be known for the whole Easter season as "infants."
SERMON 213 149
23. He has in mind here just the Church of the Gentiles. 24. It is one of the catechumens supposedly speaking. 25. By part of Christ, pars Christi, he must mean the blood of Christ. It is a most peculiar expression.
26. See Jn 19:34. 27. He is referring, I imagine, to the blessing of the font before the baptisms are performed. 28. Catholic readers today will find it odd that he doesn't here mention the sacrament of penance. But in those days it took a very different form from what it does now, and was only for very grave sins, which he certainly was not going to tell the catechumens that they would be unable to avoid. In the Lord's prayer he is referring, of course, to the petition, "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors."
29. He is speaking in an intellectual climate, which many Christians still perhaps inhabit, in which the concept of the immortality of the soul makes easy sense and the doctrine of the resurrection of the body does not; even less when it is phrased as the resurrection of the flesh. It was his own connatural intellectual climate, so to say; and here he is valiantly—to change the metaphor—swim¬ ming against the tide, as the official faith and doctrine of the Church has always done.
30. The two meanings of colo, impossible to reproduce in English. 31. Their sponsors or godparents, not their real parents. After baptism the newly baptized will be known for the whole Easter season as "infants."
32. What this means I do not know. Perhaps from this day until the Easter vigil those to be baptized had extra prayers and spiritual exercises.
33. We; all the clergy, I think he means.