How
Should We Worship?
Preface to The
Organic Development of the Liturgy by Alcuin Reid, O.S.B.
by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
In the last few decades, the matter of the right way to celebrate
the
Liturgy has increasingly become one of the points around which much of
the controversy has centred concerning the Second Vatican Council,
about how it should be evaluated, and about its reception in the life
of the Church.
There are the relentless supporters of reform, for whom the fact
that,
under certain conditions, the celebration of the Eucharist in
accordance with the most recent edition of the missal before the
Council––that of 1962––has once more been permitted represents an
intolerable fall from grace. At the same time, of course, the Liturgy
is regarded as "semper reformanda", so that in the end it is whatever
"congregation" is involved that makes "its" Liturgy, in which it
expresses itself. A Protestant "Liturgical Compendium" (edited by C.
Grethlein [Ruddat, 2003]) recently presented worship as a "project for
reform" (pp. 13-41) and thereby also expressed the way many Catholic
liturgists think about it. And then, on the other hand, there are the
embittered critics of liturgical reform––critical not only of its
application in practice, but equally of its basis in the Council. They
can see salvation only in total rejection of the reform.
Between these two groups, the radical reformers and their radical
opponents, the voices of those people who regard the Liturgy as
something living, and thus as growing and renewing itself both in its
reception and in its finished form, are often lost. These latter,
however, on the basis of the same argument, insist that growth is not
possible unless the Liturgy's identity is preserved, and they further
emphasise that proper development is possible only if careful attention
is paid to the inner structural logic of this "organism": Just as a
gardener cares for a living plant as it develops, with due attention to
the power of growth and life within the plant and the rules it obeys,
so the Church ought to give reverent care to the Liturgy through the
ages, distinguishing actions that are helpful and healing from those
that are violent and destructive.
If that is how things are, then we must try to ascertain the inner
structure of a rite, and the rules by which its life is governed, in
order thus to find the right way to preserve its vital force in
changing times, to strengthen and renew it. Dom Alcuin Reid's book
takes its place in this current of thought. Running through the history
of the Roman rite (Mass and breviary), from its beginnings up to the
eve of the Second Vatican Council, it seeks to establish the principles
of liturgical development and thus to draw from history––from its ups
and downs––the standards on which every reform must be based. The book
is divided into three parts. The first, very brief part investigates
the history of the reform of the Roman rite from its beginnings up to
the end of the nineteenth century. The second part is devoted to the
Liturgical Movement up to 1948. By far the longest part––the
third––deals with liturgical reform under Plus XII up to the eve of the
Second Vatican Council. This part is most useful, because to a great
extent people no longer remember that particular phase of liturgical
reform, yet in that period––as, of course, also in the history of the
Liturgical Movement––we see reflected all the questions concerning the
right way to go about reform, so that we can also draw out from all
this criteria on which to base our judgments. The author has made a
wise decision in stopping on the threshold of the Second Vatican
Council. He thus avoids entering into the controversy associated with
the interpretation and the reception of the Council. Yet he can
nonetheless show its place in history and show us the interplay of
various tendencies on which questions as to the standards for reform
must be based.
At the end of his book, the author enumerates some principles for
proper reform: it should keep openness to development and continuity
with the Tradition in a proper balance; it should include awareness of
an objective liturgical tradition and therefore take care to ensure a
substantial continuity. The author then agrees with the Catechism of
the Catholic Church in emphasising that "even the supreme authority in
the Church may not change the liturgy arbitrarily, but only in the
obedience of faith and with religious respect for the mystery of the
liturgy" (CCC 1125). As subsidiary criteria we then encounter the
legitimacy of local traditions and the concern for pastoral
effectiveness.
From my own personal point of view I should like to give further
particular emphasis to some of the criteria for liturgical renewal thus
briefly indicated. I will begin with those last two main criteria. It
seems to me most important that the Catechism, in mentioning the
limitation of the powers of the supreme authority in the Church with
regard to reform, recalls to mind what is the essence of the primacy as
outlined by the First and Second Vatican Councils: The pope is not an
absolute monarch whose will is law; rather, he is the guardian of the
authentic Tradition and, thereby, the premier guarantor of obedience.
He cannot do as he likes, and he is thereby able to oppose those people
who, for their part, want to do whatever comes into their head. His
rule is not that of arbitrary power, but that of obedience in faith.
That is why, with respect to the Liturgy, he has the task of a
gardener, not that of a technician who builds new machines and throws
the old ones on the junk-pile. The "rite", that form of celebration and
prayer which has ripened in the faith and the life of the Church, is a
condensed form of living Tradition in which the sphere using that rite
expresses the whole of its faith and its prayer, and thus at the same
time the fellowship of generations one with another becomes something
we can experience, fellowship with the people who pray before us and
after us. Thus the rite is something of benefit that is given to the
Church, a living form of paradosis, the handing-on of Tradition.
It is important, in this connection, to interpret the "substantial
continuity" correctly. The author expressly warns us against the wrong
path up which we might be led by a Neoscholastic sacramental theology
that is disconnected from the living form of the Liturgy. On that
basis, people might reduce the "substance" to the matter and form of
the sacrament and say: Bread and wine are the matter of the sacrament;
the words of institution are its form. Only these two things are really
necessary; everything else is changeable. At this point modernists and
traditionalists are in agreement: As long as the material gifts are
there, and the words of institution are spoken, then everything else is
freely disposable. Many priests today, unfortunately, act in accordance
with this motto; and the theories of many liturgists are unfortunately
moving in the same direction. They want to overcome the limits of the
rite, as being something fixed and immovable, and construct the
products of their fantasy, which are supposedly "pastoral", around this
remnant, this core that has been spared and that is thus either
relegated to the realm of magic or loses any meaning whatever. The
Liturgical Movement had in fact been attempting to overcome this
reductionism, the product of an abstract sacramental theology, and to
teach us to understand the Liturgy as a living network of Tradition
that had taken concrete form, that cannot be torn apart into little
pieces but that has to be seen and experienced as a living whole.
Anyone who, like me, was moved by this perception at the time of the
Liturgical Movement on the eve of the Second Vatican Council can only
stand, deeply sorrowing, before the ruins of the very things they were
concerned for.
I should like just briefly to comment on two more perceptions that
appear in Dom Alcuin Reid's book. Archaeological enthusiasm and
pastoral pragmatism––which is in any case often a pastoral form of
rationalism––are both equally wrong. These two might be described as
unholy twins. The first generation of liturgists were for the most part
historians. Thus they were inclined to archaeological enthusiasm: they
were trying to unearth the oldest form in its original purity; they
regarded the liturgical books in current use, with the rites they
offered, as the expression of the rampant proliferation through history
of secondary growths that were the product of misunderstandings and of
ignorance of the past. People were trying to reconstruct the oldest
Roman Liturgy and to cleanse it of all later additions. A great deal of
this was right, and yet liturgical reform is something different from
archaeological excavation, and not all the developments of a living
thing have to be logical in accordance with a rationalistic or
historical standard. This is also the reason why––as the author quite
rightly remarks––the experts ought not to be allowed to have the last
word in liturgical reform. Experts and pastors each have their own part
to play (just as, in politics, specialists and decision-makers
represent two different planes). The knowledge of scholars is
important, yet it cannot be directly transmuted into the decisions of
pastors, for pastors still have their own responsibilities in listening
to the faithful, in accompanying with understanding those who perform
the things that help us to celebrate the sacrament with faith today and
the things that do not. It was one of the weaknesses of the first phase
of reform after the Council that to a great extent specialists were
listened to almost exclusively. A greater independence on the part of
pastors would have been desirable.
Because it is often all too obvious that historical knowledge
cannot be
elevated straight into the status of a new liturgical norm, this
archaeological enthusiasm was very easily combined with pastoral
pragmatism: people first of all decided to eliminate everything that
was not recognised as original and was thus not part of the
"substance", and then they supplemented the "archaeological remains",
if these still seemed insufficient, in accordance with "pastoral
insights". But what is "pastoral"? The judgments made about these
questions by intellectual professors were often influenced by their
rationalist presuppositions and not infrequently missed the point of
what really supports the life of the faithful. Thus it is that
nowadays, after the Liturgy was extensively rationalised during the
early phase of reform, people are eagerly seeking forms of solemnity,
looking for "mystical" atmosphere and for something of the sacred. Yet
because––necessarily and more and more clearly––people's judgments as
to what is pastorally effective are widely divergent, the "pastoral"
aspect has become the point at which "creativity" breaks in, destroying
the unity of the Liturgy and very often confronting us with something
deplorably banal. That is not to deny that the eucharistic Liturgy, and
likewise the Liturgy of the Word, is often celebrated reverently and
"beautifully", in the best sense, on the basis of people's faith. Yet
since we are looking for the criteria of reform, we do also have to
mention the dangers, which unfortunately in the last few decades have
by no means remained just the imaginings of those traditionalists
opposed to reform.
I should like to come back to the way that worship was presented,
in a
liturgical compendium, as a "project for reform" and, thus, as a
workshop in which people are always busy at something. Different again,
and yet related to this, is the suggestion by some Catholic liturgists
that we should finally adapt the liturgical reform to the
"anthropological turn" of modern times and construct it in an
anthropocentric style. If the Liturgy appears first of all as the
workshop for our activity, then what is essential is being forgotten:
God. For the Liturgy is not about us, but about God. Forgetting about
God is the most imminent danger of our age. As against this, the
Liturgy should be setting up a sign of God's presence. Yet what happens
if the habit of forgetting about God makes itself at home in the
Liturgy itself and if in the Liturgy we are thinking only of ourselves?
In any and every liturgical reform, and every liturgical celebration,
the primacy of God should be kept in view first and foremost.
With this I have gone beyond Dom Alcuin's book. But I think it has
become clear that this book, which offers a wealth of material, teaches
us some criteria and invites us to further reflection. That is why I
can recommend this book.
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
26 July 2004
Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, was for over two decades
the
Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith under Pope
John Paul II. He is a renowned theologian and author of numerous books.
A mini-bio and full listing of his books published by Ignatius Press
are available on his IgnatiusInsight.com Author Page.
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An excerpt from
Mary: The Church at the Source
[Excerpted from the chapter "'Hail, Full of Grace':
Elements
of
Marian Piety According to the Bible", from Mary: The Church at
the
Source by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar,
pp.
61-69. Footnotes have been omitted.]
"Hail, Full of Grace": Mary, the Mother of Believers | Joseph
Cardinal Ratzinger |
"From henceforth all generations will call me blessed"––these
words of
the Mother of Jesus handed on for us by Luke (Lk 1:48) are at once a
prophecy and a charge laid upon the Church of all times. This phrase
from the Magnificat, the spirit-filled prayer of praise that Mary
addresses to the living God, is thus one of the principal foundations
of Christian devotion to her.
The Church invented nothing new of her own when she began to extol
Mary; she did not plummet from the worship of the one God to the praise
of man. The Church does what she must; she carries out the task
assigned her from the beginning. At the time Luke was writing this
text, the second generation of Christianity had already arrived, and
the "family" of the Jews had been joined by that of the Gentiles, who
had been incorporated into the Church of Jesus Christ. The expression
"all generations, all families" was beginning to be filled with
historical reality. The Evangelist would certainly not have transmitted
Mary's prophecy if it had seemed to him an indifferent or obsolete
item. He wished in his Gospel to record "with care" what "the
eyewitnesses and ministers of the word" (Lk 1:2-3) had handed on from
the beginning, in order to give the faith of Christianity, which was
then striding onto the stage of world history, a reliable guide for its
future course.
Mary's prophecy numbered among those elements he had "carefully"
ascertained and considered important enough to transmit to posterity.
This fact assumes that Mary's words were guaranteed by reality: the
first two chapters of Luke's Gospel give evidence of a sphere of
tradition in which the remembrance of Mary was cultivated and the
Mother of the Lord was loved and praised. They presuppose that the
still somewhat naive exclamation of the unnamed woman, "blessed is the
womb that bore you" (Lk 11:27), had not entirely ceased to resound but,
as Jesus was more deeply understood, had likewise attained a purer form
that more adequately expressed its content. They presuppose that
Elizabeth's greeting, "blessed are you among women" (Lk 1:42), which
Luke characterizes as words spoken in the Holy Spirit (Lk 1:4 1), had
not been a once-only episode.
The continued existence of such praise at least in one strand of
early
Christian tradition is the basis of Luke's infancy narrative. The
recording of these words in the Gospel raises this veneration of Mary
from historical fact to a commission laid upon the Church of all places
and all times.
The Church neglects one of the duties enjoined upon her when she
does
not praise Mary. She deviates from the word of the Bible when her
Marian devotion falls silent. When this happens, in fact, the Church no
longer even glorifies God as she ought. For though we do know God by
means of his creation––"Ever since the creation of the world [God's]
invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly
perceived in the things that have been made" (Rom 1:20)––we also know
him, and know him more intimately, through the history he has shared
with man. just as the history of a man's life and the relationships he
has formed reveal, what kind of person he is, God shows himself in a
history, in men through whom his own character can be seen.
This is so true that he can be "named" through them and identified
in
them: the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. Through his relation
with men, through the faces of men, God has made himself accessible and
has shown his face. We cannot try to bypass these human faces in order
to get to God alone, in his "pure form", as it were. This would lead us
to a God of our own invention in. place of the real God; it would be an
arrogant purism that regards its own ideas as more important than God's
deeds. The above cited verse of the Magnificat shows us that Mary is
one of the human beings who in an altogether special way belong to the
name of God, so much so, in fact, that we cannot praise him rightly if
we leave her out of account.
In doing so we forget something about him that must not be
forgotten.
What, exactly? Our first attempt at an answer could be his maternal
side, which reveals itself more purely and more directly in the Son's
Mother than anywhere else. But this is, of course, much too general. In
order to praise Mary correctly and thus to glorify God correctly, we
must listen to all that Scripture and tradition say concerning the
Mother of the Lord and ponder it in our hearts. Thanks to the praise of
"all generations" since the beginning, the abundant wealth of Mariology
has become almost too vast to survey. In this brief meditation, I would
like to help the reader reflect anew on just a few of the key words
Saint Luke has placed in our hands in his inexhaustibly rich infancy
narrative.
Mary, Daughter Zion––Mother of Believers
Let us begin with the angel's greeting to Mary. For Luke, this is
the
primordial cell of Mariology that God himself wished to present to us
through his messenger, the Archangel Gabriel.
Translated literally, the greeting reads thus: "Rejoice, full of
grace.
The Lord is with you" (Lk 1:28). "Rejoice": At first sight, this word
appears to be no more than the formulaic greeting current in the
Greek-speaking world, and tradition has consistently translated it as
"hail". But looked at against the background of the Old Testament, this
formula of greeting takes on a more profound significance. Consider, in
fact, that the same word used by Luke appears four times in the
Septuagint, where in each case it is an announcement of messianic joy
(Zeph 3:14; Joel 2:21; Zech 9:9; Lam 4:21).
This greeting marks the beginning of the Gospel in the strict
sense;
its first word is "joy", the new joy that comes from God and breaks
through the world's ancient and interminable sadness. Mary is not
merely greeted in some vague or indifferent way; that God greets her
and, in her, greets expectant Israel and all of humanity is an
invitation to rejoice from the innermost depth of our being. The reason
for our sadness is the futility of our love, the overwhelming power of
finitude, death, suffering, and falsehood. We are sad because we are
left alone in a contradictory world where enigmatic signals of divine
goodness pierce through the cracks yet are thrown in doubt by a power
of darkness that is either God's responsibility or manifests his
impotence.
"Rejoice"––what reason does Mary have to rejoice in such a world?
The
answer is: "The Lord is with you." In order to grasp the sense of this
announcement, we must return once more to the Old Testament texts upon
which it is based, in particular to Zephaniah. These texts invariably
contain a double promise to the personification of Israel, daughter
Zion: God will come to save, and he will come to dwell in her. The
angel's dialogue with Mary reprises this promise and in so doing makes
it concrete in two ways. What in the prophecy is said to daughter Zion
is now directed to Mary: She is identified with daughter Zion, she is
daughter Zion in person.
In a parallel manner, Jesus, whom Mary is permitted to bear, is
identified with Yahweh, the living God. When Jesus comes, it is God
himself who comes to dwell in her. He is the Savior––this is the
meaning of the name Jesus, which thus becomes clear from the heart of
the promise. Renéé Laurentin has shown through
painstaking textual analyses how Luke has used subtle word play to
deepen the theme of God's indwelling. Even early traditions portray God
as dwelling "in the womb" of Israel––in the Ark of the Covenant. This
dwelling "in the womb" of Israel now becomes quite literally real in
the Virgin of Nazareth. Mary herself thus becomes the true Ark of the
Covenant in Israel, so that the symbol of the Ark gathers an incredibly
realistic force: God in the flesh of a human being, which flesh now
becomes his dwelling place in the midst of creation.
The angel's greeting––the center of Mariology not invented by the
human
mind––has led us to the theological foundation of this Mariology. Mary
is identified with daughter Zion, with the bridal people of God.
Everything said about the ecclesia in the Bible is true of her, and
vice versa: the Church learns concretely what she is and is meant to be
by looking at Mary. Mary is her mirror, the pure measure of her being,
because Mary is wholly within the measure of Christ and of God, is
through and through his habitation. And what other reason could the
ecclesia have for existing than to become a dwelling for God in the
world? God does not deal with abstractions. He is a person, and the
Church is a person. The more that each one of us becomes a person,
person in the sense of a fit habitation for God, daughter Zion, the
more we become one, the more we are the Church, and the more the Church
is herself.
The typological identification of Mary and Zion leads us, then,
into
the depths. This manner of connecting the Old and New Testaments is
much more than an interesting historical construction by means of which
the Evangelist links promise and fulfillment and reinterprets the Old
Testament in the light of what has happened in Christ. Mary is Zion in
person, which means that her life wholly embodies what is meant by
"Zion". She does not construct a self-enclosed individuality whose
principal concern is the originality of its own ego. She does not wish
to be just this one human being who defends and protects her own ego.
She does not regard life as a stock of goods of which everyone wants to
get as much as possible for himself.
Her life is such that she is transparent to God, "habitable" for
him.
Her life is such that she is a place for God. Her life sinks her into
the common measure of sacred history, so that what appears in her is,
not the narrow and constricted ego of an isolated individual, but the
whole, true Israel. This "typological identification" is a spiritual
reality; it is life lived out of the spirit of Sacred Scripture; it is
rootedness in the faith of the Fathers and at the same time expansion
into the height and breadth of the coming promises. We understand why
the Bible time and again compares the just man to the tree whose roots
drink from the living waters of eternity and whose crown catches and
synthesizes the light of heaven.
Let us return once more to the angel's greeting. Mary is called
"full
of grace". The Greek word for grace (charis) derives from the same root
as the words joy and rejoice (chara, chairein). Thus, we see once more
in a different form the same context to which we were led by our
earlier comparison with the Old Testament. Joy comes from grace. One
who is in the state of grace can rejoice with deep-going, constant joy.
By the same token, grace is joy.
What is grace? This question thrusts itself upon our text. Our
religious mentality has reified this concept much too much; it regards
grace as a supernatural something we carry about in our soul. And since
we perceive very little of it, or nothing at all, it has gradually
become irrelevant to us, an empty word belonging to Christian jargon,
which seems to have lost any relationship to the lived reality of our
everyday life. In reality, grace is a relational term: it does not
predicate something about an I, but something about a connection
between I and Thou, between God and man. "Full of grace" could
therefore also be translated as: "You are full of the Holy Spirit; your
life is intimately connected with God." Peter Lombard, the author of
what was the universal theological manual for approximately three
centuries during the Middle Ages, propounded the thesis that grace and
love are identical but that love "is the Holy Spirit".
Grace in the proper and deepest sense of the word is not some
thing
that comes from God; it is God himself. Redemption means that God,
acting as God truly does, gives us nothing less than himself The gift
of God is God––he who as the Holy Spirit is communion with us. "Full of
grace" therefore means, once again, that Mary is a wholly open human
being, one who has opened herself entirely, one who has placed herself
in God's hands boldly, limitlessly, and without fear for her own fate.
It means that she lives wholly by and in relation to God. She is a
listener and a prayer, whose mind and soul are alive to the manifold
ways in which the living God quietly calls to her. She is one who prays
and stretches forth wholly to meet God; she is therefore a lover, who
has the breadth and magnanimity of true love, but who has also its
unerring powers of discernment and its readiness to suffer.
Luke has flooded this fact with the light of yet another round of
motifs. In his subtle way he constructs a parallel between Abraham, the
father of believers, and Mary, the mother of believers. To be in a
state of grace means: to be a believer. Faith includes steadfastness,
confidence, and devotion, but also obscurity. When man's relation to
God, the soul's open availability for him, is characterized as "faith",
this word expresses the fact that the infinite distance between Creator
and creature is not blurred in the relation of the human I to the
divine Thou. It means that the model of "partnership", which has become
so dear to us, breaks down when it comes to God, because it cannot
sufficiently express the majesty of God and the hiddenness of his
working. It is precisely the man who has been opened up entirely into
God who comes to accept God's otherness and the hiddenness of his will,
which can pierce our will like a sword.
The parallel between Mary and Abraham begins in the joy of the
promised
son but continues apace until the dark hour when she must ascend Mount
Moriah, that is, until the Crucifixion of Christ. Yet it does not end
there; it also extends to the miracle of Isaac's rescue-the
Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Abraham, father of faith-this title
describes the unique position of the patriarch in the piety of Israel
and in the faith of the Church. But is it not wonderful that-without
any revocation of the special status of Abraham––a "mother of
believers" now stands at the beginning of the new people and that our
faith again and again receives from her pure and high image its measure
and its path?
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Petrine Ministry an
Exercise in Love,
Says Cardinal Ratzinger
In Homily at Mass for
Repose of the Souls of Paul
VI
and John Paul I
VATICAN CITY, OCT. 1,
2004 (Zenit.org).- Cardinal
Joseph
Ratzinger says "the two poles of the mission" entrusted to Popes
revolve
around love and truth.
The dean of the College
of Cardinals made that point
when
presiding over a Mass in St. Peter's Basilica for the eternal repose of
Paul VI and John Paul I, the immediate predecessors of John Paul II.
The occasion gave
Cardinal Ratzinger the chance to
reflect
on the meaning of the Petrine ministry, whose essence, he said, "is not
an exercise of power, but to 'bear the burden of others.' [It] is the
responsibility
of love."
To preside over the
Church "in charity is above all
to
precede 'in the love of Christ,'" the cardinal said. He recalled that
the
definitive conferring of the primacy to Peter after Christ's
resurrection
is linked to the thrice repeated question by the Lord: "Simon, son of
John,
do you love me more than these?"
"To feed the flock and
love the Lord are the same
thing.
It is love of Christ, which guides the sheep on the right path and
builds
the Church," Cardinal Ratzinger said during his homily Tuesday.
"Love is precisely the
opposite of indifference
before
the other," said the cardinal. "It cannot allow the love of Christ to
be
extinguished in the other, or friendship and knowledge of the Lord to
be
attenuated."
"The love of Christ is
love for the poor, for those
who
suffer," he continued. "We know well how our Popes were committed with
force against injustice, and for the rights of the oppressed, those who
lack power."
"The love of Christ is
not something
individualistic"
or "only spiritual," but also "concerns the world" which it must
transform,
added the cardinal, who is prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine
of the Faith.
However, "love would be
blind without truth," he
said.
"And because of this, the one who must precede in love receives from
the
Lord the promise: 'Simon, Simon ... I have prayed for you, that your
faith
may not fail.' The Lord sees that Satan seeks to 'sift us like wheat.'"
It is a test that
"concerns all the disciples," but
"Christ
prays in a special way 'for you,' for Peter's faith, and on this prayer
is based the mission to 'strengthen your brethren,'" the cardinal added.
"Peter's faith does not
come from his own efforts,"
Cardinal
Ratzinger said. Rather, the "infallibility of Peter's faith is based on
the prayer of Jesus, the Son of God: 'I have prayed for you, that your
faith may not fail.'"
"This prayer of Jesus
is the sure foundation of
Peter's
function for all centuries," the cardinal said.
He added that it "can
justly be said that the
Supreme
Pontiffs Paul VI and John Paul I confirmed their brethren 'with
apostolic
valor.'"
The cardinal concluded:
"At a time when we see how
Satan
sifts Christ's disciples like wheat, the imperturbable faith of the
Popes
has been, visibly, the rock on which the Church is established."
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