2.      Heiler (p. 183 ff.) distinguishes between popular piety and the official theology of the Church, thus making the road easy for an elaborate analysis in which he characterizes popular devotion to the saints as veiled polytheism. But the alleged distinction between Catholic theory and practice does not really exist, since the devout Catholic has recourse to the saints because of his very faith in God who is “wonderful in his saints,” and because of his reverence and awe before the mystery of God. So that popular devotion to the saints is in line with dogma and is utterly monotheistic in its character. Nor does that devotion, as it might appear from Heiler’s presentation, comprise the whole of popular piety. If the devout Catholic turns to the saints in special need, yet, for the ordinary and fundamental concerns of his soul, he practices after the pattern of the saints and supported by their intercession an immediate intercourse of prayer with God, especially in the reception of the sacraments and in the use of those private devotions, such as devotions to the Blessed Sacrament and the Sacred Heart, which cultivate a direct child-like relation with God. It is true that special needs may become manifold and frequent, and that devotion to the saints may occupy what seems a disproportionate space in the religious life of this or that individual. Yet the Church rightly avoids restricting in any way the satisfaction of these individual religious needs, in order not to endanger the freedom of religious movement within the limits of dogmatic truth and so imperil the fertility of the religious life.

3.      St. Thomas Aquinas, “Summa Theologica, Pars tertia,” Q. LXIII, A. 3: Sactamentales characteres nihil aliud sunt quam quaedam participationes sacerdotii Christi ab ipso Christo detivatae.

4.      Experimur orantes (In Cant. XXXII, 3).

5.      Pope Pius X condemned the modernist proposition that “in definiendis veritatibus ita collaborant discens et docens ecclesia, ut docenti ecclesiae nihil supersit nisi communes discentis opinationes sancire (Decree Lamentabili, 1907, n. 6).

6.      See Dollinger on the Infallibility of the Pope. A Letter addressed to the Archbishop of Munich, London, 1871. p. 18.

7.      Pondus meum amor meus. Conf. XIII, 9.

Chapter IX: The Catholicity of the Church

I became all things to all men, that I might save all (1 Cor. ix, 22).

The Church is the Kingdom of God thoroughly leavening all mankind in slow but irresistible process, the Body of Christ embracing the whole of fallen humanity in a supra-personal unity. Therefore of her nature she rests upon faith in the divine Redeemer, in Christ. As the supra-personal unity of mankind reunited to God she obtains in Peter’s office the perfect expression of this unity and its guarantee, while her inward life, with the loving commerce which characterizes it, is realized in the Communion of Saints. Such is the sequence of thought developed in the previous Chapters.