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Sunday after the
Ascension
Thoughts for the Week - Fr. R. Taouk
8th May 2016
Rome the Eternal by Pope Pius XII
When we stand before the witnesses of the Christian past
we always feel something immortal: The faith which they
reveal still lives, and is multiplied indefinitely in
the number of those who profess it; the Church still
lives to which they belong, and she is always the same
through the centuries. She is the Church of
Christ. Today, in what concerns her visible aspect, more
perfect, more complete, more developed than in the dawn
of her nativity and the first ages of her external
manifestation. With this affirmation we find ourselves
once more at Rome near Peter's Chair. Because Christ has
realised His will to found a Church, one and
indestructible, and to do so by the promise, made to
Peter, by the institution of the primacy, or, what is
the same thing, the Papacy. The Church established on
Peter and his successors, and she alone, must be the
Church of Christ, one in herself and destined to remain
until the end of time by means of submission to a
personal and visible Head.
It was a disposition of Divine Providence that Peter
chose Rome as his Episcopal See. In the succession of
Roman Pontiffs there are many who, like the Prince of
the Apostles, have sealed with their own blood their
fidelity to Him whose visible representatives they were.
Many were great by reason of their sanctity, their
genius, their learning, the authority of their person.
There were others whose purely human qualities
corresponded less accurately to the dignity of their
supreme pastoral office. But the most formidable
tempests unleashed from the time of the Apostle Peter
down to our own have not been able to shake the Church
or prejudice the divine mission of her Rulers. Each
Pope, in the very moment in which he accepts his
election, receives it immediately from Christ with the
same power and with the same privilege of infallibility.
If there should ever come a day - we say this as a
matter of pure hypothesis - when the physical reality of
Rome were to crumble; if ever this Vatican Basilica, the
symbol of the one, invincible, and victorious Catholic
Church, were to bury beneath its ruins the historical
treasures and the sacred tombs it enshrines, even then
the Church would not, by that fact, be overthrown or
undermined; the promise of Christ to Peter would always
remain true, the Papacy would continue unchanged, as
well as the one, indestructible Church founded on the
Pope alive at that time. Thus it is: Rome the Eternal in
the Christian and supernatural sense, is superior to the
Rome of history. Her nature and her truth are
independent of the historic City. And such, beloved sons
and daughters, should your faith be, too; unshakable,
because it has for foundation the rock on which the
Church is built. Proclaim it and bear it, this faith of
yours, among your associates and your fellow students,
with clear-sighted vision, with profound conviction,
with a courage certain of victory. And pray for the
Pope, that the Lord, who has willed him to be the
Shepherd and Bishop of your souls, may grant him to help
by word and example those whom he rules, and with them
to attain life everlasting.
Allocution to Roman Students, 30 January 1949.
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