Comforter of the Afflicted and the Refuge of Sinners

Venerable Fulton Sheen+, The Mystical Body of Christ

Our Lord did not make His earthly life one prolonged transfiguration. In those few, brief moments He did reveal the glory which was really His, but at all other times He appealed through the humanity which was like unto ours. His fatigue at Jacob's well, His tears over Jerusalem, His agony in the garden, His sufferings on the Cross - all the "weakness" of His human nature - have won more souls to Him than the blazing garments and the Heavenly Voice of Thabor.

In like manner, if the life of the Church had been one triumphant, blazing transfiguration on a mountain top, apart from the woes and ills of man, she would never have been the Comforter of the Afflicted and the Refuge of Sinners. She has been called, like her Divine Head, to be a redemptress, lifting men from the shadows of sin to the tabernacles of grace where Saints are made. She is not a far-off, abstract ideal, but a Mother; and though she has been stained with dust in her long journey through the centuries, though some of her children have left her and saddened her soul, yet there is joy in her heart because of the children she has nourished; there is gladness in her eyes because of the faith she has preserved; there is understanding in her soul for she has known the frailty of our flesh, and how to nourish us back to life. And in these qualities one divines the reason why Our Blessed Lord chose, not a sinless man like John, but a weak, frail, fallen man like Peter as His first vicar, in order that, through his weakness, he and the Church of which he is the head might sympathize with the weakness of his brethren, be their Apostle of Mercy and, in the truest sense of the term, the Vicar of the Saviour and Redeemer of the world who came not to save the just, but the sinner.