Editor’s note: This essay was originally given, in a slightly different form, as a public lecture on the centenary of the foundation of the Central Catholic Library, Dublin.
———–
Like many Catholics in Ireland today, I, too, have watched with a sinking spirit the drift away from the Church, the dramatic drop in vocations and Mass attendance, the slow but steady withdrawal of Sisters and Brothers from the schools and hospitals they founded and the resulting closure of the convents and monasteries that dominated the life of every town in Ireland. Now many are but dark and empty shells where once they were beacons of light and hope.
On a more personal level, I watched the evaporation of the missionary spirit that was once so vibrant. Over the past one-and-a-half centuries, the Irish Church sent out young men and women aflame with the Faith to counties all over the world to bring Christ to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death—and much else as well: education, health care facilities and action for social justice. 1 Not surprisingly, I have been shocked and shamed at the revelations of abuse by my fellow-clerics, and by what happened in the orphanages, Magdalen laundries, reformatories and industrial schools manned by Religious. I have been both infuriated and frustrated by the increasingly atheistic and anti-Catholic tone of public discourse—and the way it is creeping into our schools, often in the guise of cultural Marxism and Wokism—not to mention the trauma of the recent referenda on abortion, the redefinition of marriage passed by large majorities of Irish Catholics, and the well-orchestrated move to introduce euthanasia.
Even more dispiriting is the lack of any inspirational leadership in the Church in Ireland today, no theological vision at the national level, and no courageous voice in the public square—apart, that is, from a handful of Catholic journalists.
An object of belief
Seen from a purely human perspective, it does not auger well for the future. But then I am reminded of the reply made, I think, by Pope Pius VI to Napoleon when the emperor boasted that given five years or so, he would destroy the Church: “Bonne chance, Your Majesty, we have been trying that for a thousand-eight-hundred years and have failed.”
And yet, paradoxically, what the present state of the Church in Europe and Ireland has brought home to me is a growing appreciation of what is nothing less than the divine nature of the Church. When I recite the Creed, I linger on the final articles of the Apostles Creed: I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy, Catholic Church, the communion of the saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. The Church is first and foremost an object of belief. The strange paradox is that the more threatened she is in a particular historical situation (from within as well as from without), the more evident it becomes that the Church herself is, in the final analysis, a mystery, more correctly, a mystery of the Faith.
The situation we face today, though unique in its physiognomy, is not unique in its nature as a crisis of enormous proportions. But it is a real crisis, and not only in Ireland. As Roberto Petici, Professor of Modern History at Bologna University, recently pointed out:
This overarching crisis is accompanied by the process of secularization and de-Christianization that has overrun the Western world and has accelerated in the last century, making Catholicism negligible even in contexts in which it had always been an element of identity of decisive importance. 2
Faced with this situation, he asks: is this an inexorable trend –indeed one destined to accelerate further—or is it be possible to reverse this trend? His answer is “no” to the first question, and a strong “yes” to the second.
He bases his belief on the possibility of reversing this tendency by giving us an historical overview of Church history from the Council of Trent down to the Second Vatican Council. He shows how often it happened in history that a demoralized Church, seemingly on its last legs, crushed and derided by the world, and yet, to the astonishment of even its own members, saw one rebirth after another, Indeed, something similar happened here in Ireland after the Great Famine (1845—1852), when an impoverished Church but recently emancipated seemed to have collapsed—and yet went on to be reborn with a vitality only matched by that of the early Irish Christian missionary movement which helped to drag a barbaric Europe out of the Dark Ages so as to help create Western Christendom in all its glory. To justify why we can look to the future in hope, we have to have recourse to theology. And there we will find the answer that was best summed up by Chesterton, who once said: “The Church had learnt, not at the end but at the beginning of her centuries, that the funeral of God is always a premature burial.” Chesterton’s aphorism needs to be teased out a bit, and to do this, we need first to examine the nature of the crisis we are facing today from a theological perspective.
In The Ratzinger Report (1985), the interview he gave to the journalist, Vittorio Messori, Cardinal Ratzinger made no bones about the root of the crisis we find ourselves in today: it is nothing less than our understanding of what the Church is. Instead, the Church is increasingly understood as a purely human institution. Indeed, we in Ireland could add that the Church is viewed by not a few as an evil institution, exposed as they are day after day to nothing but continual reminders of what went wrong in the past in Catholic Ireland. But even within her own ranks, as Ratzinger said: “Many [even some theologians] no longer believe that what is at issue is a reality willed by the Lord himself.”3
If the Church is seen simply as a human construct, then it can be remade and refashioned according to the needs of the moment—but it will not be the Church willed by God. The paradox is that the Church is indeed made up of men and women who continually fail, but, despite such repeated failures, behind her external visage, “the fundamental structures of the Church are willed by God himself, and therefore they are inviolable”.4 Without this understanding, even the content of the faith is seen as ultimately something arbitrary.
In the so-called Synodal Path taken by the Catholic Church in Germany, we see the kind of dead-end into which a local Church can find herself, when her leaders adopt such an exclusively humanist understanding of Church. The President of the German Bishops Conference claimed almost as self-evident that the teachings of the Church as found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church were not written in stone.5
What is the Church?
What, then, is the Church? Where can I find her? These are the questions that the Jesuit, Henri de Lubac, one of the great theologians of the past century, posed in his book: The Church: Paradox and Mystery.6 Decades before the Council, he had written extensively on the Church—such as The Splendor of the Church and Catholicism – but this little book was written soon after the Council. At the time, it was already becoming evident that the renewal, which the Council intended, was, in his eyes, not producing the intended effect. That situation forced him to confront yet again what he calls the fundamental question: what is the Church?
Seen from the outside, as it were, she is a complexio oppositorum: a bundle of contradictions:
I am told that she is holy, yet I see her full of sinners. I am told of her mission to raise man above earthly cares, to remind him of his heavenly vocation, yet I see her endlessly busy with the temporal things of this earth, almost as if she wished to install us permanently here. I am assured that she is universal […], yet so often her members, as if under some compulsion, huddle together in closed enclaves, just like human beings everywhere. She is immutable, the reliable lynchpin in the chaos of history, and yet look at her now! … A paradox of a Church for paradoxical mankind and one that on occasion adapts all too much to the exigencies of the latter!”
But then he adds: “… Since her early days, indeed, while she was taking the first halting steps outside the confines of Jerusalem, the Church was reflecting the traits—and the miseries of mankind.”7
However, he continues, we can easily lose sight of the essentials, if we don’t look at the fundamental paradox that is proper to the Church. And it is this paradox that can introduce us to the mystery:
The Church is at once human and divine, at once a gift from above and a product of this earth. She is composed of men each of whom resists with all the weight of a laggard and wounded nature the life the Church strives to infuse. She is orientated towards the past, which contains a memorial she well knows is never past; she tends towards the future, elated by the hope of an ineffable consummation of whose nature no sensible sign gives a hint. […] She is a people, the great anonymous crowd and still—there is no other word—the most personal of all beings. Catholic, that is universal, she wishes her members to be open to everything and yet she herself is never fully open but when she is withdrawn into the intimacy of her interior life and in the silence of adoration. She is humble and she is majestic. She professes a capacity to absorb every culture, to raise up their highest values; at the same time, we see her claim for her own the homes and hearts of the poor, the undistinguished, the simple and destitute masses. Not for an instant does she cease—and her immortality assures continuity—to contemplate him who is at once crucified and resurrected, the man of sorrows and lord of glory, vanquished by, but saviour of, the world. He is her bloodied spouse and her triumphant master. From his generous heart, ever open and yet always infinitely secret, she has received her existence and the life it is his wish to communicate to all.8
Pardon the long quotation, but de Lubac is almost lyrical, and his words are worth pondering. It is impossible to define the Church, de Lubac confesses, and when she defines herself, as she did at the Second Vatican Council, she can only produce a host of biblical images: the sheepfold, whose indispensable door is Christ, a piece of land to be cultivated, the house of God. Let me quote from Lumen Gentium: “The Church […] is “that Jerusalem which is above” is also called “our mother”. It is described as the spotless spouse of the spotless Lamb, whom Christ “loved and for whom He delivered Himself up that He might sanctify her”, whom He unites to Himself by an unbreakable covenant, and whom He unceasingly “nourishes and cherishes”. 9
Here the Council takes up two of the most powerful metaphors of the Church—Mother and Spouse. Both images are found in the New Testament. Down through the centuries, the greatest Christian thinkers and mystics have had recourse to them when trying to articulate what the Church means to them. De Lubac himself tells us that, even before he began his search to identify the essence of the Church, as it were, he knew in his heart of hearts that “I can tell it in one word, the first of all words: the Church is my mother. Yes, the Church, the whole Church, that of generations past who transmitted her life, her teachings, her witness, her culture, her love to me; and the Church of today.”10
More specifically, de Lubac writes:
In a word, the Church is our mother because she gives us Christ. She brings about the birth of Christ in us. She says to us, as Paul did to his beloved Corinthians: “for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the Gospel (1 Cor 4:15). In her maternal function she is spouse, ‘glorious and without blemish’, which the Man-God brought forth from his pierced heart to unite himself with her ‘in the ecstasy of the cross’ and to make her fruitful for all time.11
Another Jesuit, Pope Francis, seems to echo de Lubac, when, at the beginning of his Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, he writes: “The Church is a mother and wishes to show to all the face of God, faithful to His love, mercy and always able to restore strength and hope.”
The other image favored by de Lubac is that of the Church as Spouse of Christ. Though rooted in Old Testament prophecy (beginning with Hosea), the metaphor has its immediate origins in the New Testament, more precisely in Ephesians, chapter 5,12 where St Paul compares the relationship of Christ to his Church to that of the love-union of one flesh between a man and his wife, which he calls, significantly, this great mystery (mysterion). Commenting on this text, the Australian theologian, Anna Silvas reminds us that: “Christ Jesus will never withdraw his love from the Church, never abandon her, no matter how compromised she may appear to be in the eyes of the world due to the sins of her children.”13
And where do we find the Church? The Council states:
This Church of Christ is truly present in all legitimate local congregations of the faithful which, united with their pastors, are themselves called churches in the New Testament.” And it adds: “In any community of the altar, under the sacred ministry of the bishop, there is exhibited a symbol of that charity and ‘unity of the mystical Body, without which there can be no salvation’. In these communities, though frequently small and poor, or living in the Diaspora, Christ is present, and in virtue of His presence there is brought together one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. For ‘the partaking of the body and blood of Christ does nothing other than make us be transformed into that which we consume’.14
In one sense, the Church is primarily an invisible reality. Augustine once said in effect that many are part of the Church in an only apparent way, while in reality they live against her, while outside the Church there are many who—without knowing it—belong profoundly to the Lord and thus also to his Body, the Church. This raises a further question: what is the relationship of the Church to humanity as a whole? One of the key themes in Ratzinger’s ecclesiology is that the Church exists not for itself; she is made up of “the few”, who exist “for many”—for everyone. According to the anonymous second-century author of the so-called Letter to Diognetius: “What the soul is in the body, this the Christians are in the world.” Or to quote the words of Our Lord: you are the salt of the earth, the light of the world (cf. Mt 5:13-14).
But the Church is also a visible reality: it exists in human form as a corporate body, an institution. More than that, the visible Church is the indispensable means God uses to achieve his design for creation: the union of man with God. Where is the visible Church to be found? The short answer given by de Lubac is: in the celebration of the Eucharist—and in a Saint. “Just as the Church is entirely concentrated in the Eucharist, it may also be said to be entirely concentrated in a saint.”15
As de Lubac confesses, thanks to the fact that he himself had absorbed the essentials of the faith from his Catholic upbringing, he knew what to expect when he encountered a saint. What he found, was not any accomplishment of human perfection “but a strange and supernatural beauty opening up unknown vistas to me … In a saint, I saw the whole Church pass.”16 Ratzinger has often repeated that the greatest apology for the Church is to be found in her saints and in her art.
The catholicity of the Church and sublimity of the sacraments
To recapitulate. The Church is one, because she is the one Body of Christ. She is one because she is made up of all those who live lives hidden with Christ in God (cf. Col 3:3). She is one because the unity of humanity (God’s design for creation) is already being achieved in this world, in our history, in the form of a seed that is in the process of spouting.
She is holy, because she is constituted by the whole sacramental system—and this is the work of the Holy Spirit transforming us sinners from within. This is perhaps best seen in the sacrament of matrimony, where the grace of the sacrament is operative in the ups and downs of the lifelong union of spouses married in Christ. The Second Vatican Council described the Church herself as the universal sacrament of the world’s salvation. What this means is that, no matter how her members may fail, even her Popes who have failed a lot in the course of history, such failure cannot prevent God achieving his plan for the salvation of the world. And the ordinary means God uses is the very human Church, which “is in Christ like a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race” (LG #1). The sacraments are effective ex opere operato17 and so are not dependent on the state of soul of the one who administers them, so that a sinful priest [or even, in the case of danger of death, a laicised priest] can absolve a repentant sinner of his or her sins. The Church, the Body of Christ, as the “universal sacrament of salvation” (LG #48), the salvation of all humanity, is likewise not dependent on the sinful men and women who constitute the Church, though the closer they appropriate their lives to Christ the more efficacious they can be as the leaven of society.
The Church is catholic, i.e., universal because it is rooted in the Truth, which knows no borders, even though it must find expression in different cultural contexts. And that revealed Truth is guaranteed by the divinely instituted structure of the Church: The Apostolic Succession: i.e., the Bishops in union with the Pope, when (and only when) they act authoritatively in Council or whey the Pope acts ex cathedra. Together they constitute the “hierarchy”, a term which means quite literally “of sacred origin”.
Heinrich Schlier, one of the great German scriptural scholars of the last century, discovered the mystery of the Church through his own study of the New Testament as a Protestant. It was above all his study of Ephesians which led to his conversion, a conversion cost him dearly, since he lost his university post. As he well knew, the truth always carries the sign of the Cross. For him, what he called the principle of catholicity was the Church’s capacity to make definitive statement about the faith: doctrine that is binding on conscience. This ability of the Church arises from the fact of God’s definitive entry into human history, the mystery of the Incarnation: The Word became flesh and dwelt among us (Jn 1:14).
It is this definitiveness, he claimed, that is the characteristic of Catholicity. It is manifested especially in the way the Church has the authority to teach definitively, namely her dogmas, so that in the course of history the Church, led by the Spirit, could plumb the depths the mystery of revealed Truth without ever exhausting it.18 Ratzinger once wrote that the term “dogma”, which means opinion, has the same root as doxa (glory): the dogmas of the Church as the way she gives glory to God. All her dogmas have as their aim the true worship of God in spirit and truth.
But the Church’s dogmas are also the framework within which the thinker can be creative, just as an artist needs a canvas, a defined space, on which he or she can create something new. It was on the basis of such definitiveness that artists and architects down through the centuries were enabled to construct cathedrals such as Notre Dame de Paris or the Basilica of St Peter in Rome. The German poet, Heinrich Heine, once said when he stood before Antwerp Cathedral in awe at its beauty: “The men who built these had dogmas. We have only opinions. And with opinions one does not build cathedrals.”
But the definiteness of Catholicity finds it most sublime expression in the sacraments. I refer to the indelible “character” imprinted on the soul in Baptism, Confirmation and Holy Orders, the indissoluble union of man and wife that is the effect of the sacrament of matrimony, the mystery of the transubstantiation of the bread and wine in the Eucharist, or the sacramental absolution of the sins of a penitent. The emergence of virginity for the sake of the kingdom of God in the early Church—and its continued realization down through the centuries—is a manifestation of that same definitive inbreaking of divinity into humanity. Indeed, virginity and martyrdom are the two of the most radical expressions of the newness of Christianity. Which is why the decadent Roman Empire felt threatened to its foundations by both, as does our decadent modernity.
I began my talk by recalling the apparent demise of Catholicism in Ireland and Europe over the past half-century. We forget all too often that the Church is no longer confined to Europe or the Americas. Africa and Asia are where we find an astonishing vitality and even numerical growth. There, too, the local Churches are facing many challenges both internal (due to human weakness) and, especially, external leading at times to martyrdom. We have never had so many martyrs as in the present century. Martyrdom is the greatest manifestation of a vibrant Church. As Tertullian said in the third century, the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians.
We have no idea of how Christianity will flourish in the coming centuries, even in these parts. Already we witness an extraordinary number of conversions even in the crisis-ridden Churches of Europe and America, such as the record number of adults in England who were baptized or received into full communion at the Easter Vigil this year. The fact is that there are countless souls, who are searching for the truth, for meaning in life; one day they will discover the mystery of the Church. Like Newman, each one will say—thanks entirely to the grace of God—I have finally come into port after a rough passage at sea; doubts I once had in plenty, now I have none. I have many difficulties, but no doubts.
However, as Joseph Ratzinger foretold already in 1958, the future in Europe at least will be that of a minority Church—albeit a vibrant one. He wrote that at time when the churches in Bavaria were still filled to the brim each Sunday; the majority claiming to be Christians. They were at best nominal Christians, in effect, new heathens in the Church. In time, as he clearly foresaw, they would vanish like the dew in the morning sun. What would be left, would be a small, purified Church:19
Catholic Christians striving for holiness. They will transform society from within by their courageous witness to truth and by their active love towards all. We live in a time of great hope. But there is one conditio sine qua non for such a new springtime in the Church, namely the fostering of a truly Catholic mind. And one of the strongest marks of a truly Catholic mind is, as Anna Silvas put it, “a deep inalienable mystical love of the Church, perhaps all the more in her apparent weakness and debility … and, I submit, one of the surest criteria of true holiness. For such a love has taken on the nature of Christ’s own redemptive spousal love for his Bride. This is truly to put on the mind of Christ.”
Endnotes:
1 Mother Kevin Kearney, OSF, a native of Co Wicklow (1898-1957) is but one of the tens of thousands of Irish missionaries who were pioneers in both education and health care in the countries to which they were sent. Mother Kevin “was responsible for the initial shaping of the health care system [in Uganda] and its standards”, according to her biographer, Sr M. Louis, OSF (cf. Fr Conor Donnelly, “An Irish missionary nun and byword for love”, Position Papers, May 2022, 36). Before she came to Uganda in 1903, education for girls was unheard of, and so she not only opened schools for girls but also teacher training colleges. “From her schools came the first women leaders in the county in the different professions” (ibid., 37).
3 The Ratzinger Report, translated by Salvator Athanasio and Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 45.
4 Ibid., 46.
5 He was referring primarily to the Church teaching on sexual morals, which the Synodal Path effectively rejected in its most recent documents. The Germans had even ignored the 29-page letter which Pope Francis wrote to the Church in Germany at the outset, in 2019, warning them about the direction their Synodal Path was taking,
6 The Church Paradox and Mystery, translated by James R. Dunne (Shannon, Ireland: Ecclesia Press, 1969).
7 Ibid., 2.
8 Ibid. 3.
9 Lumen Gentium, #6.
10 The Church: Paradox and Mystery, 4.
11 Ibid. 5-6. He would later write a larger volume dedicated to the topic of The Motherhood of the Church, translated by Sr Sergia Englund, O.C.D. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982 [original published in 1971]).
12 Like much else in the NT, this image also has its OT antecedents, beginning with Hosea.
13 “God and Communion: Marriage and Sacrament in the New Testament” in Colin Paterson and Conor Sweeney (eds.), God and Eros. The Ethos of the Nuptial Mystery (Eugene Oregan: Cascade Books, 2015), 85-6.
14 Lumen Gentium # 26. Fr Walter J. Ciszek SJ was imprisoned in a concentration camp in Siberia, and yet he found ways and means to celebrate Mass. He writes about his experience as follows: “The intensity of devotion of both priests and prisoners made up for everything; there were no altars, candles, bells, flowers, music, snow-white linens, stained glass or the warmth that even the simplest parish church could offer. Yet in these primitive conditions, the Mass brought you closer to God than anyone might conceivably imagine. The realization of what was happening on the board, box, or stone used in the place of an altar penetrated deep into the soul. Distractions caused by the fear of discovery, which accompanied each saying of the Mass under such conditions, took nothing away from the effect that the tiny bit of bread and few drops of consecrated wine produced upon the soul.”
15 The Church: Paradox and Mystery, 5.
16 Ibid.
17That effect they have—i.e., the inner transformation of the person in his or her relationship to God—is the work of God Himself operating through the words and ritual as determined by the Church’s highest authority.
18 George Steiner in Real Presences made a similar observation when he contrasted the Catholic capacity to define dogmas with his own Jewish tradition of constant debate on the content of Revelation.
19 By a purified Church is meant not a Church of the pure, the perfect, but a slimmed-down Church that would be scripturally and liturgically rich as well as committed to re-evangelization and the transformation of society. A Church of the Pure is a serious danger to souls (and indeed to society). From the outset, the Church has rejected it. The Church always remains a Church of sinners in need of conversion. Benedict was ever sympathetic to the sheer human need for people of conviction, who often have to “go it alone”, to have the support of like-minded believers for encouragement and for inspiration. That said, the ghetto-mentality is a temptation for the like-minded and for those who are idealistic. Parochialism and narrow-mindedness are a perennial temptation but are, in fact, abhorrent to authentic Catholicity. Put simply, to be Catholic is to be open-minded and magnanimous (cf. Phil 4:8). The ghetto mentality is anti-Catholic, sectarian. Anyone who tries to live his faith will necessarily engage fully in public life, will learn how to distinguish between the sinner and the sin (true tolerance), and so will give joy-filled, public witness to the faith. And when called to do so, he or she must be ready to give non-believers a reason for the hope that is in us (1 Pet 3:15).
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
It is had to think of A Catholic Western World without Ireland, at least the English speaking world for whom it produced missionaries en masse. The two Masses we had here in South Africa where “Irish”, and society is poorer without that missionary zeal. It is even sadder that the state of the Church in Ireland mirrors a decline and a degeneration everywhere even in Africa despite growth in numbers. The causes should be clear- Clericalism, authoritarianism and too much of an overlap between State and Society. As it happened during the times of Jesus, we end up in an inward looking, static and incecous relationship that consists of quip pro qous, ie “Do not interefere as long as you have the schools” or turn a blind eye. We are only human.
That however is the problem- giving Christianity a human face is a farce and inherently cynical. Christianity has a divine heart of Jesus at her core, lives his persecution, ridicule and participates daily in His death in order to convict the world and the Priesthood of Sin, to heal and divinize people anew. At the heart of the crisis that is given theological cover or taken as mere slip, is aesthetic feel good, do good religion and forget about the rest. Yes, the spirit of Christ is severed from his body in the search for salvation. This is crisis. Yet crises create opportunistic elements as it happens with traditionalism or modernism. Both have the devil of personal ambition. We ought to be open as a Church – mainly to ourselves, if we are to renew. This is painful, if not to open ourselves to further prejudicial groupthink,it calls us to further emptying. Then we can start on true humility. Karl Rahner wrote in the 1970s that “We are a little flock in society and we shall become much smaller since the erosion of the conditions of a Christian Society within a secular society continues and takes the ground more and more from traditional Christianity”. It the same Rahner who urged is to a mysticm or more accurately an affective Christian Spirituality.
The church must be conceived of as charismatic, otherwise the Catholic affirmation of the Church’s visible continuity would be based on the juridical power of the institutions themselves.
“The grace of God is not only offered to mankind as a possibility, but is promised to the Church as a victorious grace more powerful than sin, it is certain from the outset from God’s side and from him alone, that ecclesiastical office in what most properly belongs to it, in its essence, will not, though it could, be used as a weapon against God. To that extent, therefore, ecclesiastical office and ministry is charismatic in character, if we understand by charismatic, what is in contradiction to what is purely institutional, administered by men, subject to calculation, expressible in laws and rules”. Rahner, The Shape of The Church to Come.
We all know that Charismatics are hated by Clericalist Priests and Clericalist Laity. Can we perhaps expand the framework of analysis beyond a rehash of what Cardinal Ratzinger said and we merely adulated?
“The church must be conceived of as charismatic, otherwise the Catholic affirmation of the Church’s visible continuity would be based on the juridical power of the institutions themselves.”
Convened on the 20th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council, to protect the Church from “divergent” interpretations, the 1985 Extraordinary Synod of Bishops said it with balance–very much in step with the rehashed and “adulated” Cardinal Ratzinger–that the Church is both institutional and charismatic: “…because of a partial reading of the Council, a unilateral presentation of the Church as a purely institutional structure devoid of her mystery has been made” (n. 4). And, regarding a “deeper knowledge and reception of the Council. This can be attained above all through a new diffusion of the documents themselves” (n.6).
By a show of hands, how many synodalists have actually read the documents, as if these even matter any more?
Another Jesuit, Pope Francis, “seems” to echo de Lubac, when, at the beginning of his Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, he writes: “The Church is a mother and wishes to show to all the face of God, faithful to His love, mercy and always able to restore strength and hope.”
An interesting but sad qualification “seems” when attributing a comment to Pope Frances because who really knows the intent and purpose of Pope Francis given the spectrum of his opinions.
“A truly Catholic mind is, as Anna Silvas put it, a deep inalienable mystical love of the Church, perhaps all the more in her apparent weakness and debility and, I submit, one of the surest criteria of true holiness” (Twomey).
Fr Twomey recounts the darkness we’re all aware of, that true holiness retains its conviction in the truth of Christ and his Church despite affliction and contradictions. This is the gift of the Holy Spirit that provides a deeper understanding of the sacrificial nature of divine love expressed in a world given to sin.
The rancid evil of sin is spread throughout Mankind, a Catholic Church seeming less catholic and more a member of team globalization. Where do we find evidence of that true faith in our Church? “Ratzinger has often repeated that the greatest apology for the Church is to be found in her saints and in her art” (Twomey). Art as developed during previous ages, gave a sense of spirituality which has been lost as seen in the work of Rupnik. Twomey speaks of the power of the Mass offered by Soviet convicted priests in Siberia. As long as a Mass is offered faithfully with conviction and love Christ lives within the Church and strengthens us for whatever may come.
Brilliantly constructed, learned but understandable. Thanks a lot Fr Twomey.
Yes, “The Church is first and foremost an object of belief.”
And, yet, The Church IS the Mystical Body of Christ and, as the Second Person of the Triune One, Christ is not an “object.” The fallacy of the secular world is to objectify the Creator of the universe as just another object within this contingent universe, as planet earth spins meaningless into deep space. (Fr. Twomey’s meditation richly clarifies…)
Two points and a quote:
FIRST, we might notice the vulnerability to misinterpretation and exploitation in the quote from Lumen Gentium (n. 26, tagged here as fn. 14). Out of context, the Council refers to the Mass as a “symbol” and teaches that Christ is present in the “communities.” Instead, as the extension and continuation of the total and divine self-donation at Calvary, the consecrated host is both a “symbol” AND that which/whom it symbolizes. The Real Presence, not only a symbol. To portray the apostolic Church as essentially a local “community” is the heresy of Martin Luther (as Pope Benedict elaborates)…
SECOND, isn’t this the presumption behind der Synodal Weg? Behind those who now would Lutheranize the apostolic Church? Behind all of process theology which inverts the relationship between the Church’s Magisterium and theologians? And, behind synodalism’s constructed proceduralism (though, yes, “not a parliament”) that would reduce the apostolic Church IS into only what its (“inverted pyramid”) members DO?
We are awash in the angst of constant change—the deepest rut of all—from which Fr. Twomey rescues us. The Mystical Body of Christ is the only permanence given to us in/above the created universe. Self-disclosed and Self-donated–within our universal human history as the once-only Incarnation…
QUOTE: “The Catholic Church is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.” AND, “Those runners [apostolic messengers of the Gospel] gather impetus as they run. Ages afterwards they still speak as if something had just happened. They have not lost the speed and momentum of messengers; they have hardly lost, as it were, the wild eyes of witnesses. . . .We might sometimes fancy that the Church grows younger as the world grows old” (G.K. Chesterton).
“Penance, Penance, Penance.”
https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/vigano-my-defense-against-schism-is-the-same-as-archbishop-lefebvres/
You lost me when you mentioned the Magdalene Laundries. That myth has been thoroughly debunked. This tells me you are not paying attention, but only want to go with the media narrative. Also, being from Maynooth Seminary, which has long been a bastion of homosexuality in Ireland, is also troubling.
“Also, being from Maynooth Seminary, which has long been a bastion of homosexuality in Ireland, is also troubling.”
Is this true about Maynooth Seminary, Father?
Have they lost the Faith at Maynooth Seminary?
It is a long established notion, with it origins in ancient Israel (the first society to recognise that disease was not a visitation from a vengeful god but the result of correctable, deleterious influences in our world) that civilisation advances in the footsteps of advances in Medicine. This notion served Israel, ancient Greece and Rome very well until Rome, intoxicated by the privileges of its position as the greatest and most powerful civilisation the world had seen, drowned in self-satisfaction and abandoned the confining ethics which prevented its citizens from living the indulgent lives they wanted to lead. Rome abandoned the principles of the practice of Medicine defined by the Greek civilisation in the person of Hippocrates, allowed itself to return to the multiple gods abandoned by Israel and declined under Claudius Galen, a medical practitioner, to the state of ignorance and barbarity that dominated the world for 1300 years during the Dark and Middle Ages. Pope Sixtus IV (of Sistine Chapel fame) in embracing medical science and discovery conceived a child, The Renaissance, which as it grew into maturity underwrote the greatest civilisation the world has ever seen and protected its Judeo-Christian ethics through the Civil Law. The greatest Civilisation the world has ever seen is now in decline abandoning the principles of Medicine and The Law both of which have abandoned their ethics of protection of human life as the planet’s most valuable and treasured resource in becoming the instruments of abortion, euthanasia, self harm, suicide, sexual liberation and destruction of motherhood and its nurturing of the young. Welcome to our civilisation in decline. Let’s hope it doesn’t last for 1300 years as did the Dark and Middle Ages after the decline of our predecessor, ancient Rome. And for God’s sake America and for our civilisation make sure you vote for what is good in November – unhappily you don’t seem to have much choice!!
Well, the choices might be different come November. Who knows?