“WE say, we, and the Catholic Church teaches, that God, by a free act of His love, has established a superior and transcendent bond between our nature and His; we say that a similar bond had not been necessary in itself, that it had not been commanded nor even formally demanded by any requirement of our being; it is due solely to the immense charity, to the gratuitous and excessive liberality of God towards His creature; we proclaim that the bond as a result of the divine will has become obligatory, irrefutably necessary; that it eminently subsists and that it will eternally subsist in Jesus Christ, God and Man altogether, divine and human nature always distinct, but irreversibly united by the Hypostatic Union; we add that the bond must be extended, according to divinely instituted proportions and means, to the whole race of which the Incarnate Word is the Head and that any moral being, be it individual and particular, or be it public and social, could not reject it or break it up, in all or in part, without falling short of its end, and consequently without mortally injuring itself and without incurring the wrath of the sovereign master of our destinies. Such is not only the doctrine, but the very substance of Christianity.[emphasis added]
….”We do not omit nor allow to be omitted, that which the great Apostle teaches, that Jesus Christ, after having descended from heaven, determined to fill up all things: ut impleret omnia. He did not act in His capacity as God, since this presence had always been there, but in His capacity as God and Man altogether. — In fact, Jesus Christ is thence present to all, upon earth, as well as in heaven; He filled up the world with His name, His law, His light and with His grace. Nothing is placed outside of His sphere of attraction or repulsion; no thing nor any person could remain totally foreign and indifferent to Him; He has been set as the corner-stone: building-block for some, stumbling-block and scandal for others, a stone that touches all. The history of humanity, the history of nations, the history of peace and of war, the history of the Church, above all, is not other than the life of Jesus filling up all things: ut impleret omnia.”
— Cardinal Pie (1815-1880), Bishop of Poitiers
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