Weekday

THE SPIRIT OF THE APOSTOLIC CHURCH
By Dom Damasus Winzen 4
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The fact that the Church is rather a gift of the Spirit than the fruit of human endeavor…makes the Acts of the Apostles of vital importance to the Christians of all ages. We people of the “century of progress” do not look into the past to find there the pattern for the future. Accustomed as we are to think in terms of progress, any beginnings bear to us the mark of imperfection. The life of the Church, however, is not ruled by the laws of human progress. Not being built up from the ground, but descending from above, the growth of the Church is like that of a seed, the gradual unfolding of a fundamental structure which is wholly present already in the initial stage.

The risen Christ is the “seed” out of which the Church grows as an overflow of his abundance. From Christ the Church receives the divine life in the vessel of the sacraments, to be administered, not to be produced. From Christ she receives the full light of revelation as an unalterable deposit, to be handed down, not to be invented. The risen Christ sends to his Church the fullness of the Holy Spirit so that St Peter can truly state, on the very day when the Church is born, that this outpouring of the Spirit is the fulfillment of an event which, as Joel had announced, would come about “in the last days”.

The apostolic Church is the Church of “the first love”. The apostles who govern her are endowed with a fullness of grace never to be given to any of their successors. The Church is built, once and forever, upon “the foundation of the apostles”. For this reason the history of the Church is to a large extent the history of “reformations”. Again and again the Church has returned to the apostolic pattern.

To restore the spirit of the apostolic Church in its original purity and zeal was the avowed purpose of all the great saints and reformers. The Rule of St Benedict is nothing but an attempt to reestablish the ideal apostolic Church within the confines of a monastery. St Francis, St Dominic, St Ignatius and the great number of their followers received the inspiration for their Orders from the Acts of the Apostles. The apostolic Church remains a model for our times too; not that we want to turn back the wheel of history and copy the external forms of a past age, which is impossible, but because we realize that the waters of the Holy Spirit are nowhere as pure as at their source.

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Damasus Winzen, Pathways in Scripture, Ann Arbor, MI: Word of Life, 1976, pp. 280-81.