Catholic Church -- Sermons; Sermons, English -- 20th century
It is easy, then, to see why it is that the Church _dies daily_, why it
is that she is content to be stripped of all that makes her life
effective, why she too permits her hands to be bound and her feet
fettered and her beauty marred and her voice silenced so far as men can
do those things. She is human? Yes; she dwells in a _body that is
prepared_ for her, but prepared chiefly that she may suffer in it. Her
far-reaching hands are not hers merely that she may bind up with them
the broken-hearted, nor her swift feet hers merely that she may run on
them to succour the perishing, nor her head and heart hers merely that
she may ponder and love. But all this sensitive human organism is hers
that at last she may agonize in it, bleed from it from a thousand
wounds, be lifted up in it to draw all men to her cross.
She does not desire, then, in this world, the _throne of her Father
David_, nor the kind of triumph which is the only kind that the world
understands to be so. She desires one life and one triumph only--the
Risen Life of her Saviour. And this, at last, is the transfiguration of
her Humanity by the power of her Divinity and the vindication of them
both.
End of Project Gutenberg's Paradoxes of Catholicism, by Robert Hugh Benson
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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