1. With one and the same movement of soul, the phalangist believes "in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints". Because it is to the Church He founded, and to none other, that Jesus announced the sending of the Holy Spirit from the Father in order to continue His work and to extend it to the whole world throughout all centuries. This presence of the invisible Spirit of God in the visible Church – which is an object of faith – is clearly made known by the truly miraculous and tangible fruits of His unique power.
Just as no one can go to the Father except through the Son, outside of whom there is no salvation, so no one can be assured of being a disciple of Jesus Christ, if he does not belong to the Church He founded and to which He gave His Spirit. For, though it is true that the Holy Spirit blows where He wills and is prevented by no one, and though the infinite perfection of His divine nature is limited by nothing, yet, as the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, proceeding from the Father and the Son as from a single principle, He is – following the Incarnation – the very Spirit of Jesus, sent by Him to His friends to continue His work without division, distortion or rupture.
2. The phalangist, therefore, could not oppose the Spirit to the Church, for he recognises the Spirit in the Church as her divine soul, as He who has raised, protected and extended her influence at all times and in all places, and who for this reason has organised, hierarchised, strengthened, and sanctified her without measure, making of her the communion of saints, outside of which there is no salvation.
It is He who is the bond of love, in Christ, between brothers, living and dead. It is He who has made of all the redeemed a true social body with Christ as its head, a new humanity become the Son of God’s mystical bride, in the likeness of the Virgin Mary who was, before and beyond any other woman, the temple of the Holy Spirit, the Spouse of the Word, and the dearest daughter of the Heavenly Father.
The phalangist recalls these words of Saint Cyprian: "No one has God as his Father who has not the Church as his mother.’’
The phalangist initially encountered the Church as a mother who baptised, regenerated, and instructed him in the Mysteries. It is through her visible ministry of teaching, sanctification and direction that he has been made a son of God, a disciple of Christ, and the temple of the Holy Spirit. Through a gradual illumination he learns to see in the Church’s visible perfections the invisible perfections of the Holy Spirit Himself.
1. ONE is the Spirit, the Paraclete, in the perfect unity of a single divine person. And in the same way as the divine person of the Word makes the individual human nature He has chosen intimately His, so the Paraclete subsists as perfectly one in the multitude of faithful Christians to whom He gives Himself, gathering them into His unity and creating – as it were, with a single vital breath – this organic and mystical unity, which is the Church, from so many dispersed elements.
ONE and UNIQUE is the Church, hierarchical and fraternal, without totalitarian collectivism or anarchic individualism, by virtue of this divine, simple, simplifying, unifying and perfect soul given her by Christ – His Holy Spirit.
2. HOLY is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, with that holiness which belongs only to God – in whom there can be no shadow of evil – a holiness which shines with unmistakable brilliance in the Son. The mission of the Holy Spirit in the Church is, by an inexhaustible radiation of virtues and gifts, of goodness and glory, to the mystical members of the Church, to configure each and every one of them to the image and likeness of their Head, their "unique model", Jesus Christ.
HOLY and SANCTIFYING is the Church, which on an earth exposed to shadow and change is the reflection – the iridescent and diverse image, incomparable and marvellous – of the divine beauty and goodness, ceaselessly subsisting in new forms, a source of joy and beatitude for all her children.
3. CATHOLIC is the indefatigable Spirit, the soul of the Church, whose mission is to evangelise and christianise the nations, from one extremity of the world to the other, from the beginning to the very end of time. His power embraces all men and each man, in accordance with Christ’s infinite wisdom and the Father’s mysterious design to gather them all in the Church as one society – a society which though diverse, multiple and changing because of the variety of its members, is unified and harmoniously assembled by Him who fills it with His own beauty.
CATHOLIC is the Church which, through the Spirit that guides her, encompasses all the nations in her hope and her love – and that by right, by desire, and progressively in reality. In this way she responds to the confused aspirations of the human race to recover, seal, and celebrate its primordial unity, its fraternity of original justice and grace. For such is the fullness of the vocation of the Church, humanity redeemed. As the daughter of the Father, she makes her return to Him through His Son Jesus Christ in the unity of the Holy Spirit.
4. APOSTOLIC is the faithful Spirit, sent by the Father and the Son to continue the work of the Gospel. As the Spirit of prophecy, He had inspired, sanctified and guided the people of Israel right up to the time of Christ. As the Apostolic Spirit, it is He who infallibly inspired the preaching and the writings of Christ’s witnesses, the pillars of the Church, assisting them in establishing divine Christian institutions, and multiplying marvels and gifts of holiness, so that the holy election of this new people might be visible to everyone. Since then, throughout subsequent centuries, the Paraclete Spirit, ever faithful, has assisted the successors of the Apostles and assured the Church’s unbroken and homogeneous development down the ages, without novelty or distortion.
APOSTOLIC is the Church through the fidelity that the Holy Spirit imposes on her and preserves in her. She has lost none of her ancient riches and she defends the deposit of revelation from all distortion. She protects the people of God from every fall, from every irreparable disorder. What is more, she continually augments the treasures of wisdom, virtue, power and divine glory entrusted to her by her Spouse, whilst the number of the elect grows to the fullness fixed for it by the Father.
The phalangist embraces Christ and the Church with one and the same love; he refuses to make any division or opposition between them. To be Christian and to be Catholic is one and the same indivisible grace, not by the will of the flesh and and mere received conviction, nor by the will of man, but by God’s predestination and grace. And so in the light of the four perfections of the Holy Spirit revealed in the true Church, the phalangist will be able to discern, in and around him, in the world and in history, what is of God and Catholic and what is of the devil and of man’s sin, that he might follow the one and hate the other. But he will submit his judgement to the infallible discernment of the hierarchical Church.
1. The phalangist dreads and detests schism, which is a revolt against the divine and hierarchical authority of the Roman Church, a break in fraternal charity, which no reason can justify, for it flies in the face of the Church’s unity and catholicity, gifts of the Holy Spirit. Similarly, he abhors and flees from any innovation and distortion of the faith which, through a stubborn rebellion against the infallible magisterium, leads to heresy and wounds the Church’s holiness and apostolicity, gifts of the Holy Spirit.
2. The schisms and heresies of the past, together with those of our own tragic epoch, testify to the perfidy and criminal intentions of their instigators and, alas, to the blindness and perversion of the people who follow them. Left to their own solitary strength, these schisms and heresies fall back to the common level of human politics and ideologies, and their history thereafter is no more than a series of further malevolent divisions arising from the earlier dissidence and a welter of errors creating new heresies from the first one, all of which are mutually and fiercely exclusive.
The fruits of all this are detestable and a danger to the wellbeing of civilisation, for schisms and heresies convey too much in the way of passion, murder, pillaging of Church property, age-old hatred, abandonment of religious vows, and ambition, not to effect the regression of humanity into barbarism.
3. In accordance with the Church’s constant tradition, the phalangist, giving witness to his Catholic faith and docility, anathematises the heresiarchs and the instigators of schism, past and present, and will not allow that any merit should be invented for them to justify or excuse their rebellion against the Holy Spirit and the Church. On the contrary, he will abominate their memory and hold them to be the greatest wrongdoers of mankind. Such were Photius and Michael Cerularius; such were Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Henry VIII.
The phalangist aims to live and die as a son of the Holy Catholic Church, which is Roman.
1. Because he knows that he is – and wishes to be – the disciple of Christ by the grace of the Holy Spirit in the Church, the phalangist abominates private judgement and its supposed divine guarantee, individual illuminism, characteristic of the so-called reformed religion, which calls itself Christian, but is in fact merely Lutheran, Calvinist or Zwinglian, being but the reflection of the spirit of its founders. Nothing can "sadden the Holy Spirit" more than this claim of the individual to receive his own lights, commandments and inspiration outside of any submission to the hierarchical Church and without consideration for the apostolic traditions. By acting in this way, he makes the Holy Spirit the principle of division, rupture, and erosion, the agent of indefinite and insurmountable differences and contradictions!
Private judgement is not a particular heresy but the principle and fallacious justification for every possible heresy, because it replaces the teaching of divine revelation by the Church with an individual faith, which is then transfigured into supernatural intuition and personal illumination, reducing faith to the common level of human opinion and caprice.
2. The idea resulting therefrom, of an invisible spiritual Church, a Church exclusively made up of the pure and the elect, is equally perverse. It is the contradiction and ruin of the visible, hierarchical, historical Church founded by Jesus Christ. It idealistically transfigures the Church into some sublime reality, totally sacred and spiritual, free and charismatic, a perpetual marvel, the work of the Holy Spirit alone, but in reality it debases it to the level of purely human associations and collectivities, which survive only through self-interest, sectarian rivalry, the constraint of a jealous and despotic power, or simply through the soulless inertia of social habit or religious officialdom.
Every form of Protestantism, Pentecostalism and illuminism, is absolutely rejected by the phalangist as the "sin against the Holy Spirit" from which there is no return, for it is a major aberration from the faith. And that is why the Phalange distrusts any "charismatic" upsurge in the Church.
3. The phalangist combats Protestantism and denounces it as the principal corruptive agent of the Christian religion and as the destroyer of the Church and all civilised human community, since it hands Christians over to the modern Leviathans, to empires founded on the pride of thought, the power of money and the passions of the flesh.
1. If the phalangist is against all Protestant illuminism – recognised by its latent or declared hostility to ecclesiastical, hierarchical, and clerical authority – he nevertheless knows that the Holy Spirit is given to the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, in all her living members. Each member of the faithful receives the Spirit and the abundance of His gifts. Already through baptism the Christian is illumined from on high that he may believe in the Church, in her living Tradition and in the Sacred Scriptures, which she explains to him, so that he may recognise the Church as the manifestation of Jesus Christ and His Father and receive from her the life of the sacraments and every supernatural help.
2. But desiring to understand, to love and to assist even more, the phalangist wished to receive confirmation from the Church and, with this gift of the Holy Spirit, the necessary light and energy for a more dedicated commitment to the service of the Church and the service of his brethren. Thenceforth, he is not only a practising Catholic, seeking to gain sanctifying grace and eternal life, but an active Catholic in the communion of saints or… ecclesial co-responsibility, taking his part in the concerns, labours and perils of the Church militant.
3. The phalangist loves to rediscover this initial enthusiasm and to "rekindle the gift of God that is within him through the laying on of the hands" of the apostle, that is to say, of the bishop who confirmed him (2 Tim 1.6). Certain officially instituted sacramental rites, such as the priest’s blessing, signify this call to a new, deeper and more generous commitment, by virtue of the gift of the Spirit, for there is no function or "charism" that does not come from the Holy Spirit for the service of the Church. It is because they have forgotten this that too many Christians today regard the Holy Spirit as the "great unknown" and elude His inspirations.
4. From this awakening of the Holy Spirit within himself through the sacramental rites of the Church, the phalangist will find his constant sanctification; he will receive from this same Spirit his place in the great Church, as an organ endowed with precise and useful activities in the heart of the Catholic organism whose life is the Holy Spirit.