The great teachers in the Church today tell us that "we are about to witness the most intense study of the Church since the Reformation. No longer attacked from within the broad body of Christendom with its variety of opposing sects, she is now forced to look at herself, not from the outside where she was opposed, but from the inside where she lives her most spiritual life. And it is indeed a remarkable thing that every profound treatise on the Church written in the last few years has considered the Church as she is in herself, and not as she is to her opponents." (Bishop Sheen - "The Mystical Body".) It is a fact recognized by all that argumentation tends to clarify a question as no other means. The same is true of the Catholic Church. In her long and generally stormy history the Church has met many intellectual opponents. And when the smoke of battle had cleared, she found herself enriched doctrinally by these intellectual tussles. Pelagianism helped her develop the doctrine of Grace; Arianism aided her in the deeper study of the Incarnation; Protestantism did much to further the study on the Justification of men; and within the lifetime of many of us, the heresy of Modernism has brought home more forcefully the fact of the historical Church and the fact of the historical Christ.

But the Church stands today without an intellectual opponent worthy of the name. This is true even of the Church's current enemy, Communism. All the existing arguments against Christianity are summed up in Soviet anti-religious literature but they are all puerile. Lenin himself wrote nothing new about religion though he surpassed all others in coarseness and ridicule. In one of Lenin's books, which is a compilation of all his anti-religious sayings, he calls God a corpse: 'Every little god is lying with a corpse.' In another place in the same book he gives us one of his definitions of religion: 'Religion,' he says, 'is sort of a spiritual brandy in which the slaves of capital (i.e. laboring men) drown the image of their humanity and their demand for some sort of worthy human life.' In another place he writes: 'A Roman Catholic priest who seduces a girl is far less dangerous than the good priest', and he goes on to say that the good priest will be loved and imitated by his parishioners and they will even die for him. Such trash can scarcely be called intellectual opposition. It is the product of a genius for coarseness and deserves to be left in the backwash of the gutter. Just what is the gist of Lenin's whole argument? It is superficial like all anti-religious arguments. Lenin could have written his whole argument in one short, simple sentence: 'I am disgusted with Christians.' A German pagan philosopher wrote in the last century that there was only one Christian, Christ. Lenin would even exclude Christ. Lenin hated Christ. Lenin was disgusted with Christianity because he saw too many Christians wearing masks much like some of our l00% Americans of a few years ago.

Christians themselves are the greatest objection to their religion; they are a scandal to whose who are favorably disposed towards it. This argument has been grievously abused in our day. The present weakness of faith and spread of complete unbelief lead men to judge Christianity by Christians; in former ages it was judged in the first place by its eternal truth, its doctrinal and moral teaching. Our age is too preoccupied with what is human, so that Christianity is not seen behind its mask of bad Christians; notice is taken of their wrongdoing and their deformations of the faith rather than of the religion itself; their sins are more easily seen than the great Christian truth.

Very many people today estimate the Christian religion by those whose profession of it is exterior and degenerate: Christianity is the religion of love and of freedom, but it is judged according to the hostility and hate and acts of violence of so many Christians, men who compromise their faith and are a stumbling-block to superficial modern minds.

Our retreat master told us in a conference last week that we are living in a post-Christian age. We are living on the spiritual capital of our great Christian forefathers. The situation is much like the case of the young sprout who has been working good dad for years, and when dad stopped giving, would kick him out into the street. But that time is gone. The time has come when every man and woman must declare wholeheartedly for Christ. A man in this parish said to me some time ago: 'Why doesn't the Catholic Church put on a purge and eliminate those who are not living up to its teachings?' I said that that is impossible. The Church does not do things in that way. She lets nature and grace take their courses. If grace takes her course, the sinner will be converted; if nature takes its course, the sinner will be lost. No other institution in the world has greater faith in human nature as has the Catholic Church. In this she is like her Master, Who had such great faith in humanity that He united it to His Divinity. The Church always lives in hope that the sinner will be converted just as the good mother who always lives in the hope that her wayward sons will return to her. Today by a natural process of elimination the masking Christians will be weeded out.

Now, what is my point? I have said that we are about to witness the most intense study of the Church since the Reformation. That portends an age when we shall have the intellectual Catholics who will be willing to die for their Faith. It means that Catholics must understand their Faith, for the emotional Catholic will not be able to stand the gaff. Among Catholics, young and old, the most common complaint is that the tenets of their Faith are too obscure. It never seems to dawn on them that they themselves may be culpably thick. Most priests, I am certain, try to the best of their ability to explain Catholic doctrine in their sermons.

But, how many could repeat the substance of a Sunday's sermon a few hours afterwards? If St. Paul could say, 'Woe is unto me if I preach not the Gospel', he could also have said, 'Woe is unto you if you hear not the Gospel'.

I intend this sermon to be an introduction to a series on the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ. This doctrine is so old that it looks like new. The doctrine of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ was taught germinally by Our Lord when he said: 'I am the vine, you are the branches.' St. Paul in his inspired genius developed this doctrine as the Mystical Body of Christ. The Church is certainly more than what a large number of Catholics think it is. Many Catholics think that to go to Mass on Sunday, and to support with our financial aid the "machinery" that cares for the routine of saving souls are the outstanding activities wherein religion meets life. There are others who regard the Church as something outside of and apart from themselves, something which has a beneficial personal and social import, something which is a mere assembly united for one common purpose much in the order of a political party. Still, to others

the Church is an immense corporation, the chief executive is the Pope, under whom there are territorial executives called archbishops and Bishops. Under these, in turn, are the pastors who care for the parish, which is the unit of faithful Christians throughout the world.

All of these are erroneous ideas of the Church. Religion lies much deeper than that. Religion is of the spirit. This is as true of the Church as it is true of us individually. Each day as we go through life we meet hundreds of fellow men. What do we know of their spiritual life? We see only the exterior man. We are all quick to note the exterior manifestations of evil in our fellows. That anyone can see, but as for what lies behind them, the spiritual struggles, the reaching out to God, the toilsome endeavors to live the truth of Christ - we do not know them, we may even not want to know them.

Today let us begin our study of the religion of the spirit: the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ. It is my prayer in Mass

today this study will profit you as much as it will profit me personally. Let us study the Church for, by studying her we will know her, in knowing her we will love her, and in loving her we will practice the doctrines she teaches. Then it will not be necessary for us to weep with St. Augustine, when he found Christ in the Church after a dissolute life, wrote of the Church in his Confessions: 'Too late, have I known Thee, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new. Too late have I loved Thee.'