By Richard Taylor, University of Notre Dame
To you most reverend Fathers of this Third Vatican Council, gracious shepherds of this one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church:
I come before you as but one, small member of this mystical Body of Christ to entreat you to turn your solemn authority to a matter at the core of this Church and the life of all its members, yet hardly attended to by the faithful and badly underemphasized in the Magisterium, especially in the preceding Second Vatican Council, though in no way absent in our long and rich Tradition — this central matter being nothing other than the life of Christ within each and every soul adopted by grace at baptism as another son or daughter of the Father to continue on earth the life of His only (naturally) begotten Son, Jesus.
Much can be, and much has been, said about the Church during its sacred and inspired Councils to sift through, develop, and safeguard the great deposit of Revelation entrusted to this Church by Christ Himself, to direct this Church in a world always turbulent and always in need of the light of Christ, and to guide the faithful along their way to and through the narrow gate, behind which lies our sweet and secure salvation. Many true doctrines have been defined and errors condemned in these Councils, by the authority vested in this College, to perfect the content of our faith; many decrees have been issued to direct the institution of this Church and to ensure that the administration of its most holy and salvific works lives up to its formal nature as the Bride of Christ; and many constitutions have been promulgated, especially by our most recent Council, which distill the very nature of this Church and its relationship to our world. Little to nothing, however, has been directly addressed by a Council regarding the dynamics of the Catholic spiritual life (namely, the life and kingdom of Jesus Christ within our hearts) — which should lie at the heart of our lives, and which should dominate and infiltrate all our attention and desires, and yet seem to be mostly ignored and misunderstood by many Catholics (not to mention non-Catholics).
If you are eager to dismiss me on the grounds that such a topic as the nature of an authentic Catholic spirituality is not appropriate for a Council, but perhaps rather for an encyclical, or some less formal mode of Magisterium, then I ask whether the Fathers of our most recent Council did not address topics ignored in all prior Councils. I ask, further, why this topic, which is the center, the beginning, and the end of the life of every Catholic, is unworthy to rise to the attention, discussion, erudition, and eventual inspired definition and guidance of a Council such as this.
There are many lost sheep, even among us Catholics, who are in dire need of you shepherds. How few among us give proper weight to our universal and most crucial vocation! —the formation of Christ within us, our union and spiritual marriage with Christ, and our transformation into another Christ, extending His presence and work here and now on earth while awaiting participation and union with His Father and Spirit in eternity. There are masses of baptized Catholics who have since abandoned their faith; there are lukewarm Catholics who do little but fulfill their Sunday obligation; there are radical traditionalists who fashion idols out of solemnity and dated, imperfect rituals, who disregard the binding authority of our most recent Council, and who have demeaned our previous pope, our beloved Francis; there are radical progressivists who are all too eager to appropriate the tastes and technologies of the fallen world, and who seek the kingdom of God on earth rather than within their hearts; there are lay men and women who disregard their unique call to holiness and become absorbed in their professional ambitions and the business of their family lives while their prayer lives shrink to naught; there are priests and religious who consider themselves de facto personally sanctified by their most sacred ministries, despite remaining otherwise unpossessed by the Spirit of Christ; and even some of the most devout among us — driven in their faith primarily by a strong sense of duty, morality, and proper custom, rather than by a deep, intimate experience of Christ — dismiss such spirituality as “mystical” and unattainable save by those elected by God to be saints, when in truth Christ desires to be united intimately, ineffably, and mystically with all His members. Our beloved Pope Leo XIV, in his first homily, warned against a nominal Catholicism paired with a “practical atheism” — that is, we might say, a Catholicism lacking in this most crucial spiritual dimension (1). I believe the Good Shepherd is, with our Pope and myself, entreating your rescue and your guidance.
Where did I come from, where am I now, and where am I going? How then should I live? Our existence constantly prods us with these questions. In an era overrun by absurdism and a crisis of meaning, few outside the Church find themselves able to answer this question. This much is old news, and I need not rehearse it with your Excellencies who certainly know better than I. I only wish to beseech you most reverend Fathers to turn your attention to the problems even we Catholics face in grasping an essential answer to these questions. Indeed, these questions alone could serve as the subject for dozens of documents and already have, in various indirect ways, been addressed by the Magisterium. The pressing issue facing the Church and all its members today is not that our faithful struggle to give a truly Catholic and personally fulfilling answer to these questions, but that we struggle to give an essential answer — an answer that truly and concisely distills the essence of the Catholic life. I suggest to your Excellencies at this Third Vatican Council that a document which distills the essence of the Catholic life — which up to now has been obscured by doctrines scattered here and there in our voluminous Tradition — would serve as an indispensable, and indeed beautiful, guide for Catholics (clergy and laity alike).
If this Council should concur that the essence of the Catholic life is the formation of Christ within us, as testified by this Church’s great doctors and saints, then I suggest once again to your Excellencies that this spiritual enchiridion include answers to such questions as: How does the Catholic form Christ within? How, metaphysically, are we to understand the formation of Christ within? What are the stages of formation? What are the manifestations, and thereby the discernable signs, of these stages? What follows externally from the formation of Christ internally? How is our transformation into Christ in this earthly life similar to or different from our perfect marriage with Christ in eternal life? How does this presentation of the essence of the Catholic life differ from other presentations, and why is it more complete? How does this form of essential, focused Catholic life interact with other confused, non-essential forms of Catholic life? How does this form of Catholic life promote the formation of saints? The Catholic faithful, as I see it, are in great need of such a distillation of their life of faith — despite the fact that (I grant you) a perfect distillation is not possible and inevitably fails to capture the entirety of the Catholic life.
Illustrative of the lamentable poverty in the spiritual life of today’s Catholic is the way in which most interpret one prevailing distillation of the Catholic life: the imitation of Christ. To imitate Christ, many would say (and not wrongly), is to study His life as given in the Gospels and to act similarly: to heal and console others as He did, to befriend sinners as He did, to pray and withstand temptation as He did, to do the will of the Father as He did, to lay down one’s life for others out of love as He did. St. Paul, however, gives us a clue that the imitation of Christ is something much deeper and more profound than merely patterning one’s actions according to the external example of a distant Christ. Our great Apostle testifies, “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me, ” (2). I submit to your Excellencies that in these words of our great Apostle lies the essence of the Catholic life, as fully as it can be captured and distilled. At the very least, St. Paul’s testimony reveals a grave deficiency in the common understanding and practice of the imitation of Christ given above — namely, a solely external modeling of one’s actions based on the reported acts of Jesus in the Gospels. St. Paul’s testimony reveals that, insofar as the imitation of Christ involves patterning one’s actions on Christ’s, such external acts are to somehow flow from the gushing fountain of the life of Christ within.
Centuries ago, our great Church Father St. Augustine warned us of just this mistake: “Lo, you were within, but I outside, seeking there for you… You were with me, but I was not with you,” (3). Today’s Catholic frantically does a thousand things a day and looks in a thousand different places for our Savior; meanwhile, Christ hides within the heart. It is perhaps telling that our newest and best Bible translations read, “The kingdom of God is among you,” rather than, “The kingdom of God is within you,” which is both more faithful to the original Greek and more illuminating and, frankly, astounding (4). Today’s Catholic, unless this Council intervenes, is in serious danger of perpetuating this age-old error of seeking for the kingdom of God outside, of forgetting to turn inward to find the kingdom of God within and to cultivate the life of Christ within (not, of course, to neglect the active and corporeal life, but in order to establish a foundation and a source thereof).
Not more than a hundred years ago, our beloved predecessor Pope Pius XI asked, “Is not the sum of all religion and therefore the pattern of more perfect life, contained in that most auspicious sign and in the form of piety that follows from it…?” (5) The most auspicious sign of which he wrote is nothing other than the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Now, nobody would deny the extent and popularity of the devotion to the Sacred Heart; yet, I submit to your Excellencies that this devotion does not yet enjoy the pride of place demanded by the Magisterium. The critique of Pope Pius XII remains poignant today: “There are some who, confusing and confounding the primary nature of this devotion with various individual forms of piety which the Church approves and encourages but does not command, regard this as a kind of additional practice which each one may take up or not according to his own inclination.”6 If you ask me what the devotion of the Sacred Heart has to do with the life of Christ within, I point you to the revelations entrusted by our Lord to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in a series of visions — during the first of which Christ bid her to give Him her heart, placed her heart in the fiery furnace of His most fervently loving Heart, and returned to her a piece of His heart to serve as her heart from then on. In short, the “form of piety” that follows from this most perfect devotion of our Church is nothing but an offering of one’s entire being (not merely one’s actions) to Christ and the transformation of one’s entire being into the Being of Christ within. I plea to you, most reverend Council Fathers, not to allow this most primary and perfect devotion of our Church — which, indeed, distills as fully as possible the essence of our Catholic spirituality — to go on neglected as just another “additional practice” among others, lest we Catholics continue to neglect our interior lives and stagnate in our cold indifference toward the infinite warmth and love of Jesus’ most Sacred Heart.
If, again, you dismiss me, reminding me that our rich spirituality has already been developed in our Tradition, I point out that it has never directly risen to the solemn and inspired definition of a Council, and I ask why we should keep such treasures as contained in the spiritual insights of the Desert Fathers, the Hesychasts, the Carthusians, the Carmelites, the Salesians, and the French School (among others) hidden in monasteries or otherwise written into unread words collecting dust on abandoned bookshelves. The faithful is (as always, but now more than ever) sorely in need of a clear and concise summary of the faith, a distillation of the essence of their faith, such that they may enjoy the richness of our unrivaled Tradition without getting lost therein — a kind of clarity, concision, and distillation which your Excellencies, with the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, are most capable of in this holy Council. I beg you, most reverend Fathers of this Third Vatican Council, exercising the authority vested in you by Christ, to unravel this “mystery hidden from ages and from generations past.” Let St. Paul’s words be fulfilled: “But now [this mystery] has been manifested to his holy ones, to whom God chose to make known the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; it is Christ in you, the hope for glory.”7
May the Holy Spirit be with your Excellencies and this most holy and beneficial Third Vatican Council.
1 Pope Leo XIV, First homily given in the Sistine Chapel
2 Galatians 2:20 (NRSVCE)
3 Augustine, Confessions, X.27
4 Luke 17:21 (NABRE)
5 Pope Pius XI, Miserentissimus Redemptor, #3
6 Pope Pius XII, Haurietis Aquas, #10
7 Colossians 1:26-27 (NABRE)
This essay followed the prompt: You are a representative at the Third Vatican Council and have 1,500-2,500 words to explain an issue that you believe needs utmost attention in the Church today. What will you say to the Council Fathers?