The ministry of Peter is distinguished precisely by this self-sacrificing love, because the Church of Rome presides in charity and its true authority is the charity of Christ. It is never a question of capturing others by force, by religious propaganda or by means of power. Instead, it is always and only a question of loving as Jesus did. The Apostle Peter himself tells us that Jesus ‘is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, and has become the cornerstone’ (Acts 4:11). Moreover, if the rock is Christ, Peter must shepherd the flock without ever yielding to the temptation to be an autocrat, lording it over those entrusted to him (cf. 1 Pet 5:3). On the contrary, he is called to serve the faith of his brothers and sisters, and to walk alongside them, for all of us are ‘living stones’ (1 Pet 2:5), called through our baptism to build God’s house in fraternal communion, in the harmony of the Spirit, in the coexistence of diversity. In the words of Saint Augustine: ‘The Church consists of all those who are in harmony with their brothers and sisters and who love their neighbour’ (Serm. 359,9).
Over the past twelve years, we came to understand what Pope Francis meant when he expressed similar ideas: Francis sought to unite all people without reference to Our Lord. Even worse, Francis’s idea of “fraternal communion” paradoxically excluded those who believed what the Catholic Church has always taught about the need to believe the unadulterated Faith. Is this what Leo XIV has in mind?
If we can place any reliance on Leo XIV’s choice of the St. Augustine quotation above, we would have to answer that the new pope appears to be breaking with Francis in this regard. St. Augustine’s sermon 359 dealt with his dispute with the Donatists; and, whether Leo intended it or not, St. Augustine’s sermon is profoundly relevant to the current crisis in the Church.
St. Augustine began his sermon by extolling concord in human and divine matters:
The first reading from the divine scriptures, from the book called Ecclesiasticus, commended three excellent things to us that are most worthy of consideration: concord between brothers, and the love of neighbors, and a husband and wife in agreement with each other (Sir 25:1). These things are certainly good, delightful and admirable in purely human affairs. But in divine matters they are much more significant. Is there anyone, after all, who doesn’t rejoice over brothers in concord with each other? And what is indeed deplorable is that such a great thing is so rare in human affairs; the thing is admired by all, actually practiced by so few.
So much of what we have heard from Rome since Vatican II has involved the purported promotion of concord among all men, regardless of religious beliefs. This novel approach conflicts with St. Augustine’s wisdom on achieving real concord:
How long shall we go on talking about concord between brothers over earthly matter, which is rare enough, unreliable enough, difficult enough? Let’s talk about that brotherly concord which ought to be, and can be, very real. Let all Christians be brothers, let all the faithful be brothers, let those be brothers who have been born of God and of the womb of mother Church by the Holy Spirit; let them be brothers, let them too have an inheritance to be possessed, and not divided. Their inheritance is God Himself. The One whose inheritance they are, is Himself in turn their inheritance.How are they His inheritance? Ask of Me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance (Ps2:8). How is He their inheritance? The Lord is the portion of my inheritance and my cup (Ps 16:5). In this inheritance concord is preserved; for this inheritance there is no litigation. Any other inheritance may be acquired by litigation; this one is lost by litigation. Those who don’t wish to lose this inheritance avoid the wrangling of litigation.
All of this harmonizes with the motto on Leo XIV’s coat of arms: In illo Uno unum, “In the One, [we] are one.” Our unity and concord is in Our Lord. How, then, was St. Augustine preserving unity in what appeared to be “litigating” (or wrangling) with the Donatists? His explanation is one no longer accepted by the proponents of false ecumenism and Synodality:
We too, after all, seem to be wrangling or litigating with the Donatists; but in fact we are not. A man is litigating, you see, when he wishes his opponent ill; he’s litigating when he wishes his opponent’s loss to be his own gain; for something to be snatched from the other and to accrue to himself. That’s not what we are like. You people know this too, you that are litigating outside the unity; you too know this, you that have been acquired as a result of division; you know that this lawsuit is not an action of that sort, because it is not prompted by ill-will, because it is not aiming at the opponent’s loss, but rather at his gain. What we were hoping for, you see, was that those with whom we appeared to be litigating, or even still appeared to be doing so, should acquire the inheritance together with us; not that they should lose it in order that we might acquire it for ourselves. In a word, our tone is quite different from that brother’s, who appealed to Christ as he was walking this earth. Because we too are appealing to Him in this case, as He is seated in heaven; and we are not saying, Lord, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me (Lk 12:13); but, ‘Tell my brother to possess the inheritance with me.”
This is well worth studying because it thoroughly refutes the spirit of Synodality that seeks to “accompany” others in their errors. St. Augustine appeared to be wrangling with the Donatists, but in fact he wanted them to share in the inheritance offered by Our Lord — the Donatists’ errors had caused them to break with the Church, so they had lost that inheritance. This concept of encouraging our neighbors to reject their religious errors, and return to the Church, is entirely foreign to those who accept Synodality, which treats all baptized souls as members of the People of God, and on the path of salvation, regardless of their religious beliefs.
St. Augustine was not infected with the errors of false ecumenism and Synodality, though, and he knew that true love required him to correct his neighbors’ errors:
In you there is nothing that we hate, nothing we detest, nothing we abominate, nothing we condemn, except humanerror. It’s human error, we said, that we detest, not divine truth. But what you have that is God’s, we acknowledge; what you have as your own deviation, we wish to correct. The sign of my Lord, the sign of my emperor, the mark of my king I acknowledge in the deserter; I go looking for the deserter, I find him, approach him, accost him, take him by the hand, bring him along, correct him; I do no violence to his regimental mark or badge. To anyone really paying attention and being observant, this is not a matter of litigating, but of loving.
Errors in matters of religion lead to temporal misery and eternal condemnation, so Catholics are not loving their neighbors by condoning their errors against the Faith. Prior to Vatican II, Rome clearly understood this and condemned errors to safeguard the Faith and correct those infected with those errors. In this way, many souls over the centuries were liberated from their errors and united with Holy Mother Church. As St. Augustine described, the Church was like the physician who would cure a patient from disease:
And yet there are many of them over whom we can rejoice. Many of them were profitably defeated, because in fact they were not defeated. Human error was defeated, the human being was saved. The doctor, after all, is not striving against the patient; even if the patient is doing so against the doctor, it’s the fever that is defeated, while the patient is cured. The doctor’s intention, surely, is to win; and that is also the fever’s intention, to win. The patient is kind of placed in the middle; if the doctor wins, the patient is saved; if the fever wins, the patient will die. So in our struggle, the doctor was striving for a cure and health, the patient was on the side of the fever. Those who took some notice of the doctor’s advice won the day, they overcame the fever. We have them with us in the Church, in good health and glad of it. They used to speak ill of us before, because they didn’t acknowledge us as their brothers; the fever, you see, had disturbed their wits. We, though, love them even while they abominate us and rave against us, and we were putting ourselves at the service of the raving patients. We were standing up to them, struggling with them, and in a kind way wrangling and litigating; and yet we were doing it out of love. All who serve invalids of that sort, after all, make nuisances of themselves; but it is for their welfare and salvation that they do so.
This is true charity. Conversely, John XXIII’s October 11, 1962 opening address of Vatican II announced a new orientation of promoting health without combating disease:
The Church has always opposed these errors. Frequently she has condemned them with the greatest severity. Nowadays, however, the spouse of Christ prefers to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity. She considers that she meets the needs of the present day by demonstrating the validity of her teaching rather than by condemnations. Not, certainly, that there is a lack of fallacious teaching, opinions and dangerous concepts to be guarded against and dissipated.
As nice as this might have sounded to some in 1962, it has led to an overwhelming proliferation of ever-worsening diseases of the mind and soul among Catholics and former Catholics.
St. Augustine would not have been surprised by the spiritual and intellectual carnage that has followed in wake of John XXIII’s Council because so much of what we have seen for sixty years conflicts with the central ideas of his Sermon 359. St. Augustine summed up these ideas in the section from which Pope Leo XIV drew his quotation for the inauguration Mass sermon:
A good thing indeed it is, concord between brothers; but notice where: in Christ. And the love of neighbors (Sir25:1). What if even now he’s not a brother in Christ? Because he’s human, he’s a neighbor; you should love him too, in order to gain him too. So there you are, in concord with your brother Christian, and loving your neighbor, even though you are not yet in concord with him, because he’s not yet your brother in Christ, not yet born again in Christ, doesn’t yet know about the sacraments of Christ; he’s a pagan, he’s a Jew; still he’s a neighbor, because he’s a human being. So if you love him, you have also attained another strand of love, by another gift, and in this way there are two things in you: concord between brothers, and the love of neighbors. And it’s of all those who maintain concord between brothers and who love their neighbors that the Church consists, wedded to Christ and submissive to her Husband, so that we get the third strand, a husband and wife in agreement with each other (Sir 25: 1).
Although Pope Leo XIV omitted it from his quotation, St. Augustine made it clear that those in the Church are “wedded to Christ and submissive to her Husband [Christ].” As such, neither the Donatists in St. Augustine’s day, nor non-Catholics today, are part of the Church according to the quotation chosen by Leo XIV for his inauguration Mass.
We can take further comfort on this point from a response of Cardinal Prevost (Leo XIV) in an interview recently cited by LifeSite:
When I think of St. Augustine, his vision and understanding of what it means to belong to the Church, one of the first things that springs to mind is what he says about how you cannot say you are a follower of Christ without being part of the Church. Christ is part of the Church. He is the head. So people who think they can follow Christ ‘in their own way’ without being part of the body, are, unfortunately, living a distortion of what is really an authentic experience. St. Augustine’s teachings touch every part of life, and help us to live in communion.”
All of this should encourage us that Pope Leo XIV is disposed to counteract some of the primary errors that have caused so much damage over the past sixty years. If ever he waivers in this, we can charitably remind him that his love for St. Augustine’s holy wisdom calls him to promote true harmony and love by fighting the religious errors that separate souls from unity in Christ.
Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us! St. Augustine, pray for us!
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