The
Miracle of Pentecost
This constant practice, this inviolable respect for the natural right of peoples, goes back even to the birth of the Church. When the divine Redeemer, after having satisfied the justice of his Father, had reopened to men the gates of our final homeland where the unique people of the Election will speak the unique tongue of Love without end, he sent the Consoler, the Paraclete, the Spirit of light and of truth, to “teach you all things.” The Spirit did not speak “of himself.” As if to raise up more the lowly of men, fallen but already redeemed by the blood of Christ and “reestablished in his original dignity,” He descended into the spirit of twelve ignorant men, he set their hearts on fire, lit up their intelligence, fortified their will. Their chief, the very one who had disowned their master before the hearth of a guardroom for fear of the mockeries of a servant, Simon the fisherman, now become Peter and the indisputable foundation of the Church of God, boldly speaks before a crowd still full of the fury, the fear, the contradictory passions which had marked the ignominious death of the Saviour. And the first pope and the first bishops worked the first miracle of the Spirit of God through his Catholic and Apostolic Church. Listen to the sacred text:
1. And when the days of the
Pentecost were accomplished, they were all together in one place:
2. And suddenly there came a
sound from heaven, as of a mighty wind coming, and it filled the whole house
where they were sitting.
3. And there appeared to them
parted tongues as it were of fire, and it sat upon every one of them:
4. And they were all filled
with the Holy Ghost, and they began to speak with divers tongues, according as the Holy Ghost gave them to speak.
5. Now there were dwelling at
Jerusalem, Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven.
6. And when this was noised
abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded in mind, because that
every man heard them speak in his own tongue.
7. And they were all amazed,
and wondered, saying: Behold, are not all these, that speak, Galileans?
8. And how have we heard, every man our own tongue wherein we were
born?
9. Parthians, and Medes, and
Elamites, and inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and
Asia,
10. Phrygia, and Pamphylia,
Egypt, and the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome,
11. Jews also, and proselytes,
Cretes, and Arabians: we have heard them speak in our own tongues the wonderful
works of God.[1]
Let us stop for a moment to study this
first intervention of the Holy Spirit in the Church of Jesus Christ. In actual
fact, it is double. Its first effect, is to instantaneously give to the
Apostles the knowledge and the use of “diverse tongues.” This is strictly
speaking the gift of tongues, which
shall come again, in the course of time, on the lips of many missionaries of
the Gospel. The second effect takes place in the hearing of the listeners.
These men of all nations who hear for the first time the Good News, understand it each
in his mother tongue, in the tongue of the country “where he was born,” whatever be the idiom used by the Apostles.
This phenomenon will repeat itself equally in the life of great converters of
peoples, like Saint Vincent Ferrier and Saint Francis Xavier. In neither the
one nor the other of these events did the Spirit of light and truth judge it
opportune to do what certain assimilators shall attempt later on: to impose on
people the knowledge of the tongue of the preachers, on minorities the idiom of
the majority. And yet this miracle would not have been more difficult than the
other two for the omnipotence of God. If He did not do it, it is then that He
judged that in this, as in all things, the Apostles of Christ ought to to make
themselves “all things to all men”; that the spreading of the Gospel, likewise
its moral code, likewise its dogma, does not abrogate the natural right of
humanity but affirms it and uses it in the service of truth.
On this day, the method of
evangelical preaching was established. Faithful to the example laid out by God
himself, the Apostles and their successors extend the kingdom of Jesus Christ,
announce everywhere the good news, open the eyes of the blind, make the deaf
hear, speaking to “each in the tongue wherein he was born.” Such is the task of
the Church, of her pastors, of her missionaries, of her preachers, of her catechists,
and not to make themselves agents of the assimilation of one race or another,
the unifyers of one empire, the propagandists of one particular or universal
democracy, the servants of despotic kings or the flatterers or tyrannical mobs.[2]
[2] Permit me to support this
reflection and many of those that follow, with the authority of the eminent
author of The Public Law of the Church, Msgr
L.-A. Paquet:
“Catholicism is universal.
“It is not its mission to
apply a ‘triage’ of languages nor a selection of peoples, but to use all
languages and to evanglise all peoples.
“Its ministers, by their very
nature, are neither constructors of empires nor champions of republics, but
sanctifiers and apostles.
“Christ, their model, did not
stretch out his bloody hands on the cross in order to distribute sceptres and
crowns to his favourite races; but to enfold all men in a single embrace and to
pour out to all races the bounties of his redemptive work.
“It is this higher law, in all
epochs, that has inspired all enlightened spirits and all men of God; and it is
this master idea, inscribed for the splendour of believing humanity, which
stamps the religious political order with its true character everywhere.
“Now, to accomplish the work
of redeeming mankind, two instruments among many others, are not only useful,
but as it were necessary: liturgical language, and national idiom.
“By the beautiful Latin
language, whose precise forms, like keys burnished all from old medallions,
establish and preserve her dogmatic thought, the Church conserves intact, in
the spheres of science, doctrine, and rites, her unchanging creed.
“By the mother tongue, she lovingly
descends from these heights, and she enteres into relationship and into
cnoversation with the masses. There is the secret of her prestige, of her
influence, and of her success.”
(Discourse given at the
Congress of the French Language in 1912, and reproduced in Discourses and Allocutions by Msgr L.-A. Paquet, Quebec, Imprimerie
Franciscaine, 1915).
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