeking union with God through prayer and the sacraments. In a vision of Christ near the end of his life, after Christ told Thomas that he’d written well about Him, He asked Thomas what he wanted from Him. His answer was “Non nisi Te” (None but You).
Perhaps, in his last days on earth, Thomas had broached that third degree of charity, restless for nothing but what we have cast as our first and last life lessons, restless for anything but union with God. Perhaps the “straw” that was his theological works had been the kindling that fueled the fires of charity that brought him to that exultant state, so soon before he came to the end of his days on earth and came to cherish his ultimate End of life with God in heaven.
May the lessons that helped Thomas attain eternal life help us and our neighbors attain, with God’s grace, that same highest and most eternal of all possible goals.
The End
125 Translation in St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary of the Gospel of St. Matthew, trans. Rev. Paul M. Kimball (n.p.: Dolorosa Press, 2012), 949.
126 Ibid., 963.
127 Martin Mosebach, Subversive Catholicism: Papacy, Liturgy, Church (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2019), 77.
128 In commenting on ancient techniques using locations to help us place mental images of things we strive to remember, St. Albert noted, “Some will place a church.”
129 I cannot help but note that I sit here proofreading this book’s rough draft, written a couple of weeks ago, on April 16, 2019, the day after the devastating destruction by fire of the magnificent Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, a structure that St. Thomas himself saw during its original construction. I hope and pray that this tragic loss will awaken us to the inestimable spiritual and cultural value of magnificent sacred art and architecture.
130 If I might stretch the “apples and oranges” metaphor for individual differences just a bit more, I’d compare Thomas’s fruit to that of a watermelon. It’s the largest fruit I can think of. It contains copious quantities of refreshing water and a multitude of seeds that can generate new sources of nourishment!
131 These fruits, building on Galatians 5:22–23 are listed as charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, and chastity (CCC 1832).
132 1 John 3:18 reads: “Little children, let us not love in words or speech but in deeds and truth.”