Three gently smiling cherubs look up from its base, their sweet faces contrasting with the regular grid pattern on which they are set. Delicate and lively organic swirls and figures alternate with classical, architectural details of precise proportion up the stem that opens into the floreate surround of the smooth, simple silver cup that is lightly gilded within. None of its perfection is machined, but rather all is fashioned and finished by human hands, two of them, using the simple tools and elaborate techniques proper to the silversmith.
This silver chalice Monsignor Stricker owned came to me roundabout by way of a priest to whom he had given it decades ago. The man who restored it for me told me it was over two centuries old, and bench-made in France. Though I have used it occasionally here in the church, you have most likely not noticed it was different from any other chalice. It is beautiful, but that is not why I draw it to your attention.
France in the early nineteenth century was reeling from a decades-long effort to eradicate the Faith and the Church that had begun with the revolution in 1789. After that led, logically of course, to the Terror, a Corsican Corporal rose to the top of the savage heap and commenced to demolish the civil order of all Europe. He sacked the Vatican and abducted the Pope, and asserted himself Emperor of it all. Predictably, priests and bishops behaved badly, many of them abandoning their posts or even signing on to the new Cult of Reason or the suborned patriotic “church.” Faith, morals, sacraments – those were all so “passé”; the New Order was the future. Many faithful clerics fled for their lives, some to the fledgling United States. One of them became the third Archbishop of Baltimore. It may be because of this connection that the French chalice found its way to Baltimore, where it found its way to Father William Stricker, who grew up there. But that is not why I draw it to your attention.
What that chalice contains and conveys to me is the faith of one man far away and long ago, who poured his work and skill and time and resources into making a beautiful object of the highest quality that had no possible use or value whatsoever except to cup the Precious Blood of the Lord in the divine worship of the very Church that looked to him and many around him to be on the verge of being driven out of existence. Whether he sold it to a priest who was fleeing toward the promise of America, or sent it there in hopes of its finding altar and priest, he bestowed his handiwork on a future he had no material evidence would ever be.
For the past five centuries, a belligerent rationalism combined with persistent hubris has labored mightily to dismantle, dismember, or dilute the Faith and the Church whose charge it is to nurture and nourish. To make ourselves the deciders of what is good, to make ours the judgment of right and wrong, to assert the God’s Word is a lie is a ripe temptation always on a branch just high enough to congratulate ourselves for being able to reach it. While many of her gravest threats have come from without, the Church has never pretended that membership offered an exemption from this temptation.
Pope Pius VII, for five years a prisoner of Napoleon, is reputed to have told the little man: “You want to destroy the Church, but you will not succeed at what her priests and bishops for centuries have tried and failed.” He was prescient about the denouement of Bonaparte’s reach. It falls to us to pray that his observation about the efforts of her bishops and priest not be out of date. To us falls the obligation to cherish and preserve all the good that has been handed down to us. To us falls the burden of bearing with ridicule and insult from the avant-garde waving the flag of the future. Moreover, even when isolated, it falls to us to do the work, to fashion and craft both lives and objects that have no other possible use but to nourish and nurture a persevering and faithful Church.
Monsignor Smith
