Consequently such a conception of authority does not paralyze and petrify the believer, but enfranchises him, directing his gaze to Christ and Christ alone. No human authority, no extraneous personality, may stand between Christ and the believing subject. Divine truth, grace and life must flow into the soul directly from Christ Himself. Therefore— however paradoxical it may seem—the authority of the Church secures the liberty of the individual Christian, by its impersonal and extra-personal character. It protects that liberty from the spiritual domination and claims to mediatorship of alleged leading personalities, and sets Christ and the believer in direct contact with each other. Therefore the effect of such authority is not to separate, but to unite; or rather, it protects and secures that mysterious magnetic field and those wondrous magnetic forms which originate in the polarity of Christ and the soul. It protects and secures the direct contact and interplay of life between the Head and its members.

That is as true of the Church’s teaching office as of her priestly and pastoral authority. For her teaching office also is subject to the word of the Lord: “One only shall be your teacher, Christ” (Mt. xxiii, 10). When the Catholic priest proclaims the word of God, Christ Himself preaches through him. Certainly this authority of Christ is most plainly and strikingly expressed in the doctrinal pronouncements of His Vicar; but it is present also in the preaching of the simple parish priest in his remote village church. “Christ Himself speaks through His disciples; His voice is heard through those whom He sends” (St. Augustine, “In ev. Joann.,” xlvii, 5). All the doctrinal controversies of Christianity are dominated by this Christo-centric conception of the Church’s teaching authority. It is because Christ is the sole canon of her preaching, that the Church adheres so obstinately and so rigidly to His traditional message. It is for this reason that she can endure no modernism, no fraternizing with the spirit of the age. Her teaching is, and aims at being, nothing else but a handing on of that message of Christ which was proclaimed by the apostles. St. Paul enjoined his disciple, Timothy, to guard that which had been committed to him (Timothee, custodi depositum! 2 Tim. i, 14; cf. 1 Tim. iv, 16; vi, 14). That is exactly the doctrinal program of the Church. Her conservatism and her traditionalism derive directly from her fundamentally Christo-centric attitude.