Yes, we Catholics are all aware of the problems plaguing Holy Mother Church right now. So, why then do we persist? Perhaps one way of addressing this question is to focus on the precise nature of what ecclesial Christians believe about the Church.
Many Christians are scandalized or crying “I told you so” in the wake of the Trump Administration’s examination of the number and type of grants given to supposedly charitable Christian organizations. That once stalwart Evangelical or Reformed schools, ministries, and publications are now revealed to have taken large sums of money from our administrative state coincides uncomfortably with the hard left turns they made over the last decade or two.
The same goes for many Catholic charitable organizations. The large salaries and the direction of their advocacy and their services raise big question marks about how those who have cried loudest about the threats of “Christian nationalism” or “integralism” seem to have embraced some version of such views themselves in their operations. It’s just that their Christian nationalism was left wing.
It is not a stretch to think that even some Catholic bishops will have—perhaps by the time this is published—been revealed to have taken a great deal more of Caesar’s coin than we thought. Cynical minds may find that they were right to distrust the idea that certain versions of what Catholic moral teaching demands in the social sphere were wholly spiritual. We may well find out some of them permitted or demanded officially “Catholic” organizations to do things that were not just imprudent but wrong. The same probably applies to some Orthodox bishops and organizations.
While divisions of any group into “two kinds of people” may can be suspect, I think the division of Christians into the categories of ecclesial and the non-ecclesial has some merit because it illuminates key differences.
The term “non-ecclesial Christian” might sound incoherent. Almost all Christians have some idea of church—ecclesia. But, I think that for many Protestant Christians, the term functions very differently. The non-ecclesial Christian holds to an “invisible church” that is merely the spiritual collective of all who truly believe in Christ. Since baptism is only a sign adopted when one claims true faith, one has no real objective measures of who is a “real Christian” or not. The non-ecclesial Christian may believe you ought to get together for prayer and Scripture with others in your area, but there is no particular group to whom one belongs and no truly authoritative leader whom one must acknowledge. Councils of Christian leaders can’t declare anything authoritatively. For non-ecclesial Christians, there is a bit of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy: if another Christian, even a pastor, seems incorrigible, that individual simply can’t be a Christian.
Ecclesial Christians, on the other hand, hold to a visible Church in which there is an objective measure of being a Christian (sacramental initiation) and a God-given authority structure. That structured body of connected believers, they say, will continue till the end of the world. Most ecclesial Christians will teach that this body has and can again teach concrete particulars about the Christian faith without error, for most ecclesial Christians are either Catholic or Orthodox. And we ecclesial Christians don’t say those who seem incorrigible are not Christian; we say they are bad Christians.
To the non-ecclesial Christian, the idea of objective measures of Christian identity and Christian authority sounds crazy. The non-ecclesial Christian will read my first few paragraphs about the bad leaders and read an endorsement of their own views. After all, they will say, Catholics, Orthodox, and all who hold to a visible Church in which there is God-given structure and authority must admit that the Church as we ecclesial Christians understand it seems scarcely more protected from evil than the world itself.
Ecclesial Christians will have to admit, the non-ecclesial will say, that those leaders we claim are part of the God-given structure sometimes act in the name of God to do imprudent, stupid, and even bad things. How can we say that such structures are what God has given? Are we ecclesial Christians, Catholics and Orthodox, simply fooling ourselves with our belief in an “indefectible Church” that will not fail in the assault on the gates of hell? We are ourselves admitting that our own leaders sometimes seem to be working to build up (or at least polish) those gates.
The difficulty is acknowledged, I think, by almost all Catholic and Orthodox Christians I know. One Orthodox friend likes to tell me that the Orthodox approach to their own hierarchy is to treat them like state legislators—they do have some power over our lives, but we should generally ignore them, sometimes actively so. Similarly, many like to recite the line attributed to St. John Chrysostom (c. 349-407), “The road to hell is paved with the skulls of erring priests, with bishops as their signposts.” While he may or may not have said it that way, we know St. Chrysostom wrote in a homily on Acts 1:12, “I do not think there are many among Bishops that will be saved, but many more that perish.”
Catholics have sometimes been accused of having a different, triumphalistic view. There is truth to the charge in the last two centuries, but that view has largely dissipated. A correspondent who read some of my theological writings recently wrote, “Regarding the Catholic church I do think history does not support the glowing view you have of its activities and upper personnel in particular over the centuries.” My response was that, though a glowing view is occasionally communicated by some exuberant Catholics, it’s not the view of anyone who has examined the past or the present with any attention. There is no Catholic doctrine that popes, much less bishops, are, as Mary Poppins was said to be in the musical, “practically perfect in every way.”
Most Catholics love to repeat the purported words of Chrysostom cited above. We have other lore that will not likely be printed on inspirational tee shirts for sale in the Catholic goods store. A story about Ercole Consalvi has it that the nineteenth-century Cardinal Secretary of State was arguing with Napoleon Bonaparte, who had kidnapped Pope Pius VI, about his wicked actions. The diminutive emperor told Consalvi he would “destroy the Church,” to which the cardinal reportedly responded in an exasperated tone, “If in 1,800 years we clergy have failed to destroy the Church, do you really think that you’ll be able to do it?”
Fr. Joseph Fessio, the Jesuit who founded Ignatius Press, likes to say his own appeal to other Christians is, “Come home to the Catholic Church! It’s terrible here!”
In short, yes, we’re all aware of the problems. So, why then do we persist? Perhaps one way of addressing this question is to focus on the precise nature of what ecclesial Christians believe about the Church.
For one thing, despite our agreement with St. Paul that the Church is the “pillar and foundation of the truth” (I Timothy 3:15-16), we also remember that her past leaders include Judas Iscariot. Nor was he the end of bad apostolic eggs. Speaking to the Ephesian Church, St. Paul warned that after his departure “fierce wolves” would come to devour the Church. The fierce wolves would include even those “from among your own selves. . .speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them” (Acts 20:29-30).
Even if the leaders are not “fierce wolves” or heretics, they are certainly not free from either sin or mistakes. In the Epistle to the Galatians, St. Paul famously records an occasion in which he had to “oppose to his face” St. Peter, first among the Apostles and first Pope, then residing in Jerusalem. Though St. Peter knew that the Gentiles were now to be accepted as full members of the Church, because he feared some of the Jewish Christians sent from the Apostle James, he had refused to eat with the Gentile Christians who were not circumcised. This even though Peter himself no longer kept kosher (see Galatians 2:11-21).
For the ecclesial Christian, there is indeed a belief that the Church is indefectible and infallible. By the first term, we mean the Church will not completely be wrecked. By the second, we mean she will not teach dogmatically what is false. For the Orthodox, as I understand them, this means the Ecumenical Councils will not err in their dogmatic teaching. Conciliar disciplinary or legal canons are, of course, a different subject. The wisdom or prudence of any of them is a matter of debate. God offers protection from false teaching. He offers no such protection from dumb rules or policies.
So, too, for Catholic beliefs. We believe the same about the Ecumenical Councils, even if we think more such meetings have been granted this status and its divine protection than do the Orthodox. We also believe that, under certain carefully delineated conditions, the pope can himself teach on a point of faith or morals in such a way that we know he is speaking without error. Nevertheless, there is no implication that a pope is himself some kind of an inspired prophet. The fact that the First Vatican Council laid out those conditions for recognizing infallible teaching implies that, ordinarily, popes should not be assumed to be teaching infallibly.
Ecclesial Christians take to heart St. Peter’s notion that the Church is Noah’s Ark (see I Peter 3:21-22). If, as the old saw has it, it were not for the storm and flood outside, one could never stand the stench within. We believe we must stay in the boat even if some of the officers are often idiots or worse.
Though we are bothered by the bad actions of some leaders, they ultimately don’t dissuade us from remaining, for our faith is not in them. Christian faith for the ecclesial Christian is no less in Christ than it is for those who believe only in an invisible Church. We merely acknowledge that Christ’s Church in this life is, as St. Augustine called it, a corpus permixtum, a mixed body of people who range from deeply faithful to deeply unfaithful and everything in between. And each of these people, including the leaders, is also in via—on the way. Each has the opportunity to repent or give way to his own fall.
Ecclesial Christians will find that we sometimes must not follow along when our leaders are misbehaving. But we do believe we have to stick with them. They may be knaves or villains, but they are our knaves and villains. The Catholic apologist Trent Horn doesn’t like it when Catholics repeat the lines about the paving skulls on the road to hell. Better, he says, to pray for the pope, bishops, and priests.
Horn and others who want to remain positive are completely correct on our duty to pray. But suggestions that we not advert to the rather gloomy wisdom gained from twenty centuries in the Ark must be rejected. We must always be lighting candles, but cursing and mocking the darkness is an important mechanism. God who sits in the heavens and laughs at those conspiring against him surely wants us to do the same at those who do so from within his Church. The Old Testament prophets evinced quite a bit of this realism, sometimes bitter and mocking, in their own inspired writings.
Not to acknowledge and complain about the failures of our own leaders because we don’t want to cause scandal is getting it backward. When we refuse to acknowledge the problems, it causes others to think our faith is weak and that we hold to a fable about a Church in which everything is sunshine and rainbows.
I don’t know what will be revealed about Catholic bishops or leaders as Elon Musk and his merry band keep uncovering the ways in which Caesar’s coin-based grants have corrupted institutions. I hope very little that is truly bad. If it is very bad, however, it will not shake my faith in Christ or the Church in the least. All I’ll know is that the wolves and the weak-willed leaders are among us. And it is every Christian’s duty to pray and act in the way appropriate to root out corruption. As it was in the beginning of the Church, is now, and will be until Christ comes to judge the popes, bishops, priests—and all of us.
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