ÎTbe îtmerican
Bcckstastical IReview
A MONTHLY PUBLICATION FOR THE CLERGY
Cum Approbatione Superiorum

VOL. CXVIII
JANUARY—JUNE, 1948

’Ey lj/l τνίύματι, μι$. ψυχ^
vwaffXovyres ry τίντα του eiayyeXiov
Phil. 1:27

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THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA PRESS

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partaking in them; he knew, in other words, that polyphony
could be part of the liturgy, and not merely a distraction from it
Perhaps he also saw in this music a bridge made-to-order, over
which a twentieth-century Catholic could pass to an intelligent
and abiding appreciation of ancient chant. For such reasons his
Motu proprio recommended the restoration of golden age choral
music. And for such reasons it is indeed worthy of being sung
“in the more solemn functions of the Church.”

Francis J. Guentner, S.J.
St. Mary’s CoUege,
St. Mary's, Kansas

.

The Progress of Assimilation to Christ

The members of the Mystical Body of Christ ought to share His life
more and more, in order to become like to Him. The sacred Humanity
of the Saviour progressively communicates to us the graces which it has
.merited for iis upon the Cross. This is the influx of the Head of the
Mystical Body upon the members of that Body. Through this inflts,
Our Lord wills that we should become more and more like unto Hirn,
by baptism, by absolution, by frequent communion, by the crosses and
purifications requisite for our advancement, up to the reception at
Extreme Unction and of our entrance into heaven. In the lives of many
Saints, we see this progressive assimilation by a certain reproduction
in them of the mysteries of Our Lord’s infancy, those of His hidden
life, then those of His apostolic life, and finally of His life of sorrows.
Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, in L’amour de Dieu et la Crois de disse
< (Jurisy, France: Éditions du Cerf, 1929), I, 256.

Ut Revelentur ex Multis Cordibus Cogitationes
The secret thoughts which Jestts Christ is going to reveal are princi­
pally those in which we deceive ourselves, when we believe that we are
doing for God’s sake what we are actually doing for our own interests,
or out of envy of authority, or in favor of our own individual opinions.
These are the thoughts that are most hidden, since we take care to hide
them iron our very selves.
—Bishop Jacques Benigne Bossuet, in lus Élévations sur les mystères.
cap. 20.

ST. AUGUSTINE’S USE OF THE NOTE OF
CATHOLICITY
Long before St. Augustine began to teach and to defend the
divinely revealed doctrine of Our Lord’s true Church, the great
mass of mankind, both members and non-members of the Church,
had come to use the term Catholic as the distinctive designation of
this society. The expression first appears in patristic literature
during the opening decade of the second century. Employed
somewhat sparingly at the outset it became the usual and
ordinary title of Christ’s true Church by the middle of the third
century. Yet, despite the fact that there had been certain more or
less rhetorical expositions of the Church’s catholicity prior to his
time, it remained for St. Augustine to formulate what was to be
the definitive theological explanation of this characteristic of
God’s kingdom on earth.

The tendency of some modern theological writers to shy away
from what may be called the geographical implications of the
Church’s catholicity find little support in the teachings of St.
Augustine. Thus, to mention only a few examples, in his second
book Contra litteras Petiliani Donatistae Cirtensis Episcopi, in the
second book of his work Contra Gaudentium Donatistarum
Episcopum, and in his Ad Catholicos epistola contra Donatistas
(better known as the De unitate ecclesiae}, the greatest of the
Latin Fathers of the Church insists upon the derivation of the
term “catholic” from the Greek καθ’ Shov, and gives a defi­
nitely geographical explanation of that catholicity. St. Augustine
insisted that the true ecclesia, the actual kingdom of God on
earth, was a society commissioned by Our Lord Himself to
establish itself throughout the world. Furthermore, he contended
that, by virtue of the divine aid actually promised and given to
this society, it had been founded in territories scattered over the
face of the earth. Hence, he concluded, it could be distinguished
readily from other societies falsely claiming the Christian name
by the very fact that the accomplishment of the divine prophecies
and the divine promises could thus be recognized in it.
By far the greater portion of St. Augustine’s teaching about
the catholicity of the Church was evolved and expressed in works
directed against the errors of the African Donatists. Hence it is
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|

quite impossible to appreciate his meaning unless we realize the
!,
common ground he was able to use in his attempts to bring into
>
the glory of Christian unity those unfortunates who had been
»
misled by the propaganda of Donatism. The holy Bishop Augusi
tine, it must be understood, offered shining example of en­
thusiastic devotion to the “home missions” of his own time and
of his own country. In order that men for whom Our Lord had
sacrificed Himself on Calvary might not perish forever, St.
Augustine devoted every ounce of his energy to the task of
persuading the Donatists of his district to enter and to dwell
within the true and only Church of Jesus Christ. Meekly
>
accepting insult and calumny, he made use of every available
opportunity to show the urgency of the divine command to come
into the true Church as well· as the horrible spiritual disadvantages
attendant upon their present condition of heresy and schism.
Furthermore, he utilized every intellectual resource at his
disposition to bring out the evidence that the Church for which
he labored is, and is alone, the Body of Jesus Christ.
St. Augustine was dealing, however, with a group of men
manifestly capable of tailring his own language on his own plane.
They were men who said that they wanted to be, and actually
claimed to be, followers or disciples of Jesus Christ Our Lord.
They were perfectly aware of the fact that there is such a thing
as the one true ecdesia. They realized that in order to be truly a
disciple of Christ, a man had to belong to the society of the
disciples, the true ecdesia which is actually God’s kingdom in
this world. Finally, like some of the heretics of our own time, they
were willing to admit that this true ecdesia of Jesus Christ was
properly designated as the Catholic Church. As a matter of fact
they could hardly help making this admission. By the latter part
of the fourth century the baptismal formula in use in most of the
Churches professed belief in “the holy Catholic Church.” Thus,
if men were to make any serious claim to the Christian name and
the Christian status, they had to identify themselves in one way
or another as “Catholics," and to look for some way, however
far-fetched in which their own company could be identified as
“the Catholic Church.”

The method adopted by the particular Donatist writers and
debaters whose arguments were taken up by St. Augustine was,
basically at least, identical with the procedure later followed by

ST. AUGUSTINE’S USE OF CATHOLICITY

49

the Protestant heretics. The Donatist claimed, first of all, that the
true Church’s title of “Catholic” bespoke and implied a fullness of
truth within the Church and the possession of all the sacramental
' means of salvation within this society. They claimed the complete
possession of Christian truth and the enjoyment of all the
ecclesiastical sacraments for their own assembly, and denied that
the magna ecdesia had any right to the title of “Catholic” on
these grounds.
The Donatist camp paid comparatively little attention to the
geographical concept of catholicity. They refused to concede that
the Church of Christ could be called Catholic by reason of any
extension throughout the nations and the localities of the earth.
Yet, oddly enough, they disputed even the obvious evidence of the
spatial or geographical universality of the Church of their
opponents. Those whom the world called Catholic had, they said,
no real claim to this glorious title even on the grounds of regional,
national, or numerical extension, since these people were not in
religious communion with all those who claimed the Christian
name throughout the world, and because all the nations of the
world had not yet received the gospel of Jesus Christ. Thus they
managed to convince themselves that the society for which St.
Augustine labored was only a partial thing, and consequently a
Church which had no real claim to the title of the ecdesia catho­
lica.
Thus, in working for the conversion of the Donatists, the
saintly Bishop of Hippo Regius did not need to show the bene­
ficiaries of his missionary charity and zeal that they were
obligated to enter into the true ecdesia of Christ. Neither did he
have to exert himself to show that this true ecdesia was actually
the ecdesia catholica of the creed. Instead he conceived it to be his
business to use every device of theological acumen within his
power to bring these unfortunate dissidents to realize that the
God-given catholicity of the true ecdesia was essentially a
geographical thing and that the note of geographical or, as some
of the modern writers would have it, “spatial,” catholicity
marked the communion within which he worked as the Church
within which God commands all men to live.
St. Augustine’s explanations and demonstrations of the
Church’s catholicity are always couched in the language of
apostolic meekness and charity rather than in terms of merely

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scholastic method. He was using all of the tremendous intellectual
,
and persuasive forces with which God had endowed him to make
men look at the truth to which their own passions and prejudices
had blinded them. The Donatistic system, like a great many
dissident doctrines since that day, was essentially an after­
thought. The frenzied objections and claims of the Donatistic
leaders were intended primarily to justify a position which the
Donatists of a previous generation had taken for entirely differ­
ent motives. The original Donatist faction had been composed of
certain African malcontents supported in their opposition to
Mensurius the Bishop of Carthage and Cecilian his successor by
certain bishops from Numidia. The definitive schism came in 313,
when an assembly of these rebels declared Cecilian invalidly
elected and chose Majorinus in his place.
The original dissidents had justified their stand by the con­
tention that Bishop Felix of Aptonga, the consecrator of Cecilian,
had surrendered the sacred books to the pagans during the
persecution of Diocletian, and that consequently he had no power
to administer episcopal consecration. Despite the fact that the
innocence of Felix was established and recognized by several
investigating committees, the Donatists persisted in their stand,
and anathematized the Catholics as men polluted by their
contact with the traditor Felix. The Roman See, and with it all the
rest of the Church of Jesus Christ on earth quickly entered
into communion with Cecilian and his followers. Hence the
Donatists found themselves impelled to explain their position by
twisting and perverting the regularly taught doctrine about the
Catholica.
A considerable portion of St. Augustine’s campaign against the
Donatist errors had to be devoted to the task of explaining that
the moral worth of Cecilian and of Felix had nothing whatsoever
to do with the question of the identity of the true Catholic
Church. Nevertheless, the main body of his polemic was given
over to the task of showing that the geographical extension of the
Church to which he belonged was sufficient to designate that
Church to the Donatists as the real kingdom of God on earth.
St. Augustine thus described the question at issue between the
Catholics and the Donatists.

The question at issue between us is certainly about where the ecclesia
is; whether it is in our company or in theirs. This is surely the one

ST. AUGUSTINE’S USE OF CATHOLICITY

^3^18 5

[Church] which our forefathers have called the Catholica in order that
they might manifest it for what it is by its very name, because it is
throughout the whole [world] (per totum). For the Greek expression
for “according to the whole (secundum totum) " is naff δλον. But this
Church is the Body of Christ, as the Apostle says: “For his body which
is the Church.” Hence it is certainly manifest that the person who is
not among the members of Christ cannot have Christian salvation. But
the members of Christ are bound one to another through the charity of
unity, and through this same charity they are joined to their Head,
which is Christ Jesus. Therefore everything revealed about Christ
concerns the Head and the Body. The Head is Jesus Christ Himself,
the only-begotten Son of the living God, Himself the Saviour of the
Body, who has died for our sins and who has risen from the dead for
our justification. The Body is the Church, about which it is said: “That
he might present it to himself, a glorious church, not having spot or
wrinkle or any such thing.” The question between us and the Donatists
is about where this Body is, that is, where the Church is.1
St. Augustine’s missionary and apostolic patience wore
somewhat thin when he came into all-to-frequent contact with the
obstinate refusal of the Donatist leaders to take cognizance of the
manifest Catholicity of the society to which he belonged. So,
when Petilianus asserted that the Catholics had “gone aside into
the part,” and had thus forfeited their right to the Catholic name,
he made this reply.

I also have gained a very slight knowledge of the Greek tongue,
hardly to be called knowledge at all. Yet I am not at all ashamed to say
that I realize that δλον means, not “one,” but “the whole”; and that
Kaff όλον means “according to the whole.” From this the Catholic
Church received its name, according to the saying of the Lord: “It is
not for you to know the times which the Father hath put in his own
power: but you shall receive the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon
you, and you shall be witnesses unto me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea
and Samaria, and even to the uttermost part of the earth.” Know that
the Catholica receives its name from this. But you are so intent on
running with your eyes shut against the mountain which, according
to the prophecy of Daniel, grew out of a small stone and filled the whole
earth, that you actually tell us that we have gone aside into a part, and
that we are not in the whole, among those whose communion is spread
abroad over the entire earth. But, just as, if you were to say that*.!'am
Petilianus, I would not be able to find any way ïo^refôtè you’.olthgrihan
1 De unitate ecclesiae, cap. 2. CSEL, LII, 232.

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to laugh at you as speaking in jest· or to mourn for you as being mad,
so now, I see that I have no choice other than this. Since I do not be­
lieve that you are joking, you see what alternative remains.2

The saintly Bishop of Hippo Regius also protested vehemently
against the attempt on the part of Gaudentius the Donatist to
use the testimony of St. Cyprian as an indication that his faction
deserved the Catholic name. St. Augustine deplored the blindness
that motivated men to speak against the manifest evidence of the
Cyprianic writings.

Why, then, do you deceive yourselves and wish to deceive others by
these impudent lies ? If yours is the Catholic Church according to the
testimony of this martyr, then show that it spreads its rays over the
entire world : show that it extends is branches, in the abundance of its
fruitfulness, over the whole earth. For the Catholica has received its
name in the Greek tongue from this. For, what is called όλ,ον in Greek
is called totum or universum in Latin. “Through the whole” or “ac­
cording to the whole” is καθ’ όλον, from which the Catholica receives
its name.8
As far as their positive teaching was concerned, the Donatists
held that the Catholic name of the true Church of Jesus Christ
referred to some universality of truth, of the sacraments, of the
means of salvation, or of obedience to the divine commandments,
rather than to any geographical matter. Thus the Breviculus
collationis informs us that at the famous debate between the
Catholics and the Donatists at Carthage, the Catholics asserted
that they, and not their opponents, "were in communion with the
Church spread over the entire world, which is the Church to
which the scriptures bear witness, and that hence they were, and
were rightly called, the Catholics.” The Donatists, on the other
hand, claimed that “the Catholic name owes its origin, not to
any universality of nations, but rather to the fulness of the
sacraments.” And, when the Donatists petitioned “that the
Catholics should prove that all nations were in communion with
them," the Catholics announced that they would be very pleased
to offer that proof.*
Although the geographical origin and meaning of the term
» CestVa κη*-αί Ρ&ΗαΙϊί,-Π, 91. CSEL, LII, 75.
• GMfrs.Gan&niMiw^l, 2. HI, 3, CSEL, LIII, 53.
* Bmfculus coitaiioMi, CSEL^liXXW, 468.

ST. AUGUSTINE’S USE OF CATHOLICITY

53

“Catholic” were clear enough, St. Augustine refused to let what
was essentially an apostolic quest for souls degenerate into a mere
exercise in historical philology. The Catholic Church, after all,
based its contentions, not on the development of a theological
expression, but on the manifest predictions and promises of Jesus
Christ Our Lord. St. Augustine brought out this aspect ofjhis
teaching in a letter to Vincentius, a bishop of the Rogatist
party.
You believe that you have made a very subtle statement when you
assert that the name “Catholic” means universal, not with reference
to the communion as embracing the entire world, but with reference
to obedience to all the divine commandments and to all the sacraments.
It is as if we (even granting that perhaps the Catholica may have
derived its name from the fact that it truly holds the entirety of that
truth of which some particles are found in different heresies), based our
defence of the Church throughout all the nations upon the testimony of
this word rather than upon the promises of God and the many and
manifest declarations of the Truth itself.5
Those who would hold, then, that the Catholic name of the
true Chinch was derived from the fact that this society has all the
truth contained in public revelation, or all the sacraments, or that
it obeys all the commandments, could expect no explicit oppo­
sition from St. Augustine against such contentions. To him it was
clear enough that the Catholic name originated from and signified
the geographical extension of Our Lord’s society. Those who
would quibble about the meaning of a word, without adverting to
the normal use of that term among men, could be left to their own
imaginings, as far as St. Augustine was concerned. He was
interested in showing that his Church, the Church of the universal
communion, was actually the Body of Christ, the Church of the
promises. To accomplish this purpose he had recourse to the
divine promises themselves. He brought out the evidence that the
benefits which Our Lord had, according to the scriptures,
promised to the society of His disciples, were to be found in the
Church of the Catholic communion, and in that company alone.
Thus, for St. Augustine, the fact of Catholicism rather than the
mere name was to be considered as a note of Our Lord’s society.
Or, to speak the truth more completely, the Catholic name was
» Ep. XCIII, 23. CSEL, XXXIV, 468.

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efficacious as a mark of the true Church only to the extent that it
was recognized as the accomplishment of the divine promises
made to God's kingdom on earth.
The central promise of Christ which St. Augustine saw as
manifestly fulfilled in the visible Catholicity of the true Church
was the one set down in the last chapter of the Gospel according
to St. Luke. Our Lord spoke thus to His disciples prior to His
ascension into Heaven.

And he said to them: Thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ
to suffer and to rise again from the dead, the third day:
And that penance and remission of sins should be preached in his
name, unto all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.®
With this text St. Augustine associated the parallel passage
from the Acts of the Apostles, in which Our Lord told the disciples
that “you shall receive the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon
you, and you shall be witnesses unto me in Jerusalem, and in all
Judea and Samaria, and even to the uttermost part of the earth.”T
Thus, for St. Augustine, the true Church of Jesus Christ was
manifestly that which “starting out from Jerusalem, was spread
abroad over the whole world.” The use of this formula is exempli­
fied in a section of the Breviculus collationis which tells of certain
letters written by the Donatists in response to a mandatum of the
Catholics. The Donatists were unable to give a satisfactory
answer

first, because they did not -wish to treat adequately or even to touch
upon the evidences (testimonia) taken from the Law and the Prophets
and the Psahns, and the Apostolic and Evangelical writings, [testi­
monies] by which it is shown that the Catholic Church is spread abroad
through the entire world beginning from Jerusalem, whence, extending
into lands both near and far away, it came finally to Africa. And there
are throughout the other localities and cities, throughout which it was
previously established, many Churches founded by apostolic labor and
belonging to this unica, with which it is manifest that the Donatists
. are not in communion.®
In this same chapter there is mention of the evidences “which
the Catholics brought forward in favor of the Church in which
*Luic 24: 46-47.
7 Acir 1:7-8.
* Breviculus collationis, cap. 10. ΠΙ, 10. CSEL, LUI, 59.

ST. AUGUSTINE'S USE OF CATHOLICITY

55

they communicate, that which, beginning from Jerusalem, is
spread throughout the world.” The expression occurs dozens of
times in the anti-Donatist writings and sermons of St. Augustine.
Naturally enough, the Catholic theologians who were first called
upon to fight against the errors of Protestantism appealed to the
writings of St. Augustine. They employed his terminology as well
as his conclusions. Particularly at the hands of the Louvain
theologians, the ‘‘ecclesia incipiens a Hierusalem” became one of
the favorite titles of the true Church of the promises.
Thus John Driedo employed this concept of the true Church
frequently in his work De ecclesiasticis scripturis et dogmatibus.9
Francis Sonnius incorporated St. Augustine’s own words into his
Demonstrationes religionis christianae ex verbo Dei.10 Thomas
Stapleton, the greatest of all the Louvain theologians, employed
the expression both in his Principiorum fidei doctrinalium '
demonstratio methodica11 and in the revision and digest of that
work, the Principiorum fidei doctrinalium relectio scholastica et
compendiaria.12
St. Augustine used the original promise made by God to
Abraham to explain and to prove the true and geographical
catholicity of Christ’s kingdom on earth. Turning some of the
raillery of the Donatists against their own cause, the great
Bishop of Hippo Regius explained that membership in Christ
involved membership in the world-wide organization.

... I may say with perfect justice that he who has not delivered
himself up to Christ in company with the whole world should be con­
sidered a partner of the man who betrayed Christ The Apostle says
that “then are you the seed of Abraham, heirs according to the prom­
ise." And again he says: “heirs indeed of God and joint heirs with
Christ” And he shows that the same seed of Abraham belongs to all
nations, according to the promise given to Abraham : “in thy seed shall
all the nations of the earth be blessed.”13
St. Augustine also used the words of Psalm 2 in showing that,
according to the scriptures, the company or the kingdom of Jesus
’In the 1530 edition of Louvain, pp. 505, 510, 512.
“ Tract. VIII, cap. 2; in the 1556 Louvain edition, p. 464.
11 In the Paris edition of 1579, pp. 114, 143.·
12 In the Antwerp edition of 1596, pp. 125, 464.
'· Contra litteras Petiliam, II, 20. CSEL, LII, 32.

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Christ was predicted as a world-wide society. In this Psalm the
Lord is represented as saying to the divine Messias: “Ask of me,
and I will give thee the Gentiles for thy inheritance, and the
utmost parts of the earth for thy possession.”14
St Augustine interpreted the Scriptures (which, incidentally,
he considered to be the sole source of an efficacious demonstration
of the true Church against the Donatist errors) ,1S as promising the
kingdom of God on earth a moral rather than a physical catho­
licity. The Donatists were prone to disregard the true Church’s
claim of real and geographical catholicity on the grounds that the
Catholics of Africa were not in ecclesiastical communion with all
of the races of the earth, considered absolutely. Thus the Donatist
Cresconius denied the Church’s claim to catholicity on the pretext
that there were at that time many barbarous nations which had
not as yet been won for Christ, and with which, in consequence,
the Catholics were not in communion. He furthermore alleged the
somewhat silly reason that the Church could not properly be
termed “Catholic" because it was manifestly not in communion
with the various heretical conventicles scattered throughout
the world.15
St. Augustine answered that particular observation with the
statement that many of the nations which Cresconius mentioned
as not having been evangelized had actually heard the message of
Christ since the appearance of his writing. Here, in a passage
freighted with meaning for the theology of the Catholic missions,
St. Augustine assured his Donatist opponent that that Church
continued to increase among the nations, and that, after it had
been given to all of them, the end itself would come.17 Thus, for the
greatest of the Latin Fathers, the catholicity of the true Church of
Jesus Christ was essentially a dynamic rather than a static thing.
The Church was in existence throughout the world, and further­
more it was necessarily, in virtue of the divine commission and of
the divine grace by which it operates, growing and increasing
throughout the world, in the sense of bringing new peoples to the
fellowship of Jesus Christ.
“Psolm 2:8.
“CL Ep. XCIII, 28; De unitate ecclesiae, cap. 5. CSEL, XXXIV, 472L;
LH, 236.

“ Contra Cresconium.Ill, 70. CSEL, LII, 476.
« Ibid., IU, 71. CSEL, LII, 476 f.

ST. AUGUSTINE’S USE OF CATHOLICITY

57

In the writing of St. Augustine the notion of a merely suc­
cessive catholicity for the true Church is firmly rejected. The
Donatists maintained that their own Church had a right to the
Catholic name by reason of what they considered the backsliding
of the rest of Christendom. The world-wide Church of Jesus
Christ had fallen away from the truth by reason of its fellowship
with Cecilian. The nations that thus perished (according to the
Donatist scheme of things), were supposed to have had their
chance for salvation. The assembly to which they belonged was
thus, in their eyes, the faithful remnant of a company which, at
one time or another had been in existence throughout the world,
but which was, in their time, restricted to a portion of Africa and
to a couple of scattered groups of Africans resident outside of
their own country.18

In opposing this contention, St. Augustine pointed to the fact
that the divine prophecies and promises indicate an actual'y
catholic kingdom of Jesus Christ on earth. To attempt to restrict
the true ecclesia of Jesus Christ to members of a dissident con­
venticle limited to a couple of Roman provinces would be, in any
event, a try at limiting the salvific will of God Himself. The
people of the other parts of the Empire, and those outside of the
Roman dominions a fortiori, had hardly heard of the Donatists
and their arguments at all. If their salvation depended upon union
with such a society, then, indeed, they would be unfortunate.
St. Augustine was firmly convinced that the divine promises,
through the visible accomplishment of which the ecclesia is
manifestly a Catholic society, never meant to imply that abso­
lutely all of the races of the earth will be evangelized until the
end; nor that, in the nations evangelized, every member of these
political or ethnical groups will become a member of the true
Church.19 On the other hand he believed that the Church will
always be a visible organization, and that it will remain visibly
catholic by reason of a great number of adherents scattered
throughout the world. Answering the objection of Cresconius to
the effect that the paucity of those saved, according to Our
Lord’s word, would seem to imply that the true Church could not
be actually catholic, the Saint answered that the Church would
*’ Cf. De vnilale ecclesiae, cap. 37. CSEL, LII, 279.
"Ep. CXCIX, 48. CSEL, LVII, 287.

Μ «·, ’

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always be large enough to be visible, and that it would always be
small enough to be the subject of persecution on the part of its
enemies.50 There will always be a “mixed multitude” of these
enemies of the true Church. Through the efforts of these foes, the
piety of the Church can be at once exercised and manifested.

The catholicity of the Church was, in the teaching of St.
Augustine, bound up closely with the communion of the apostolic
Churches, and in particular with that of the apostolic Church of
Rome. Catholicity was not by any means the only note or mark of
the Church. In writing against the Manicheans St. Augustine
drew up a list of the factors which kept him within the member­
ship of the Church. The first of these factors is the wisdom of the
Church, a wisdom which cannot be grasped by those outside its
fold. There are, however, four other factors.
. . . not to speak of this wisdom, which you do not believe to be in
the Catholic Church, there are many other things which most justly
keep me within its bosom. The consent of peoples and nations keeps
me within the Church. So does its authority, begun by miracles, nour­
ished in hope, enlarged by love, established in age. The succession of
priests keeps me [in the Church], beginning from the very See of the
Apostle Peter, to whom the Lord, after His resurrection, gave the com­
mission to feed His sheep, down to the present episcopate. And so,
finally, does the name “Catholic” itself.21
Despite the fact that the catholicity of the true Church of
Jesus Christ is not by any means its only note, that catholicity is,
in the hands of St. Augustine, a truly effective instrument for
pointing out to a group which professes to accept the scripture as
God's inspired word, that the Church which exists throughout the
world is in reality the Body of Christ. He used this characteristic
of the Church with success in demonstrating that the society
which was in communion with the Roman See was, by the evidence
of Our Lord’s own promises, the one true Church, necessary for
man’s salvation.

Joseph Clifford Fenton
The Catholic University of America,
Washington, D. C.
n Contra Cresamium, III, 75. CSEL, LU, 480 f.
a Contra epistolam Manichaei quam vocant fundamenti, cap. 4. CSEL, XXV,
196.

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Answers to Questions
THE ALLELUIA ADDITIONS ON CORPUS CHRISTI
Question: Why, in the Divine Office for Corpus Christi and its
Octave, do we have the Alleluia in the short responsories and the
versicles and responses immediately following for Tierce, Sext,
and None, but not in Prime or in Compline?

Answer: The Alleluia appears in the responsories of Tierce,
Sext, and None, and in the versicles and responses immediately
following, on the feast of Corpus Christi and throughout its
Octave because the text in question is strictly proper to the
feast of the Blessed Sacrament, while in Prime and Compline the
responsories are common to all days of the year. Their Eucharistic
character also accounts for the addition of the Alleluia to the
versicles and responses at the end of the hymns of Lauds and
Vespers on Corpus Christi. This is the only feast which employs,
extra tempus Paschale, the supplementary Alleluias which are
otherwise distinctive of the Easter season.
“BLESSED” AND “BLEST” AGAIN

A correspondent suggests that when an object is holy because
of intrinsic holiness the proper word is bless-ed. Thus we speak of
the Bless-ed Sacrament, the Bless-ed Virgin, never of the Blest
Sacrament or the Blest Virgin. Objects which derive their
holiness from without, from an intrinsic source, may be designated
by the monosyllabic word, blest, as a blest Rosary or a blest
candle.

THE MANDATUM ON HOLY THURSDAY
We are pleased to receive a letter from a reader, who is the
pastor of a Franciscan parish in New Mexico, in favor of the
Mandatum in parochial churches. He states that he grew up
with the ceremony from the time he was an altar boy in the
Cathedral parish in Los Angeles and that he has performed the
rite every Holy Thursday of the forty years of his priesthood. He
knows of no admiratio populi concerning the ceremony but
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