Ave Maria Meditations
The Holy Ghost was to be to the Church what our Lord had been to His disciples while He was upon the earth. Nay, incredible as it seems, He was to be more. He was to be so much more that it was to be expedient for them that Jesus should go away, in order that the Holy Ghost might come. He wants to be our Lord’s successor, so to speak…
The office of the Holy Ghost was to protract our Lord’s sojourn upon earth. Under Him the disciples were to do greater miracles then even their Lord had done. The hierarchy, the Sacraments, the preaching of the Cross, the miraculous gifts, the empire of grace, all these things were to be developed in the Church under the personal ministry and reign of the Third Person of the undivided Trinity, God the Holy Ghost.
What the tabernacle is to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, that the Church is to the Holy Ghost: only that the Church is a living tabernacle in mortal souls, not of metal, or of marble, or wood…(The Holy Ghost): His powers, His gifts, His operations, His energies, His presence, inform everything in and about the Church. So that he who speaks against the Church speaks against the Holy Ghost! We are saying that devotion to the Holy Ghost implies and contains in a very special way a devotion to the Church. We read that the sin against the Holy Ghost is to be the great sin of the last age of the Church…
This warning must have been practical to all times and to all souls, because our blessed Savior gave it…The indefectibility of the Church is from the Holy Ghost. It cannot fail. It is not in its power to die. Heresies cannot corrode it. Persecutions cannot waste it…the indefectibility of the Church is the standing miracle of history.
+Fr. Frederick Faber, D.D.
