The Holy Scandal: Untouchability by Sin

Photo by Tolga Ulkan on Unsplash

This is the second of two posts on the meaning of the holiness of the Church. The first post dealt with the equation of the holiness of the Church with the holiness of its members. The second will deal with equating holiness with the untouchability by sin, which gives rise to the paradox of the Church. In each of these posts, reference will be made to Joseph Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity.

I am continuing the discussion I had in my fundamental theology course with the seminarians, which covered the holiness of the Church. My previous post looked at the basis of the Church’s holiness. In this post, I propose to look at the type of holiness we refer to.

While last week’s post referred to a tendency to equate holiness of the Church to the holiness of its members, this week’s post will look at the tendency to equate holiness with a perfection that strives to stamp out any sign of imperfection. In doing so, I wish to highlight the scandalous paradox that lies at the heart of the Church.

In defining the problem here, Ratzinger in his Introduction to Christianity spoke of a tendency to visualise holiness “as untouchability by sin and evil, as something unmixed with the latter” (264). This tendency, like the tendency to equate the Church’s holiness with the holiness of its members, is based on the fantasy of a world of black and white, and “a tendency to cut out and reject mercilessly the current form of the negative” (264).

Against this tendency, Ratzinger looked to Jesus of Nazareth, which the Christian tradition puts forward as the embodiment of holiness. In speaking of Christ’s holiness, Ratzinger notes that the source of the scandal surrounding Christ’s holiness was not his drive to remain unmixed with the unholy. Indeed, he says

The aspect of Christ’s holiness that upset his contemporaries was the complete absence of this condemnatory note - fire did not fall on the unworthy nor were the zealous allowed to pull up the weeds which they saw growing luxuriantly on all sides (264).

On the contrary, Ratzinger writes

This holiness expressed itself precisely as the mingling with the sinners whom Jesus drew into his vicinity; as mingling to the point where he himself was made ‘to be sin’ …complete community of faith with the lost (2 Cor 5:21; Gal 3:13).

Put another way, the holiness of Christ highlights a crucial paradox: the holiness of Christ is expressed precisely in his making contact with sin, becoming so laden with the world’s sin that “he who was without sin became sin on our behalf” (2 Cor 5:21).

This paradox of Christ should lay the foundation of understanding the Church - the body of Christ - as a paradox. In Ratzinger’s words, the Church is “simply the continuation of God’s deliberate plunge into human wretchedness”. He goes as far to say that the holiness of the Church which we profess is an “unholy holiness”, opposed to “man’s expectation of purity” (265). The holiness of the Church in the creeds, says Ratzinger, all but exhorts us to “not separation but union, not judgement but redeeming love” (265). This love “does not keep its distance in a sort of aristocratic untouchable purity but mixes with the dirt of the world, in order thus to overcome it” (265).

To conclude both these posts, Ratzinger alerts us that the Church being a society of the perfect is a distortion of what we profess in the Creed. On the contrary, in Ratzinger’s words, the Church’s holiness that we believe in is a

…holiness that radiates as the holiness of Christ from the midst of the Church’s sin. So to the faithful the paradoxical figure of the Church, in which the divine so often presents itself in such unworthy hands, which the divine is only ever present in the form of a “nevertheless”, is the sign of the ‘nevertheless’ of the ever greater love shown by God” (264)

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