Thursday, March 16, 2006
YOU CAN'T HAVE CHRIST WITHOUT THE CHURCH
That is the thrust of an article by Cindy Wooden at Catholic News Service as reported in The Florida Catholic. She is reporting on Benedict's March 15 general audience. According to Benedict:
"A slogan in vogue a few years ago, 'Jesus, yes; the church, no,' is completely irreconcilable with the intention of Christ," the pope said March 15 at his weekly general audience.
That is closely akin to my argument that doctrine is a mystic's life preserver. Everything we know about our faith has come to us through the Apostles and their successors. Jesus and the Church are inseperable. That is why so many Catholics are still faithful Mass-goers in spite of the demoralizing scandals that are a regular feature of Catholicism in America these days.
But what do you do when the local church is feeding out heresy and molesting the laity's children? A lot of Catholics must face this dilemma. What do you do if your local church is driving your faith away?
Benedict's target would seem to be the teaching of liberal theologians:
Pope Benedict criticized the "individualistic interpretation" of Christ's ministry espoused by "liberal theologians" such as the late German theologian Adolf von Harnack.
The idea of von Harnack and others that Jesus' mission is addressed only to individuals, he said, "is a typically modern" interpretation of relationships and does not fit in with the biblical description of God establishing a covenant with an entire people and sending Jesus to establish a new covenant and save all humanity.
If all of humanity is saved, then what have they been saved from? Unless there is sin, there is no need for a Savior. To call Jesus Savior is to admit that some actions will keep you out of heaven unless you repent. Jesus came to offer His Redemption to all of humanity, but each and every human must respond to the offer for himself, or we would have no free will.
So how could we determine what actions are pleasing to God and what are not if we have no doctrine to guide us? Human wills are too easily corrupted to rely solely on ourselves for guidance. We can easily persuade ourselves that what we want to do is what we should do unless we have an objective standard. There really is sin in the world, and without an objective standard, no two of us would define sin in the same way.
If there is an objective standard, then there is doctrine, and so then there is a Church. If there is a Church, then there are leaders of the Church. And if there are leaders, there is the potential that some of them will be sinful. That, of course, brings us full circle to abusing priests and heretics in theologian disguises. Benedict said:
"The Twelve Apostles are the most evident sign of the will of Christ regarding the existence and mission of his church, the guarantee that between Christ and his church there is no contradiction," he said.
Again speaking without notes, the pope said Jesus and the church "are inseparable despite the sins of the people who make up the church."
"Christ is present today among his people, especially through those who are the successors of the apostles," he said. "And his continuing presence in the community is a motive for our joy."
True, when it's working as it was intended to work, the Church is a source of joy. But in order for this to happen, there must be order. The doctrines of the Church must be upheld, and something must be done about those who are undermining doctrine. Someone with the power to do so must act when heresy is being preached. But we have had 25 years of a papacy that shunned action. We have had 40 years of dissent and confusion since Vatican II.
For the Church to work...for our faith to hold us...there must be reform and return to orthodoxy. Otherwise we are whistling in the wind, and in a couple more generations many, and maybe even most, will not even know what Catholicism means.
