perfection is to be and to do what is perfect in the personal and priestly life in piety, humility, charity, self-denial. To exercise is to elicit, to exert, to effect. It is a word of power and energy, of self-command and inward force issuing in outward results.
Schoolmen have disputed whether a priest, who is himself imperfect, could exercise perfection. It is, indeed, an axiom: Extra statum perfectionis perfecti multi, intra statum perfectionis multi imperfecti. But S. Augustine says, Nemo potest dare quod non habet.
If it be said that Judas preached the kingdom of God; that truth has its own vital power; that even mortal sin in the priest does not hinder the opus operatum—that is, the grace of the Sacraments; that any priest may teach others to be humble, charitable, pure, and pious; that if the ground be good and the seed good, no matter what be the hand that sows it—all this may be true—the love and compassion of our Lord for souls will not suffer the faithful to be defrauded by bad priests, or even by imperfect priests who have entered the priesthood without the interior spiritual perfection needed for ordination, or, having entered rightly, have afterwards lost it. All this may be true; but this is not exercere perfectionem.
