What do we mean when we profess in the Creed that the Church is holy?
In the teaching of saints and teachers like Bernard of Clairvaux, the conviction that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic stands side by side with cries for reform, a willingness to challenge the sins and other failures of its members, including its leaders.
Contemporary theologians have reflected rather deeply on this question in light of Christian history. (It has also been a matter of public debate in the past decade–see, e.g., here and here.) As a theologian, Joseph Ratzinger (who, of course, became Pope Benedict XVI) said the following in his Introduction to Christianity (first published in 1968) (pp. 338-42):
[W]e shall simply make a brief attempt to discern the real nature of the stumbling block we encounter in pronouncing the formula about the “holy, catholic Church” and strive to understand the answer implied in the text of the Creed itself. … [L]et 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 the sinful Church, and the only reproach it incurred was that of still being far too timorous; so deeply aware are we all of the sinfulness of the Church. This may well be partly due to the Lutheran theology of sin and also to an assumption arising out of dogmatic prejudgments. But what makes this “dogmatic theology” so reasonable is its harmony with our own experience. The centuries of the Church’s history are so filled with all sorts of 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 had to make everyone who saw it go rigid with horror: “We are no longer dealing with a bride but with a monster of terrible deformity and ferocity” (emphasis added).
Ratzinger goes on to say something similar about the Church’s catholicity. How can one not question our profession of the Church’s catholicity when “the one garment of the Lord is torn between the disputing parties, the one Church is divided up into many Churches, every one of which claims more or less insistently to be alone in the right.” The Church can become not only a stumbling block but even “the main obstacle to belief,” with those outside and inside seeing in the Church nothing “but the human struggle for power, the petty spectacle of those who, with their claim to administer official Christianity, seem to stand most in the way of the true spirit of Christianity.”
Our tendency to worry, even hesitate, as we profess the Church’s catholicity and holiness is rooted in certain theological arguments–Ratzinger even alludes above to the Lutheran teaching of simul iustus et peccator (at the same time righteous and a sinner)–but primarily in our experience and our awareness of history.
But Ratzinger does not leave us here. Responding to what he calls a temptation will not be a matter for theory or for “mere reason.” His reply is that “ultimately one can only acknowledge why one can still love this Church in faith, why one still dares to recognize in the distorted features the countenance of the holy Church” (emphasis added). The Church is not called holy because of “the holiness of human persons.” Instead, when we call the Church holy we are primarily referring to “the divine gift that bestows holiness in the midst of human holiness.” This age that is passing away will never give us a gathering of holy, sinless human beings. Ratzinger tell us that the holiness of the Church “consists in that power of sanctification which God exerts in her in spite of human sinfulness.”
There is an emphasis here on what God is doing, what He is giving. Our sin and failure will not lead God to revoke His gifts that sanctify. This is the “real mark of the ‘New Covenant'”: “in Christ, God has bound himself to men, has let himself be bound by them. The New Covenant no longer rests on the reciprocal keeping of the agreement; it is granted by God as grace that abides even in the face of man’s faithlessness.” For Ratzinger, this work of sanctification by God is communicated by “an institution”–an institution that is “sanctified by him forever” and “in which the holiness of the Lord becomes present among men.” The statement that the Church is holy despite the sinfulness of its members–the frequent use of the word nevertheless after we talk about the holiness of Christ radiating “from the midst of the Church’s sin”–is, Ratzinger says, a sign to the faithful of “the ever greater love shown by God.”
Here is an especially clear statement of Ratzinger’s teaching here:
The thrilling interplay of God’s loyalty and man’s disloyalty that characterizes the structure of the Church is the dramatic form of grace, so to speak, through which the reality of grace as the pardoning of those who are in themselves unworthy continually becomes present in history. One could actually say that precisely in her paradoxical combination of holiness and unholiness the Church is in fact the shape taken by grace in this world.
He asks, “Is there not revealed in the unholy holiness of the Church, as opposed to man’s expectation of purity, God’s true holiness, which is love?”
In future posts, I hope to look at discussions of the Church’s holiness in the medieval and “Baroque” theology.
Matt, odd is this sort of antinomianism — the church is holy even if its successors to the bishops not only sin but cover it. I know that’s a bit of a cheap shot but I suspect you are writing with the current controversy in mind. Rome used to charge the idea of justification by faith alone — no works — as antinomian. Protestantism removed the motivation to be good. Isn’t the implication of your post similar? What incentive do the bishops have to reform the church since — well, no matter what they do the church is holy? Ratzinger’s words are even more poignant — as in, the less holy the church is the more holy God is.
Imagine making a case for the reliability of Scripture that way. The more errors we find the truer it is.
I know, I’m biased. But as a matter of quality control, it really does seem some revision of Rome’s ecclesiology is called for. It was not a Protestant who wrote, “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
As far as your comment on Bernard, are you saying that he should have been harder on Eugenius? I’m just making sure that I understand the force of your concern.
Antinomianism seems a bit strong of a term (as it is with reference to most Protestant soteriology). Ratzinger is certainly not saying that the unchanging holiness of the Church (in this limited respect) means that there is no law that the members of the Church (clergy and lay) must follow.
But I take your point. And I’m hoping to say more about this in the future. But for now, I’ll say that there has at times been a Donatist streak in some of the most radical cries for reform. Whether it is fair to Wyclif and Hus or not, the Council of Constance condemns Wyclif for saying this:
“Just as a prince or a lord does not keep the title of his office while he is in mortal sin, except in name and equivocally, so it is with a pope, bishop or priest while he has fallen into mortal sin.”
And it condemns Hus for saying this:
“Nobody is a civil lord, a prelate or a bishop while he is in mortal sin.”
If Wyclif and Hus (as characterized by Constance!) were right, the path for reform would be quite different than the one that might be on offer from Ratzinger.
But we agree–I would assume–that Donatism is wrong. Though we’d obviously see the implications differently, we don’t think that the authority of the Church and the efficacy of the sacraments depend entirely on the moral probity of the Church’s ministers. Now, of course, it might give a sharper edge to reform if we were Donatists. But a different path must be found (or remembered) for opposing immorality in the Church and also for bringing about institutional changes.
If Matt’s argument were Antinomian, he would not recognize what these priests prelates have done as being sin. There would be no sin in his view. The argument that Matt’s position is Antinomian also depends on priests and prelates being identical with the Church, which they are not. Even they are only some of its members, neither its totality nor its essence except insofar as they are truly bound to Christ. The view that priests and prelates constitute the Church would be an extreme form of clericalism. The Church is one, holy, catholic and apostolic because its members are grafted into the True Vine, Who always remains sinless. All who approach Him become sinless through, with, and in Him—and they become sinless only in that way. All who turn away from Him lose the source both of purification and of eternal life, including priests and prelates—but also including Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, two rather infamous baptized Christians whose sin is hardly less scandalous than those of priests and prelates. The Vine, however, endures as always, from Whom any holiness that we may have will come. This is stated in different but parallel terms in Ephesians 5:22-33 (especially 5:25-27). Reconciliation can come only through Him. It will have to involve faith in the mercy of God and the efficacy of the Blood of Christ as well as works of reparation, both in this life and most likely in the approach to Eternity. Faith without works is dead (someone once said), and works without faith are insufficient for salvation.