That is the Catholic autocosm at its loveliest, as seen by the poet of the Pilgrim Fathers when under the spell of translating Dante. And ’tis, indeed, no untrue vision of its ideal.
I saw an old statue of St. Zeno in his church at Verona, and the saint, who began life as a fisherman, appeared as proud of his fish pendent as of his crozier. Can one imagine a British bishop in a fishmonger’s apron? Even the Apostles are doubtless conceived at the Athenæum Club as a sort of Fishmongers’ Company, with an old hall and a ’scutcheon. For England combines with her distrust of High Church a ritual of High Life, which is the most meticulous and sacrosanct in the world.
Nor is there any record of a British bishop behaving like St. Zeno when the Emperor Gallienus gave him the crown from off his own head, and the saint requested permission to sell it for the benefit of the poor. True, British bishops are not in the habit of exorcising demons from the daughters of emperors, but neither are they in the habit of dividing their stipends among curates with large families.
St. Zeno, by the way, came from Mauretania, and St. Antony was not really of Padua, but of Portugal. ’Twas a free trade in saints. There was no protection against protectors. Virgil and Boëthius themselves enjoyed a Christian reputation. One does not wonder that even Buddha crept into the calendar by an inspired error. It is heartening to come on an altar in Verona to St. Remigio, “apostle of the generous nation of the French,” to find Lucca Cathedral given over to an Irish saint and honouring a Scotch king (“San Riccardo, Re di Scozia”), and to read of King Canute treating with Pope John and Emperor Conrad for free Alpine passes to Rome for English pilgrims. Universities too were really universal. The Angelic Doctor was equally at home in Naples, Paris, and Cologne.
What can be more nobly catholic than the prayer I found pasted outside Italian churches: “My God, I offer Thee all the masses which are being celebrated to-day in all the world for the sinners who are in agony and who must die to-day. May the most precious Blood of Jesus the Redeemer obtain for them mercy!” True, the poetry of this prayer is rather marred by the precise information that “every day in the universe about 140,000 persons die: 97 every minute, 51 millions every year,” but not so grossly as by the indulgences accorded to the utterers. Why must this fine altruism be thus tainted? But alas! Catholicism perpetually appears the caricature of a great concept. Take for another example the methods of canonisation, by which he or she who dies “in the odour of piety” may pass, in the course of centuries, from the degree of venerable servant of God to the apogee of blessed saintship. What can be grander than this notion of taking all time as all earth for the Church’s province? Yet consider the final test. The great souls she has produced must work two posthumous miracles, forsooth, before they can be esteemed saints. By what a perversion of the spiritual is it that holiness has come to be on a par with pills! Surely a true Church Universal should canonise for goodness of life, not for mortuary miracles. Joan of Arc, who must wait nigh five hundred years for saintship—did not the miracle of her life outweigh any possible prowess of her relics?