Over there at my left hand, as I kneel, there is the confessional. What graces and consolations have come to sinners through the Sacrament of Penance only God's angels could tell me. I have myself experienced that comfort. If ever I sinned grievously, what would have become of me if there was no such sacrament? If ever I had an acute problem, what an ease to discuss it with a priest whose lips will never disclose it to another! What happiness to rise up after a good Confession and face life anew, certain that all my sins had fallen off my soul like a garment!
"The mercies of the Lord I will sing forever."
On my right I see the pulpit. It too has its message for my soul. I learn in the Catholic Church, and in the Catholic Church only, the full content of Christ's teaching, with nothing added or taken away, with His divine promise to preserve it immune till the end of the world. Perhaps I have listened to eloquent and famous preachers who drew the crowds and packed the largest churches; perhaps I have sat and heard the rather pitiful effort of a nervous priest who stumbled through his discourse with obvious difficulty, halting many times, leaving unfinished sentences, constantly referring to his notes.
But because I am a Catholic I am not unduly disturbed if in my priest in the pulpit I find lack of natural talent. Like Our Lord, every true priest will tell me: "My doctrine is not mine but His that sent me." Have I not had the experience that often a poorly delivered sermon has awakened compunction in a sinner's heart? Why is this except that Jesus Christ stands with His priest in the Catholic pulpit? The sacred task imposed on the priest is to be the faithful echo of his Master's voice.
"If the preacher," writes Saint John of the Cross, "is to profit his hearers and not be puffed up with empty joy and presumption, he must bear in mind that his function is more spiritual than vocal; for, though it depends on audible words, its power and efficacy are not in words, but in the spirit that utters them."
Let me sit and listen in a Catholic Church anywhere throughout the entire world and I am told the same identical doctrines. There is "one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, Who is over all the Church." I am equally at home in New York or Pekin or Dublin or Sydney. There is no contradiction, no difference; all of us are united in what we believe; all of us learn the same wherever we sit at the feet of a Catholic priest for instruction.
Assuredly it is in no spirit of arrogance that we remind ourselves of the glaring contrast outside the Catholic Church. A Protestant today may attend service in any one of three or four hundred churches and listen to as many preachers expounding as many contradictory teachings. To the Catholic it seems inconceivable that Our Lord could possibly allow men to flounder about in such hopeless confusion concerning questions that affect their eternal salvation so nearly. To the Catholic it seems evident that this babel of voices has arisen because men have gone away from the one living teacher to whom alone the divine Master gave the commission to preach in His name.
Not arrogance, Lord, but deep sorrow should be my reaction when I see how Your seamless garment has been rent. Not arrogance, but immense joy, Lord, that I know exactly what I believe, and why; that I have Your divine promise behind every dogma of my splendid gift of Catholic Faith.