The Holy Scandal: the Church's Members

Photo by JOHN TOWNER on Unsplash

This is the first of two posts on the meaning of the holiness of the Church. The first post will deal with the equation of the holiness of the Church with the holiness of its members. The second will deal with equating holiness with the untoucbability 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.

In my fundamental theology course with the seminarians, I covered the four marks of the Church as stated in the Nicene Creed: The Church is one, holy, catholic and apostolic.

Having gone through the oneness, catholicity and apostolicity of the Church, we turned to the question of the holiness of the Church, and what that holiness meant. On the face of it, one might be forgiven for believing two things about the holiness of the Church, the first is that holiness pertains to the holiness of the Church’s members, while the second pertains to equating holiness with an untouchability by sin and, with it, the drive to weed out all manner of imperfection. Each of these will be addressed in this week’s blog post and the next.

To both of these, we looked to a passage from Joseph Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity. What is striking to the reader is the way in which Ratzinger, rather than begin with waxing lyrical about the beauty of holiness, begins first by articulating a problem: does what we profess in the creed square up with our experience?

Even more striking, Ratzinger went on to give this problem a much wider scope and severity than those in polite company might be afraid to afford it. Ratzinger goes on to say

Nevertheless let us speak out and say plainly what worries us today at this point in the Creed. We are tempted to say, if we are honest with ourselves, that the Church is neither holy nor Catholic: the Second Vatican Council itself ventured to the point of speaking no longer merely of the holy Church but of a sinful Church…The centuries of the Church’s history are so filled with human failure that we can quite understand Dante’s ghastly vision of the Babylonian whore sitting in the Church’s chariot; and the dreadful words of William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris in the thirteenth century, seem perfectly comprehensible. William said that the barbarism of the Church must make everyone who saw it go rigid with horror: ‘Bride is she no more, but a monster of frightful ugliness and ferocity’ (262).

Ratzinger thereby paints the grimmest picture possible to articulate the problematique, and crowns it with the remark that

…for many people today the Church has become the main obstacle to belief. They can no longer see in it anything but the human struggle for power, the petty spectacle of those who, with their claim to administer official Christianity, seen to stand most in the way of the true spirit of Christianity (263).

Given the scale of the problem, is there then no response?

What Ratzinger seems to be doing is to adopt a via negativa, highlighting the extent of human depravity within the Church as a way of demonstrating that the holiness of the Church is not to be equated with the holiness of its members.

We pray and hope that those in the Church will take up Jesus’ call to “be holy as your heavenly Father is holy” (Mt 5:48). However, that manner of holiness is not what we refer to when we profess of the holiness of the holy Catholic Church in the Apostle’s Creed, nor does the truth of that profession depend on the holiness of the Church’s members.

Instead, Ratzinger states this quite plainly: “The Church is not called ‘holy’ in the Creed because of its members, collectively and individually, are holy” (263). Indeed, he goes on to say that to make such a link is a dream, unattainable in this life.

We must be careful to observe a nuance, however, for Ratzinger calls this a dream that “appears fresh in every century…[and] may express a human longing which man will never abandon until a new heaven and a new earth really grant him what this age will never give him” (263).

What this suggests is that even though making a link may be a dream, it is nevertheless based upon a legitimate and undying longing. It may only be fulfilled at the eschaton, where the new heaven and new earth resides, but we must be careful not to snuff out this longing.

Having parsed out the holiness of the Church’s members, Ratzinger goes on to speak of the basis of that holiness. What the holiness of the Church consists in, he says, is “that power of sanctification which God exerts in it in spite of human sinfulness…granted by God as grace which abides even in the face of man’s faithlessness” (263).

The holiness of the Church which we profess, therefore, is “the expression of God’s love, which will not let itself be defeated by man’s incapacity”.

What profess and celebrate, therefore, is the undying faithfulness of God, which is the proper object of our worship. However well intended, the equation of holiness to the members would be to make the members of the Church the object of our belief, celebration, and yes, worship.

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