The books of the New Testament, the writings of the Fathers of the Church, and the documents of the ecclesiastical councils abound in information about the status and the responsibilities of the diocesan presbyterium. The men who are privileged to belong to such sacerdotal brotherhoods and the men who are preparing themselves to accept their bishop's call to enter one of them should be shown what the various loci theologici have to say about the position and the duties of the diocesan priesthood as such. To depict the secular priest as merely a priest without vows, to explain the presbyterium merely in terms of the religious life, is to obscure the content of Catholic theology and to neglect a manifestly important instrument of priestly sanctification. Such obscurity and such damage will inevitably follow if the teaching on the presbyterium is left out of the formal course of theology and relegated to the place of mere “spiritual reading."

CHAPTER II

THE BISHOP AND THE

DIOCESAN

PRIESTHOOD

HE status of a diocesan priest in the Catholic Church,

TH

as we have seen, is that of a member of a sacerdotal brotherhood, gathered around and subject to the ruler and father of a local Church. As a corporate unit this brotherhood, the presbyterium, functions only to aid the visible head of the local Church in the performance of his divinely constituted duties. Normally, and according to the constitution of Christ's kingdom on earth, the visible head and father of the local Church is the diocesan bishop. Hence the function of the presbyterium as a fraternity and the function of the individual diocesan priest as a member of the presbyterium must be described in terms of the work which God has assigned to the diocesan bishop in the Catholic Church.

The work of a bishop who is a head of a diocese is, in the last analysis, the accomplishment of the purpose of the local Church itself. God has not charged him with a mere part, even with the principal part, of the task which the local Church is intended to perform. On the contrary God has made the bishop responsible for all the functions which the individual local Church, the house or family of God over which the bishop rules as head and father, is meant to fulfill. As a result, the presbyterium, the brotherhood of diocesan priests over which the diocesan bishop presides, is a corporate reality brought into being to assist the bishop in his essential

work of achieving the integral purpose for which God instituted the local Church as a unit of His kingdom on earth.

Now, the local Church differs from every other religious family within God's city in this world in that its purpose is precisely that of the universal Church itself. The other individual religious brotherhoods in the Church have been brought into being at some point in the Church's history for the attainment and the conservation of some particular good which the Church desires for the attainment of its essential end. Thus the individual religious order or congregation exists to further a particular project or purpose of Christ's society. The local Church, the Catholic diocese, on the other hand, is itself the divinely instituted unit of the universal Christian society. It is the Catholic Church in the locality of the diocese. It exists to attain, not some individual aspect or part of the Catholic Church's essential purpose, but that purpose as a whole, within and through the diocesan community. It is for this reason that the local Church is said to be the Church universal in miniature. The difference between the immediate purpose of the diocese (and hence the immediate purpose of the bishop with his presbyterium) and the immediate purpose of the individual religious order or congregation is an important factor in determining the distinction between the spirituality of the diocesan priesthood and the spiritualities of the various sacerdotal religious communities. Each one of the great religious orders and congregations can be said to have its own proper and characteristic spirituality. Thus the Benedictine spirituality is something distinct from that of the followers of St. Ignatius Loyola or St. Francis or St. Dominic or St. Alphonsus Liguori. This is true, in the last analysis, because each of these saintly Founders worked for the attainment of a distinct immediate purpose, for the accomplishment of one definite kind of benefit for the Church.

The good of the Church as a whole demanded, or at least made it expedient, that the individual ends of each of the

religious communities should be pursued. In each case, however, the corporate prosecution of such a particular good purpose within the Church necessitated the formation of a definite religious society distinct from the diocese and from the diocesan presbyterium. The diocese or the local Church as such has no right to limit its efforts or to concentrate them upon the achievement of any one particular objective within the ambit of the Church's purpose. By the very fact that it is what it is, it must labor for the attainment of the Church's objective as a whole. Because the local Church is the relatively autonomous and complete society of Christ's faithful in one city or district, because it is the company of our Lord's disciples gathered around a spiritual father whose office is of the essence of the kingdom of Christ on earth, the work of the bishop and of his presbyterium must be directed immediately toward the full and complete purpose of the Church.

Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ instituted His visible Church and preserves it as an indefectible society for the glory of God, for the perpetuation of His own redemptive work, and for the sanctification and salvation of men through the practice of the Christian religion. God is glorified when He is known clearly and rightly praised by His creatures. According to the actual decrees of divine providence, the only ultimate and completely perfective knowledge of God available to mankind is that of the beatific vision. Only if a man finally attains to that knowledge will he have reached the good to which God Himself has ordered the human family. Only in and through this beatific vision does man find his eternal and absolute happiness and thus ultimately glorify God.

It was to bring man to the perfection of the beatific vision that our Lord performed His redemptive work. He suffered and died in order that men might gain victory over the forces tending to hold them apart from God and might possess God in the glory of the beatific vision forever. The

life of sanctity in this world is that of habitual grace, the actual beginning of that supernatural life to which the beatific vision belongs. Thus the sanctification and salvation of men through the practice of the Christian religion is not to be considered as an end in any way distinct from God's glory or from the continuation of our Lord's redemptive activity. It is the process in which and through which God is glorified and Christ's work is continued. It is the one essential purpose and function of the visible Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church has another purpose, secondary and subsidiary and, to a certain extent, incidental. Because it is the only authorized and infallible bearer of the divine message, it accomplishes the results which the message itself brings about. We know from the teaching of the Vatican Council's constitution Dei Filius that the divine public revelation entrusted to and preached by the Church is absolutely necessary for mankind because of the fact that God has raised man to a supernatural destiny, and also that it is truly, though not absolutely, requisite in order that "those truths about God which are not of themselves beyond the competence of human reason may, in the present condition of the human race, be known by all, readily, with firm certitude, and with no admixture of error."1

Because there is and can be no such thing as a realistic individual and social ethic apart from a correct natural knowledge about God, and because democratic nations can never hope to achieve even a decent government unless their electorates possess effective and true ethical standards, the divine message and the Church which teaches this message inerrantly are both necessary for the preservation of civilization and world order. Since this natural and social good is produced by the Church by the will of its divine Founder, it may be and should be counted as a purpose of

1 The Vatican Council, const. Dei Filius. Cf. Denzinger-Bannwart, Enchiridion symbolorum, n. 1786. An application of this principle to the field of moral teaching is found in the encyclical Humani Generis.