This law also holds good and is applicable to her visible head, the supreme pastor of the faithful. The pope, as pope, was no less the father of the faithful and exercised his jurisdiction when driven into the Catacombs, or violently taken by a despot and imprisoned at Fontainebleau, or, as at present, forced by the action of a desperate faction of Italians into retirement in the Vatican, than when his independence and authority were recognized and sustained by the armies of the Emperor Constantine or defended by the sword of Charlemagne, the crowned emperor of Christendom.
“The pope,” to adopt the words of Pius IX., “will always be the pope, no matter where he may be, in his state as he was, to-day in the Vatican, perhaps one day in prison.”
The perpetuity of the Catholic Church is placed above and beyond all dangers from any human or Satanic conspiracies or attacks in that Divinity which is inherently incorporated with her existence, and in that invincible strength of conviction which this divine Presence imparts to the souls of all her faithful children. It is this indwelling divine Presence of the Holy Spirit from the day of Pentecost which teaches and governs in her hierarchy, is communicated sacramentally to her members, and animates and pervades, in so far as not restricted by human defects, the whole church. Hawthorne caught a glimpse of this divine internal principle of life of the Catholic Church and embodied it in the following passage: “If there were,” he says, “but angels to work the Catholic Church instead of the very different class of engineers who now manage its cranks and safety-valves, the system would soon vindicate the dignity and holiness of its origin.”[2] This statement put in plain English would run thus: The Catholic Church is the church of God actualized upon earth so far as this is possible, human nature being what it is. The indwelling divine Presence is the key to the Catholic position, and they who cannot perceive and appreciate this, whatever may be their grasp of intellect or the extent of their knowledge, will find themselves baffled in attempting to explain her existence and history; their solution, whatever that may be, will tax the faculty of credulity of intelligent men beyond endurance; and at the end of all their efforts for her overthrow these words from her Founder will always stare them in the face: “Non prævalebunt”—“the gates of hell shall not prevail against her.” If this language be not understood, perhaps it may be in its poetical translation: