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The True Meaning of Easter
BY PLINIO CORRÊA DE OLIVEIRA
The Resurrection represents the eternal and definitive triumph of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the complete defeat of His adversaries, and the supreme argument of our faith. Saint Paul said that our faith would be in vain if Christ had not resurrected. The whole edifice of our beliefs is founded on the supernatural fact of the Resurrection. Let us then meditate on this highly elevated subject.
Christ Our Lord was not resurrected—He resurrected. He was dead. Lazarus was resurrected. Someone other than him, in this case, Our Lord, called him back to life. As for the Divine Redeemer, no one resurrected Him. He resurrected Himself, needing no one to call Him back to life. He took His life back when He so willed.
Everything said of Our Lord can be analogically applied to the Holy Catholic Church. In the Church’s history, we often see that precisely when She seemed irremediably lost, and all the symptoms of catastrophe seemed to undermine Her, events took place that kept Her alive against all the expectations of Her adversaries.
A curious fact is that sometimes the Church’s enemies come to Her aid rather than Her friends. For example, in a most sensitive period for Catholicism like Napoleon’s era, an extremely unusual episode occurred: a conclave convened for the election of Pius VII under the protection of Russian troops, all schismatic and under the command of a schismatic sovereign. In Russia itself, the practice of the Catholic religion was curbed in a thousand ways. Yet, in Italy, Russian troops ensured the free election of a Sovereign Pontiff precisely at the moment a vacancy in the See of Peter would have caused such grievous damages for Holy Mother Church that, humanly speaking, she might not have been able to overcome them.
Such are the marvelous means that Divine Providence employs to demonstrate that God has the supreme government of all things. However, let us not think that the Church owes Her salvation to Constantine, Charlemagne, John of Austria, or Russian troops. Even when She seems entirely abandoned and lacks the most indispensable natural resources for survival, let us be certain that Holy Mother Church will not die. Like Our Lord, She will rise with Her divine strength. And the more inexplicable the seeming resurrection of the Church may be from the human standpoint (we say seeming because, unlike Our Lord, the Church will never die a real death), the more glorious Her victory will be.
In these murky and sad days, let us thus confide. However, to restore all things in the Kingdom of Christ, let us confide not in this or that power, man, or ideological current but in Divine Providence, which will once again force the sea to open wide, move mountains, and cause the whole earth to tremble if necessary to fulfill the divine promise: “The gates of Hell shall not prevail against Her.”
Hence, even amid the sadness of the contemporary world, Holy Church uses the vibrant and most chaste joys of Easter to highlight the triumphal certainty that God is the Supreme Lord of all things, that His Christ is the King of Glory Who overcame death and crushed the devil, that His Church is the Queen of Immense Majesty, capable of rising again from amid the ruins, dissipating all darkness, and shining with an even more glorious triumph precisely when the most terrible and most irremediable defeat seems to await her.
The regularity with which the various cycles of the liturgical year succeed one another in the Church’s calendar is truly an affirmation of the celestial majesty of the Church. She remains undisturbed no matter how much the events of human history change around Her and despite the ups and downs of politics and finances as they continue their disorderly race, for She is above the caprices of human passions.
She is above, yet not indifferent to them. When the sorrowful days of Holy Week are commemorated during times of tranquility and happiness, the Church, like a solicitous mother, seeks to revive in her children a spirit of abnegation, a sense of heroic suffering, a spirit of renunciation of the triviality of everyday life, a total devotion to ideals that give life a higher meaning. Better than a “higher meaning,” these ideals give life the only meaning there is, the Christian one.
But the Church is not a mother just when She teaches us the great and austere mission of suffering. She is also a mother when pain and annihilation have reached an extreme. She lets the light of Christian hope shine before our eyes, opening unto us the serene horizons that the virtue of confidence places before all true children of God.
The joy and sorrow of the soul are a necessary result of love. When man has what he loves, he is joyful. When the object of his love is missing, he becomes sad.
Today, men place all their love on superficial things. That is why they only become emotional about superficial things—above all, personal misfortunes such as poor health, uncertain finances, ungrateful friends, the promotion that never comes, and so on. All these are secondary for the faithful Catholic who cares above all for the greater glory of God, the salvation of his soul, and the exaltation of Holy Mother Church.
A Catholic’s greatest suffering should be seeing the Church in Her current condition. There are many reasons for sadness, some of which point to a not-so-distant catastrophe. However, Christian hope continues. The Easter celebration itself teaches us this reason for hope.
When Our Lord Jesus Christ died, the Jews sealed His tomb and had soldiers placed to guard it. They thought the whole episode was over. In their wickedness, they had denied that Our Lord was the Son of God. They did not want to admit He could destroy the prison sepulcher in which He lay and, above all, rise from the dead. Yet all this happened. Our Lord resurrected Himself without any human assistance, and by His orders, the heavy sepulchral stone was effortlessly and quickly removed, as if it was a cloud. He resurrected.
Likewise, the immortal Church may appear abandoned, sullied, and persecuted. She may lie under the sepulchral weight of the heaviest trials and appear defeated. But She has within Herself a supernatural and interior strength, which comes from God, and that assures Her a victory as splendid as it is unlikely.
That is the great lesson of Easter. It is the great consolation of upright souls who love God’s Church: Christ died and rose again. The immortal Church rises from Her trials, glorious like Christ, in the radiant dawn of His Resurrection. ■
The preceding combined articles were originally published in O Legionário on April 25, 1943 and April 1, 1945. They have been translated and adapted for publication without the author’s revision. –Ed.
