Ven. Pope Pius XII: Dare Not Forget. We Belong to the Church Militant

(The completion of the North American College) lights a stronger flame of hope for the Church in the United States of America and in the world. All this, it seemed to Us, adds up to a grave and sacred responsibility that rests on you, Our dear young seminarians, and on those who are to follow you. 

Will the sacrifices cheerfully offered for your sake be repaid in kind and with interest? Will the hopes and plans cherished by your Bishops, cherished by Us, be fulfilled? Your eager hearts are quick to answer: yes. But reflect a moment. That will be true only under one condition, that you become priests worthy of the name.

In the priesthood man is elevated to an almost staggering height, a mediator between a world in travail and the celestial kingdom of peace. Christ’s ambassador, steward of God’s mysteries, he exercises a divine power. Heir to the priestly and kingly offices of the divine Redeemer, he is commissioned to carry on the task of salvation, bringing souls to God and giving God to souls. Never, then, unmindful of the supreme importance of such a vocation, the priest will not busy himself with useless things.

Modeling his life on that of Him he represents he will gladly spend and be spent on behalf of souls. Souls he seeks everywhere and always, not what the world can offer him. “To be a priest and to be a man dedicated to work is one and the same thing”, wrote Bl. Pius X; and he liked to quote the words of the synod presided over by St. Charles Borromeo:  “Let every cleric repeat again and again: he has been called not to a life of ease and leisure, but to hard work in the spiritual army of the Church.”

Those words, beloved sons, recall another fact one dare not forget. We belong to the Church militant; and she is militant because on earth the powers of darkness are ever restless to encompass her destruction. Not only in the far-off centuries of the early Church, but down through the ages and in this our day, the enemies of God and Christian civilization make bold to attack the Creator’s supreme dominion and sacrosanct human rights.

No rank of the clergy is spared ; and the faithful—their number is legion—inspired by the valiant endurance of their shepherds and fathers in Christ, stand firm, ready to suffer and die, as the martyrs of old, for the one true Faith taught by Jesus Christ. Into that militia you seek to be admitted as leaders.

Imprisonment and martyrdom, We know, do not loom on the horizon that spreads before your eyes. In an atmosphere of untrammeled freedom, where “the word of God is not bound”, the Church in your country has grown in numbers, in influence, in strength of leadership in all that makes for the good of the commonwealth.

The college on the via dell’Umiltà has seen your priests increase from twenty-five hundred to forty-five thousand and more-proud and glorious tribute to the unselfish, clear-visioned Catholic family life that prevails among you; a mission country become a seminary of apostles for foreign fields. 

But the Church militant is “one body, with one Spirit … with the same Lord, the same faith, the same baptism”. (Eph 4, 4 ff.)  And that Spirit calls for more than a dash of heroism in every priest who would be worthy of the name, whatever the external circumstances of time and place.

The spirit of the martyrs breathes in every priestly soul, who in the daily round of pastoral duties and in his cheerful, unrelenting efforts to increase in wisdom and in grace, gives witness to the Prince of shepherds, who endured the cross, despised the shame “when He gave Himself up on our behalf, a sacrifice breathing out fragrance as He offered it to God”.  (Eph 5, 2.)

We raise a fervent prayer to Mary Immaculate, under whose patronage you have placed your country, to Mary gloriously assumed into heaven, whom you have wished to honor in your chapel here, that she would always show a mother’s loving care of the clergy of America, and guide you, beloved seminarians, bearers of such high hopes, along the way that leads to that holiness which will bring her to recognize in you a greater and greater resemblance to her own divine Son . . . .

Venerable Pope Pius XII:  Dare Not Forget. We Belong to the Church Militant. Speech delivered on October 14, 1953 [Acta Apostolicae Sedis 45 (1953) pp 679 ff.] at the opening of the North American College in Rome.