| |

Communion of Saints: St. Robert Bellarmine on the Mystical Body of Christ | John A. Hardon, S.J.
Print-friendly version
Shortly after his defection from Rome, Johann Döllinger
bitterly reproached the First Vatican Council with "doing nothing but defining
the private opinions of a single man—Cardinal Robert Bellarmine." The
accusation is false but suggestive, because it leads us to investigate the
teaching of St. Robert on the organization of the Catholic Church as the
Mystical Body of Christ. Most of the Council's business had to deal with the
origin and nature of the one true Church. Moreover, Bellarmine's ecclesiology
was the main source from which the Fathers of the Council drew their decrees
and definitions. Consequently, with the current interest even among
non-Catholics in the Church of Christ as the Mystical Body, we should not
overlook what St. Robert Bellarmine has to say about a subject in which the
Church herself considers him the outstanding authority.
Pope Pius XII, in his Encyclical Mystici Corporis, confirms this authority when he quotes St. Robert
to support his explanation of why the social Body of the Church should be
honored with the name of Christ. "As Bellarmine notes with acumen and
accuracy," the Pope says, "this naming of the Body of Christ is not to be explained
solely by the fact that Christ must be called the Head of His Mystical Body,
but also by the fact that He so sustains the Church, and so in a sense lives in
the Church, that it is, as it were, another Christ." [1] So much for an
apologetic of Bellarmine's qualifications. What follows is a synthesis of his
doctrine on the Mystical Body taken from his sermons and controversies, which,
it is hoped, will help to amplify several points of detail which the Mystici
Corporis only suggests but otherwise does
not develop or dwell upon.
The Mystical Body of Christ Is the Catholic Church
It is significant that Bellarmine went out of his way to
emphasize what seems so obvious to us—that the Mystical Body of Christ is
also the established Church of Christ. Until his time, there were relatively
few Christians not in communion with Rome who claimed that their organization
was the Body of Christ of which St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians: "You are the
Body of Christ, member for member" (I Cor., xii. 27). But with the advent of
Luther and Calvin the situation changed. On the one hand, they preached an
invisible Church founded on faith and predestination; on the other hand, they
called their Church the Body of Christ. This was a new idea and challenge to
traditional Catholic theology.
The Mystical Body of Christ, the predestinarians argued, is
not unlike His tangible physical Body. And since the whole physical Body of
Christ is in heaven and glorified with all its component parts, it follows that
the Mystical Body should also arrive at heavenly glory in all its individual
members. The statement looks harmless enough until we examine its implications.
If every member of the Mystical Body is going to be saved and the Church of
Christ is the Body, then the only members of the Church are those whom God has
eternally decreed should enter heaven. Everyone else is a putative member only,
deceived by God and deceiving himself that he is even a Christian, much less a
part of the Mystical Body.
"My first reaction to this doctrine," Bellarmine observes,
"is that the opposition has pushed the analogy between the mystical and
physical Bodies of Christ far beyond the limits ever intended for them by the
Apostle. They are certainly alive in general outline, but not in every detail.
And besides, even the physical Body of Christ entered heaven and was glorified
only in its formal constituents, but not in all its natural parts, many of
which were lost and changed with the passage of time, as we notice happens in
our own bodies.
So, it is correct enough to say that the whole Mystical Body
will be saved in its constitutive elements, inasmuch as every class in the
Catholic Church—apostles, prophets, teachers, confessors and
virgins—will be represented among the saved. It is not true, however,
that all its material elements, that is, every numerical member of the Mystical
Body, will finally attain to salvation." [2]
Calvinists and The Mystical Body
Another argument, of the Calvinists particularly, was that
the only Church of which Christ may be said to be the Head is the one which He
will eventually save and "set before Him on the Day of Judgment—glorious
and without spot or wrinkle," as described by the Apostle in his Epistle to the
Ephesians. However, since only the predestined will be saved and glorified,
only they are properly to be considered members of the Church of Christ.
St. Robert answers: "It all depends on how you understand
the expression, 'His Church.' If it is taken to mean that Christ is Head only
of that part of 'His Church' which He will save, then the proposition is false.
Christ is Head of the whole Mystical Body, in spite of the tragic fact that
certain people who are now its members, will be lost for all eternity. But if
'His Church' is understood to include the whole body of the faithful as
distinguished from the societies of unbelievers, then the proposition is true,
while the conclusion deduced from it is false. For although some members of
this Church will not be saved, it is wrong to conclude that therefore Christ does
not save His Church, of which He is the Head." [3]
However, Bellarmine does not limit his concept of the
Mystical Body to the visible Church on earth. The Mystical Body of Christ is
composed of three "Churches"—the Church Militant, the Church Suffering and
the Church Triumphant. He has as little sympathy with those who denied
membership in the Body of Christ to the souls in purgatory and the Saints in
heaven, as he had with anyone who restricted its membership to the predestined
and elect or extended it to those who were united only by a common, internal
faith in Christ.
Bellarmine Defends Honoring the Saints
In his defense of the Holy Eucharist against the Calvinists,
St. Robert had to answer some of their stock charges on the traditional custom
of offering the Holy Sacrifice in honor of the Saints. He explains that the
Protestant bias against this practice arises form two fundamental errors in
their theology: one a misunderstanding of Catholic doctrine, where they claim
that we offer the Mass as an act of adoration to the Saints instead of to God;
the other is an unwarranted limitation of membership in the Mystical Body. "The
practice of offering Holy Mass to honor the Saints," he says, "is especially
appropriate as a public expression of our belief in the Communion of Saints.
The Sacrifice of the physical Body of Christ is an oblation of the corporate
Mystical Body of Christ. Moreover, since we do not hesitate to mention the
names of living persons, such as the Pope and bishop, in the ritual of the Mass,
why should we fail to remember those of the faithful departed who are in heaven
or in purgatory, when all of them belong to the same Body of the Lord?
According to St. Augustine, there is no better way of fulfilling the one great
purpose for which the Eucharistic Sacrifice was instituted, than that it might
symbolize the universal sacrifice in which the whole Mystical Body of Christ
—the whole regenerated City of God—is offered by the hands of the
great High Priest to the glory of His Heavenly Father. Once we recognize the
Saints, no less than we, are organically united to the Mystical Body, it
becomes not only proper but necessary that their memory should be recalled
during the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass." [4]
Membership in The Mystical Body
In general, however, when Bellarmine speaks of the Mystical
Body, he has in mind only the first of its three branches, the Church
Militant—or, in other words, the visible organization of the Roman
Catholic Church. Thus, in treating the delicate question of occult infidels, he
refutes the doctrine of Calvin who held that, if a baptized person has lost the
virtue of faith, in spite of his external profession of belief and conformity
with Christian practice he is no longer a member of the organic Body of Christ.
"It is certainly true," he admits, "that a sincere faith and not its mere
external profession is required if we are to be internally united to the Body
of Christ, which is the Church . . . . But even the man who makes only an
outward profession along with the rest of the faithful is a true member, albeit
a dry and dead member, of the Body of the Church." [5]
It follows, therefore, that the Mystical Body of Christ is
the Roman Catholic Church, whose members are all those who have been baptized
and who at least externally practice and profess the true faith. Commentators
on the Mystici Corporis make special
note of the fact that, after centuries of controversy on the subject, the Pope
has authoritatively approved Bellarmine's doctrine on the minimum essentials
for membership in the Mystical Body—which reads like a paraphrase from
the third book of St. Robert's De Conciliis. In the words of Pope Pius XII, "only those are
really to be included as members of the Church who have been baptized and
profess the true faith and have not unhappily withdrawn from Body-unity, or for
grave faults been excluded by legitimate authority. For in one Spirit were we
all baptized into one Body." [6]
Sinners as Members of The Mystical Body
John Wyclif, and after him the Protestants in general,
allowed that all the justified in the state of grace, and only they, are
members of the Mystical Body. Even Catholic theologians like de Soto and Cano,
when they came to explain how sinners are members of the Body of Christ, gave
them analogous membership and nothing more. They admitted that baptized persons
in the state of sin may be called "the faithful" and "Christians," but only in
the sense that they are somehow externally attached to the Body of the Church.
"Not only the organs and limbs," they argued, "but also bodily secretions, the
teeth, the hair, and such like, all belong to the body." Bellarmine refused to
accept this view. "If what they say is true, the consequences are impossible. A
wicked Pope then is not the Head of the Church, and other bishops, if they are
in sin, are also not heads of their respective churches. For the head is not a
bodily secretion or the hair, but a member of the body—indeed, its most
important member."
"To solve the difficulty, therefore, we have to distinguish
two senses in which a member of the body may be understood. It may be taken in
the strict sense to designate the member in itself, in its essence and
substance as a member. Or it may mean a member of the body in its capacity as a
medium of activity through which the body operates. Thus, for example, the eye
of a man and the eye of a horse are specifically different as substances or
entities because they are radicated specially different souls. But as kinetic
instruments they are specifically the same because both have the same end and
object of their operation—both being directed to the sensible perception
of color.
"An evil bishop, a bad priest, a layman in grievous sin are
dead members of the Body of Christ, and therefore not true members, if we
understand 'member' in the strict sense of an integral part of a living body.
However, these same 'dead members' are very vital members if we consider them
as instruments of activity within the Church. So that the Pope and bishops are
real heads, the teachers and preachers are real eyes and tongues of the Body of
Christ, even when they have fallen from the grace of God. For while it is true
that a Christian becomes a living member of this Body through charity, yet in
the Providence of God the instruments of operation in the Church are
constituted by the power of orders and jurisdiction, which can be obtained and
exercised even by a man who is personally an enemy of God.
"Hence the great difference between a physical body, in
which a dead member cannot serve as a vital instrument, and the supernatural
Mystical Body, where this is not only possible but actually happens. To explain
the paradox we should recall that in natural bodies their work depends entirely
on the health and soundness of the organs by which they act. But the Mystical
Body of Christ can operate independently of the virtue and vitality of its
members, because the soul of this Body, which is the Holy Spirit, can function
equally through good instruments as through bad, through instruments that are
alive as through those which are dead." [7]
Part 1 | Part 2
| | | |