A Reflection for the Vigil of the Ascension, on the Commemoration of St. Robert Bellarmine
“Ascending on high, he led captivity captive; he gave gifts to men.” — Eph. 4:8
On this Vigil of the Ascension, while the Church still keeps her gaze on the Risen Christ before lifting it heavenward tomorrow, the sacred liturgy joins to the day’s prayer the memory of St. Robert Bellarmine, Bishop, Confessor, and Doctor of the Church. There is a quiet providence in this conjunction. Bellarmine, the great expositor of the visible Church and her unity, is commemorated on the very threshold of the feast that defines the Church’s whole earthly condition: she is the Body of a Head who has departed from sight, and who reigns now in glory.
Two passages of the inspired Word draw us into this mystery — St. Paul to the Ephesians (4:7-13) and Our Lord’s High Priestly Prayer (Jn. 17:1-11). Together they open before us the inner logic of the Ascension: a departure that is also a giving, a hiddenness that is also a fullness, a prayer to the Father that becomes the perpetual intercession of the Risen and Glorified Christ.
I. “Ascendens in altum, captivam duxit captivitatem”
St. Paul takes up the words of Psalm 67 and applies them to Christ: “Ascending on high, he led captivity captive; he gave gifts to men.” The Apostle then pauses, as though astonished by the depth of what he has just said, and adds: “Now that he ascended, what is it, but because he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.”
Here is the great paradox of the Ascension — that Christ departs in order to fill. St. Leo the Great, in his sermons on the Ascension, expresses it with imperishable beauty:
“Quod Redemptoris nostri conspicuum fuit, in sacramenta transivit” — What was visible of our Redeemer has passed over into the sacraments (Serm. 74, De Ascensione II).
He no longer walks the dust of Galilee; He reigns at the right hand of the Father. But for that very reason He is now more present, not less — present in the sacred Mysteries, present in His Church, present “where two or three are gathered” in His name. The Ascension is not a withdrawal of grace but its diffusion. St. Gregory the Great, in his Ascension homily (Hom. in Evang. 29), teaches that the disciples were not made sorrowful by the Lord’s going, but glad, because the parting of the flesh was the opening of a greater nearness in the Spirit.
And lest we mistake this fullness for something abstract, St. Paul tells us how it is dispensed: “He gave some apostles, and some prophets, and other some evangelists, and other some pastors and doctors, for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” The ascended Christ pours forth His gifts in the hierarchical structure of His Church. The episcopate, the priesthood, the sacred teaching office — these are not human contrivances grafted onto a spiritual movement; they are the very gifts of the Ascending King.
St. John Chrysostom, preaching on this passage (Hom. in Eph. 11), marvels that the diversity of offices is given for the unity of the body — that distinction in ministry exists for the sake of communion. The Church is not levelled into a formless mass, nor splintered into rival sects; she is ordered as a body, with members each bearing their gift “according to the measure of the giving of Christ.”
It is here that the figure of St. Robert Bellarmine rises to meet the text. The great Doctor, writing in an age when the visible Church was being torn by the revolt of the sixteenth century, drew from this very passage and others like it the unshakable conclusion that the Church which Christ founded is visible, hierarchical, and one. His celebrated definition in De Ecclesia Militante — that the Church is the assembly of men joined by profession of the same Christian faith and communion in the same sacraments, under the governance of the lawful pastors and chiefly the one Vicar of Christ on earth — is nothing less than a faithful gloss on Ephesians 4. He did not invent the doctrine; he transmitted it. And in doing so he handed on what the Fathers themselves had taught: that the Body of Christ has a structure, because the Head Himself has willed it.
II. “Pater, venit hora” — The High Priestly Prayer
If Ephesians shows us the ascended Christ as the Giver, the seventeenth chapter of St. John shows us the ascending Christ as the Intercessor. The Lord lifts up His eyes to heaven on the eve of His Passion, but the prayer He utters there is the very prayer He continues to offer eternally before the Face of the Father. “Father, the hour is come, glorify thy Son, that thy Son may glorify thee.”
St. Augustine, in his Tractates on the Gospel of John (Tract. 104-105), insists that we must read this prayer with the right ear. Christ does not pray as one in need of glory He does not yet possess — for, as He Himself declares, “glorify thou me, O Father, with thyself, with the glory which I had, before the world was, with thee.” He prays rather as one who, in His sacred humanity, opens to us the everlasting communion of the Holy Trinity. The Doctor of Hippo notes that the Son’s prayer is the revelation of the Son’s divinity: that He should ask glory equal to and identical with the Father’s own pre-existent glory is the speech of one who is consubstantial.
And the prayer reaches its summit not in the petition for His own glorification, but in the petition for His own: “Holy Father, keep them in thy name whom thou hast given me; that they may be one, as we also are.” Here, on the eve of His Ascension, we hear what the Ascended Christ unceasingly asks of the Father: unity — and a unity patterned after the unity of the Divine Persons themselves.
This is the prayer that thunders against every schism, every heresy, every faction. St. Cyril of Alexandria, commenting on this verse (In Joann. XI), teaches that the unity Christ asks for is not a merely moral concord but a true, ontological participation in the divine life, mediated through the sacraments and crowned by charity. The Church is one because she is the Body of the One Christ, animated by the One Spirit, professing the One faith.
We see at once why this Gospel is set before us on the Vigil of the Ascension. As Our Lord prepares to depart in His visible humanity, He bequeaths to His Father the unity of His own. He does not leave them orphans. He does not leave them without prayer. He does not leave them without one another.
And again the figure of Bellarmine stands not far away. The whole labor of his Controversies was, in a sense, an extended meditation on John 17:11. He saw with terrible clarity that to lose the visible unity of the Church is to render the Lord’s Prayer apparently unanswered — and this he would not concede. The Father heard the Son. The unity exists. The Church endures, one and visible, ut sint unum — that they may be one.
III. The Two Texts Together
Place these passages side by side, and the structure of the Ascension mystery becomes plain.
In John 17, Christ ascends in prayer to the Father, asking that His own be kept in unity.
In Ephesians 4, the answer to that prayer is given: the ascended Christ dispenses His gifts, establishes the offices of His Church, and Himself becomes the principle of her unity — “until we all meet into the unity of faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the age of the fulness of Christ.”
The Gospel is the petition; the Epistle is the gift. The Gospel is the High Priest entering the Holy of Holies; the Epistle is the priestly blessing poured back upon the people. The Gospel is the Head turning toward the Father; the Epistle is the life of the Head flowing into the members.
St. Thomas Aquinas, with his accustomed precision (cf. Summa Theol. III, q. 57), teaches that the Ascension was fitting for four reasons: it prepared a place for us; it gave us confidence that our nature is exalted to the Father’s right hand; it directed our love and faith to heavenly things; and it merited for us the sending of the Holy Ghost and the outpouring of gifts. All four converge upon the truth that the Ascension is for us — propter nos et propter nostram salutem, even in its glory.
IV. A Word from the Doctor We Commemorate
It is fitting to close with the voice of the saint whose memory the Vigil graces. St. Robert Bellarmine, whose immense learning never severed itself from a deep and tender piety, wrote in his little treatise De Ascensione Domini (in De Septem Verbis and the Conciones) that the believer should ascend with Christ in mind and heart even while the feet remain upon the earth. The Christian’s true homeland, he insisted, is not here; and the labor of this life is to make our hidden citizenship more and more real, that when at last we are summoned, we may not be strangers to the country we have professed.
He himself died holding the Crucifix and the image of his Lord, having spent his life in the defense of His Church. He had done as he taught: he had ascended already in spirit, long before the body followed.
V. Practical Application
The Ascension is not a feast to be observed and then set aside. It is a permanent orientation of the Christian life. Let three practices be drawn from this reflection:
First, lift up the heart. The very name of the Mass’s great preface — Sursum corda — is an Ascension command. At every Holy Sacrifice we are summoned upward, where our High Priest now stands before the Father on our behalf. Live the day with the heart already lifted.
Second, love the visible Church. Bellarmine’s whole labor is wasted on us if we treat the Church as a sentiment rather than a Body. Honor her hierarchy. Receive her sacraments. Submit to her doctrine. “He gave pastors and doctors” — these are gifts of the Ascended Christ, not impositions.
Third, pray for unity. Make the Lord’s own prayer your own. “Ut sint unum” — that they may be one. Pray it for the Church visible, for the conversion of those outside her, for the healing of the wounds within her. To pray this is to pray with the Heart of the Ascended Christ.
A Prayer for the Vigil
O Lord Jesus Christ, who on this day didst prepare to ascend to the right hand of the Father, lifting up our nature with Thee into the heavenly glory: grant that we who confess Thy Ascension may dwell with Thee in mind and heart, kept in the unity for which Thou didst pray, and edified by the gifts which Thou hast given to Thy Church. Through the intercession of St. Robert Bellarmine, faithful Doctor of Thy Body, may we be confirmed in the truth and persevere unto that perfect man, unto the measure of the age of the fulness of Thy grace. Who livest and reignest with the Father, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, world without end. Amen.
If this reflection draws you to deeper study, the Sacred Liturgy learning path traces the Ascension and its proper Mass with care, while the Theology and Doctrine path opens the great Bellarmine and his fellow Doctors on the nature of the Church. The contemplative may find rest in the Spiritual Practices and Devotions path, particularly the meditations of the Glorious Mysteries.
Vigilia Ascensionis Domini — Commemoratio S. Roberti Bellarmino, Ep. Conf. et Eccl. Doct.