The Book of the Holy Rosary: Part III, Chapter VI. The Mission of the Holy Ghost
The Holy Scripture Narrative
“And when the days of the Pentecost were accomplished, they were all together in one place: and suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a mighty wind coming, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them parted tongues as it were of fire, and it sat upon every one of them: and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they began to speak with divers tongues, according as the Holy Ghost gave them to speak. Now there were dwelling at Jerusalem, Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven. And when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded in mind, because that every man heard them speak in his own tongue. And they were all amazed, and wondered, saying: Behold, are not all these that speak Galileans? And how have we heard, every man our own tongue wherein we were born? Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia; Phrygia, and Pamphilia, Egypt, and the parts of (Lybia about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome; Jews also, and proselytes, Cretes, and Arabians: we have heard them speak in our own tongues the wonderful works of God. And they were all astonished, and wondered, saying one to another: What meaneth this? But others mocking said: These men are full of new wine. But Peter standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice, and spoke to them: Ye men of Judea, and all you that dwell in Jerusalem, be this known to you, and with your ears receive my words. For these are not drunk, as you suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day: but this is that which was spoken of by the prophet Joel: And it shall come to pass, in the last days (saith the Lord), I will pour out of My Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. And upon my servants indeed, and upon my handmaids, will I pour out in those days of My Spirit, and they shall prophesy” (Acts ii.)
In the successive stages through which the scheme of God for compassing the end of human salvation unfolds itself to our view in the Fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary, the Third Glorious Mystery brings us to the Day of Pentecost; or, in other words, to the accomplishment of the promise given by the High Priest Himself on the day of His solemn entry into the Holy of Holies, that the Paraclete should come in His stead, to those whom He left on earth, and that they should be baptized by the Holy Spirit.
“See my brethren,” says St Augustine, “what you ought to love, and what you ought to hold fast. Our Lord, when He rises again in glory, commends His Church to us; and again, when about to be still further glorified by His Ascension, He again commends His Church; and when He sends the Holy Spirit from heaven He once more commends His Church. For after His resurrection what does He say to His disciples: ‘These things I said to you while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled which are written in the Law, and the Prophets, and the Psalms concerning me’ And then He opened their understandings that they should understand the Scriptures, and He said to them: ‘Thus it was written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer and to rise again from the dead on the third day.’ Where is the reference to the Church here? He goes on to say, ‘That penance, and the remission of sins, should be preached in His name.’ We ask, where?
‘Throughout all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.’ These were His words after His glorious Resurrection. And what does He say as He is about to be glorified by His Ascension into heaven? ‘Ye shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, even unto the ends of the world.’ What, again, does He say on the occasion of the Descent of the Holy Ghost? The Holy Ghost descends. They who are filled with the Holy Ghost are able to speak the languages of all nations. And each person is able thus to speak; what can this point to, except to the unity of all people and languages? Holding this truth fast, firmly built up in this, clinging to it with an unshaken charity, let us, who are His children, evermore praise the Lord, and say, ‘Alleluia.’ But is this to be done only here or there? or where? and how far? The prophet answers:
‘From the rising up of the sun, to the going down of the same, praise the name of the Lord.’”
Jesus had given to His disciples the commission, “Go ye into the whole world and preach the gospel to every creature;” but He had, notwithstanding, suspended the immediate effect of their commission, by bidding them wait in Jerusalem till they should be endued with power from on high; without which power it was in vain for them to attempt to go into the whole world to execute their mission. The sign and seal of the Third Person of the Ever-Blessed Trinity was thus needed to complete the work which had been begun; for the redemption of man is the joint work of the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity.
Here it will be fitting for us to observe in what way the Pentecostal gift of the Holy Ghost presents itself under a twofold aspect to the mind of the believer.
A man’s life, even in his fallen condition, is twofold. He is both a little world in himself, the life of which he does not share in common with others, as Solomon says, “The heart knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger intermeddleth not with its joy;” and he is, as both St Thomas and Aristotle say, also a social animal, both as member of a family, and as citizen of Estate; in both of which respects, as St Paul says, “Men are members one of another, and we share our life with others.” And even according to the dictates of natural wisdom, two things were held in the times before Christ to be wanted for the perfection of a happy life—namely, a sufficiency of personal gifts proper to the interior life of the man, and a sufficiency also of dignity and honour, in the way of social position. Hence it was a kind of sacred maxim of the old Roman empire to risk everything to insure the pre-eminent dignity of the rights of citizenship in the empire. The ‘Civis Romanus’ was one whom the whole power of the empire must protect in the possession of his rights. Divine grace, as the great Doctor of the schools teaches, does not overthrow the order of nature; and in the world before Christ, humanity has never been known to have attained to anything higher or better than what was exemplified in the choicest of the Roman citizens, who united in their persons the highest natural qualities, combined with the greatest external advantages of secure and dignified social position. So the Holy Trinity framed Its Divine plan for the restoration of the children of men in a way consonant to existing experience. There was to be the pouring out of the richest inward personal gifts and graces from the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, combined with the gift of an honourable citizenship in a city, not the perishable work of the political and legislative wisdom of man, as was the Roman empire, but an eternal city, whose maker and builder is God. This city is the Catholic Church, the work which Jesus Christ came into the world to gather together about Himself.
Man being made, not for solitude but for social life, cannot, ordinarily speaking, perfect himself otherwise than in social life, and it therefore became the wisdom and goodness of the Ever-Blessed Trinity, in Its plan for the restoration of fallen man, to found and extend over the world the Catholic Church, a visible society, in the bosom of which the Christian people might enjoy the best form of that social life, for which God, in His plan of creation, has formed them. It became, then, both the goodness and the wisdom of God to found His own society in the world, and so to throw it open to all believers, that all might receive from Him a place in it. And when any soul of man profits by the mercy of God, and receives from God what He freely offers to all, a place and a citizenship in the society of which He is Himself the founder and builder, God says to him, “Remain in the land, and thou shalt be fed with the riches of it” (Ps. xxxvi. 3). “As a bird which goes away from its nest, so is the man who leaves his place” (Prov. xxvii. 6). “I am the vine, ye are the branches; as the branches cannot bear fruit without the vine, so ye cannot bear fruit without Me” (John xv.) The work of the Ever-Blessed Trinity is one whole, and so long as you walk in humility before God, and remain in the place which He has given you, you will be to Him a dear son of His household, and all the riches of the household will be yours; but if you suffer yourself to be betrayed by the devil into the sin and folly of following the devil’s example, by quitting your place, then you will cease to be fed with the riches of the land, and you will be in great danger of having your place with the fallen angels, “who did not preserve their principality, but left their abode, and are reserved in everlasting chains in darkness, for the judgment of the great day” (Jude).
As the doctrine of the necessity for accepting in due humility the duty of conforming to communion with the Catholic Church, is one that is found to be very galling and revolting to human pride, there is, consequently, the stronger reason on this account for taking pains to understand in what way the Third Glorious Mystery of the Holy Rosary teaches and inculcates this duty, as its own special and peculiar lesson.
The language of this Third Mystery, then, to all is, “Come into the Catholic Church, because its founder and builder is Jesus Christ; and when you are in it, walk humbly before God all your days in your place in the Catholic Church, that you may be fed with the riches of the land, that God, the Holy Ghost, may shed abroad in your hearts all His most excellent gifts.” “The beginning of the pride of a man,” says the Scripture, “is to turn away from God” (Ecclus. x. 14); and what sort of blindness and pride must it not be on the part of men, to think that they can substitute the work of their own hands for the city and the temple whose builder and maker is God? What kind of blindness must not that be which desires indeed to have the religion of Jesus Christ, for the sake of the spiritual riches and treasures of God the Holy Ghost in which it abounds, but insists upon having these outside the great society of the redeemed, which Jesus Christ has gathered together, and over which He is the Supreme Pastor, represented here below by the august person of His vicar, the Roman Pontiff? And who can fail to perceive how contrary the human pride that insists upon this must be to the design of the Holy and Ever-Blessed Trinity? As we have seen, there is in every man, by his creation, his interior life and his social life. A man is at once, by creation, a microcosm, or little world in himself, and a social being. The Ever-Blessed Trinity says to the creature of Its hands, “Your interior life shall be enriched and adorned by the graces of the Holy Ghost, and your social life shall be perfected in the place assigned to you in the great company of the redeemed, in which shall be given to you a far more honourable and enduring citizenship than ever was that of the Roman empire in its palmiest days;” and this creature, thus taken by an act of pure grace and Divine love once more into favour, answers either, “I do not believe and I value neither the graces nor the citizenship,” or “I value indeed the graces that are offered, but I turn my back upon the citizenship, and prefer a society of my own making, free from all its shackles and restraints, which I neither relish, nor of which I can perceive either the utility or the advantage.”
Thus it is that the pride of men is for ever cavilling and wrangling with God as to the terms of His salvation, and like Moses, in the very presence of the bush burning with fire, for ever disputing and bargaining with God over the very salvation of which man is alone to derive the profit. “My people,” says the prophet Micheas, “I pray you remember what Balak, king of Moab, thought in his heart, and what Balaam the son of Beer answered him, that thou mayest know the justice of God. I will show thee, O man, what is good, and what the Lord requireth from thee, to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with Thy God” (Mich. vi. 7.)
If, then, the special lesson of the Third Glorious Mystery of the Rosary is to teach and inculcate upon us the duty of studying to remain humble, grateful, and contented in our place in the great company of the redeemed, the Catholic Church, ever on our watch lest the devil should tempt us through pride to take pattern by him and quit our domicile, it will also teach us to cultivate an overflowing charity and compassion towards all the unhappy souls who, victims of the multiplied scandals and disorders of this lower world, have hitherto failed to come into possession of the rightful place and citizenship in the Catholic Church to which the concluding words of the inspired volume invite them, “And the Spirit and the Bride say, Come; and he that heareth let him say, Come; and he that thirsteth let him come; and he that will, let him receive the water of life without price” (Apoc. xxii. 17).
And in this respect, the Third Mystery of the Rosary, while it inculcates this duty of an especial charity towards the multitudes who, scarcely so much through a fault of their own, as through the calamitous effect of sins and scandals anterior to the time of their coming into the world, are separated from the place in the Catholic Church which belongs to them, and would make their happiness, also puts in our hands a great power of helping them, of which in charity we should be studious to learn to understand and master the use.
The true city of God must plainly be one that is set on a hill, and that cannot be hid, except indeed to the eyes of those who, in their perverse hatred of the light which would guide them to its gates, resemble the blindness of the Jews, who can see in Jesus Christ nothing but the person of the disturber of public order, whom Pilate at their demand caused to be publicly executed upon the Cross. The same veil which is over the hearts of the Jews for so many generations, and which keeps them from acknowledging the true Son of David, may be also over the hearts and eyes of many among the nations, to keep them from acknowledging the Catholic Church, to whose citizenship all are invited. But the Scripture says to us, “He that heareth, let him say, Come;” and the Third Mystery of the Rosary certainly furnishes us with that which may enable us to say, “Come” with better effect. It is in this mystery, that we are presented with a remarkable note of the city of God that is set upon a hill and cannot be hid. The true company of believers, with whom are all the riches of the outpouring of the Holy Ghost, is one that on the day of Pentecost suddenly by miracle received the gift of speaking all the languages of the earth, and has continued ever since in possession of this gift, as a mark by which it may be always securely known. In the early times after the Flood, the Holy Trinity baffled the pride of men, when they thought to make a unity of their own, and perpetuate it in a stronghold of their own making: “And the Lord came down that He might see the city and the tower that the children of Adam were building. And He said, Behold the people is one, and there is one lip to them all. They have begun to do this, and they will not desist from their undertaking until they have completed it.
Let Us come down and confuse their speech, so that no man may understand the speech of his neighbour. And in this way the Lord divided them from that place into all lands, and they ceased to build the city” (Gen. xi. 5). But that which the Holy Trinity brought upon men as the punishment designed to repress and to set limits to their pride, it is manifest that the same Holy Trinity alone can repeal and reverse. From the day of Pentecost to the present hour, there is only one Christian company in the world that is known by the token of speaking all the languages of the earth, that is, the Catholic Church. The unity of nations, which is the work of God, no power or wisdom that is of men can counterfeit. And whatever falls away from this unity becomes a separated fragment, broken off from the great body; like one of the tribes which the Lord, in the punishment of pride, divided off with a separate speech of its own, and sent to find its place in the general confusion of the world, “Behold, then,” the Third Mystery of the Rosary teaches us to say to all, who are willing to hear, “the true city of God, speaking all the languages of the earth, restored by humility to the unity which was broken up through pride, ‘The Spirit and the Bride say, Come, and let him that heareth say, Come.’ Come to the inheritance which God has given to all the nations of the earth, acknowledge His Vicar the Holy Roman Pontiff, and come and rest yourselves under the shadow of the great tree which has spread its branches over the whole world, and whose leaves the Apostle says are for the healing of the nations (Apoc. xxii. 2). If you have any doubt which is the Church, the Bride of Christ and His mystical Body, ask the nations of the world, for Christ has received them for His inheritance,—not this or that one nation, for it may be blinded by its particular pride, but all the nations, for these are the inheritance of Christ, and see if they do not answer you with a voice that comes from the east and the west, from the north and the south,—the one true Church is the Roman Catholic Church. Roman, because Jesus Christ has established its centre of unity in the city and See of Rome. Catholic because it has all the nations of the earth for its inheritance.”
Thus it is, then, that the Holy and Ever-Blessed Trinity perfect Its work by the double outpouring of the Holy Spirit into the heart of the believer and into the whole body of the Church. St John relates that “on the last day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, If any man thirst, let him come to Me. He that believeth in Me, as the scripture saith, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water” (Deut. xviii. 15). “Now this He said of the Spirit, which they should receive who believed in Him; for as yet the Spirit was not given, for Jesus was not yet glorified” (John vii. 37). Here are the gifts that are promised to the believers individually. And, again, St Paul writes, “He hath given some to be apostles, some prophets, others to be evangelists, others pastors and teachers, for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, until we all come together in the unity of faith and of the acknowledging the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Eph. iv. 11). Here is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit into the Body of Christ, the Church.