Holiness - A Quite Unmerited Gift

Excuse the loooonnnngggg post, but yesterday one of my kids was telling me about how difficult it was to hear about the sins of the Catholic Church. We talked about it for awhile, with me offering my inadequate response that the church is like a person who has sinned, who has a sad history, just like all of us. Well, today I heard Fr. Groeschel mention that Benedict XVI (when he was Joseph Ratzinger) addressed just this point in "An Introduction to Christianity". When I asked Chris if we had a copy tonight he said, "Yes, it's in Liz's car." Well, here it is - so timely considering the sex scandals, but written before they came to light. It's long, but well worth it... (love you, kiddo!)

The Second Vatican Council itself ventured to the point of speaking no longer of merely 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...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 13th century... 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."

There is no theory in existence which could refute such ideas by mere reason, just as conversely these ideas themselves do not proceed from mere reason but from the bitterness of a heart which may perhaps have been disappointed in its high hopes and now, in the pain of wronged love, can see only the destruction of its hopes. How, then, are we to reply? In the last analysis one can only confess 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. Nevertheless, let us start from the objective elements. ..the word "holy" does not apply in the first place to the holiness of human persons but refers to the divine gift which bestows holiness in the midst of human unholiness. The church is not called "holy" in the Creed because its members, collectively and individually, are holy, sinless men - this dream, which appears afresh in each century, has no place in the waking world of our text, however movingly it 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.

Even at this point we can say that the sharpest critics of the Church in our time secretly live on this dream and, when they find it disappointed, bang the door of the house shut again and denounce it as a deceit. But to return to our argument, the holiness of the Church consists in that power of sanctification which God exerts in it in spite of human sinfulness...grace which abides even in face of man's unfaithfulness.

...But it is really and truly the holiness of the Lord that becomes present in it and that chooses again and again as the vessel of its presence - with a paradoxical love - the dirty hands of men. It is holiness that radiates as the holiness of Christ from the midst of the Church's sin...The existing interplay of God's loyalty and man's disloyalty which characterizes the structure of the Church is grace in dramatic form...

Let us go a step further. In the human dream of a perfect world, a holiness is always visualized as untouchability by sin and evil, as something unmixed with the latter... the aspect of Christ's holiness that upset his contemporaries was the complete absence of (a) condemnatory note - fire did not fall on the unworthy... On the contrary, this holiness expressed itself precisely as mingling with the sinners whom Jesus drew into his vicinity; as mingling to the point where he himself was made "to be sin" and bore the curse of the law in execution as a criminal - complete community of fate with the lost. He has drawn sin to himself, made it his lot and so revealed what true "holiness" is - not separation but union, not judgment, but redeeming love. Is the church not simply the continuation of God's deliberate plunge into human wretchedness; is it not simply the continuation of Jesus' habit of sitting at table with sinners, of his mingling with the misery of sin to the point where he actually seems to sink under its weight?

Only he who has experienced how, regardless of changes in her ministers and forms, the church raises men up, gives them a home and a hope, a home that is hope - the path to eternal life - only he who has experienced this knows what the Church is, both in days gone by and now...A slammed door can, it is true, become a sign that shakes up those inside. But the idea that one can do more in isolation than in fellowship with others is just as much of an illusion as the notion of a church of "holy people", instead of a "holy Church" that is holy because the Lord bestows holiness on her as a quite unmerited gift.