The present code of canon law makes no mention of hermits. However, it would be wrong to interpret this silence as a condemnation. At the time when the code was compiled, indeed practically since the French Revolution, the solitary life had all but disappeared from the western Church. Those few who followed it, if there were any at all, did not justify any particular legislation. The Church had no intention of making laws for a manner of religious life that no longer existed and, from all appearances, no one had any intention of reviving.

But contrary to all one would have thought, since the last war the eremetical life has again come into favour. In many places but especially in the monastic orders rather clear tendencies and desires have arisen for this ancient form of asceticism and for this way of giving oneself to God. And some of these aspirations have been realized with an admirable simplicity and seriousness.

Today's gospel reading, dearly beloved, as it reaches our ears and strikes on the hearing of our minds, calls upon us to understand a great mystery. And with God's help we shall the more easily achieve this if we turn our attention to what is related shortly before. Jesus Christ, the saviour of the human race, before he instituted that faith which brings back sinners to righteousness and the dead to life, surrounded his disciples with prophetic instruction and with mighty works, so that they should believe that one and the same Christ was both the only-begotten of God, and son of man. For one of these without the other is of no profit for salvation. It is equally perilous, whether we believe that our Lord Jesus Christ is God and not man, or man and not God. “We must confess both, for just as true humanity is united in him to divinity, so is true divinity united to humanity.