Church history demonstrates, to every unbiased student, how earnestly and austerely most wearers of the tiara have taken their personal obligations, and how their lofty office has not impaired their humility, love and devotion, but transformed and deepened them. It is true that there have been popes, especially in the tenth century and at the Renaissance, who have given sad evidence of the frailty of human nature. But their number fades into insignificance before the dazzling company of saints and martyrs which the See of Rome has already given to the world. The words of the Protestant theologian Walter Kohler about Pope Pius X are true “mutatis mutandis” of the overwhelming majority of the popes of Rome: “He recked nothing of the political power of the modern state. He was a priest, and his endeavor was to hold the Host aloft, to look neither to right nor left, and to bear his Savior through the world.” Such is the idea of the papacy and such its essential nature: to bear the Savior through the world, to devote self to Christ in the service of the community. So all egotism, all domination, all special privilege is fundamentally foreign to the Church. And therefore and in that measure the Church fulfills the noblest dreams of democratic equality. Unity and brotherly love have here built themselves a house, a house in which, as St. Cyprian says and St. Augustine repeats (De bapt. c. Don. vii, 49), only those dwell who are of one heart and one mind. The spirit of the Master pervades that dwelling, the spirit which enriched us with the luminous words: “One only is your Master, ye all are brethren.”

Endnotes

1.      None of the Fathers sets forth the mystical unity of Christ and the faithful so clearly and impressively as does St. Augustine. He would have the nature of the Church conceived in terms of this unity: Cum ille caput, nos membra unus est Filius Dei (In ep. Joan. Tr. X, 3). Aliter enim est in nobis tamquam in templo suo, aliter autem quia et nos ipse sumus, cum secundum id, quod ut caput nostrum esset, homo factus est, corpus eius sumus (In ev. Joann. Tr. CXI, 5). Et nos Ipse est (Sermo CXXXIII, 8). Ille caput cum ceteris membris unus homo est. Et cum ascendere nemo potest, nisi qui in eius corpore membrum ipsius factus fuerit, impletur: quia nemo ascendit, nisi qui descendit…. igitur jam non duo, sed una caro (Sermo XCI, 6, 7).

2.      St. Augustine: Dominus autem securus moriens dedit sanguinem suum pro ea, quam resurgens haberet, quam sibi jam conjunxerat in utero virginis. Verbum enim sponsus et sponsa caro humana; et utrumque unus Filius Dei et idem filius hominis: ubi factus est caput ecclesiae, ille uterus virginis Mariae thalamus ejus, inde processit tamquam sponsus de thalamo suo (In ev. Joann. Tr. VIII, 4).

3.      Heiler, op. cit., p. 40.