COLLECT:
Deus, cuius gratia iusti ex impiis
et beati efficiamur ex miseris,
adesto operibus tuis, adesto muneribus,
ut quibus inest fidei iustificatio
non desit perseverantiae fortitudo.
This prayer was not in pre-Conciliar editions of the Missale Romanum. It had a precedent in the Sacramentarium Bergomense. There are elegant parallels here as well as snappy rhythmic phrases. This is a delight to pronounce.
SUPER LITERAL VERSION:
O God, by whose grace we are made
just people out of impious and happy people out of wretches,
be present with Your works, be present with gifts,
so that the fortitude of perseverance will not be lacking
to those in whom there is the justification of faith.
SMOOTHER VERSION:
O God, by whose grace we are made
into just people after having been impious and blessedly happy after being miserable,
be present to us now with your works, be present with Your gifts,
so that the strength of perseverance will not be lacking
to those in whom there is the justification of faith.
God, who created the universe and everything in it out of nothing, makes justified people out of the wicked and the sinner. He makes those who are wretched and miserable into joyous children of God.
One of the things that popped into my mind as I translated this prayer today was the verse of the awful Amazing Grace. "Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound) / That saved a wretch like me!" The idea is that we are wretches before and remain always wretches, "wretch" being a description of our totally corrupt nature which remains corrupt even after baptism.
Catchy tune, of course, but that is not Catholic teaching.
Let’s have some catechism.
In the Fall of our First Parents the whole human race contracted original sin and our human nature was wounded. On our own we are incapable of repairing the damage, for it is simply disproportionate to man’s powers to do so. The one who is both man and God, however, was proportioned to this work and He repaired the breech. When we are incorporated into His Person, we benefit from the merits of the Sacrifice He made on our behalf. The way we are integrated into Him is, fundamentally, the sacrament of baptism.
In the sacrament of baptism we are at once both justified and sanctified. We are justified in the sense that the debt we owed on account of our sins (including Original Sin). God cleanses us of the guilt of those sins and we are just in His sight. At the same time, we are also made holy by the indwelling of the Trinity. We are cleansed and made pleasing at the same time. Classical protestant teaching says that baptism justifies but we still remain filthy in our nature. We are justified but not sanctified. We remain interiorly corrupt
no matter what we do, but Christ interposes Himself between us and the Father so that we appear to be clean even though we are not. This is not Catholic teaching, of course. For Catholics sanctification and justification are two sides of the same coin.
Spinning this out a little more, as an example I recall from Lutheran doctrine that a justified person remains forever a sinner because of concupiscence, which is not removed by baptism. Concupiscence describes the disordered desires and difficulty we have in controling our appetites we have because of the wounds to our will and intellect. The baptized person is described by Lutherans as simul justus et peccator … righteous and sinner at the same time.
On the other hand Catholics know that concupiscence is not in itself a sin. Justification in baptism removes sin but not concupiscence. Lutherans think concupiscense itself is sin. Thus, they separate justification and sanctification from each other. For them, concupiscence itself makes people sinners. Concupiscence makes us guilty before God and it is never removed from us. This was and is contrary to Catholic teaching. The Council of Trent correctly taught that justification makes us righteous. It condemned with an anathema the error that justification is only an "imputation" of Christ’s righteousness (which is at the heart of the Lutheran description of man as a heap of dung covered over with white snow). Trent also condemned with an anathema the claim that concupiscence itself is sin.
We have been given great gifts by God, including sanctification. Christ’s merits become our merits. What we need to do is persevere in sanctity to the end of our lives. It is difficult, this life of grace and sanctity, but it is possible. This is part of what the late Pope was trying to show the world through the great emphasis he placed on beatifications and canonizations.
