Dear Friends,
Some have been asking questions about the holiness of the church given the recent revelations about Cardinal McCarrick and the investigations into past abusive activity of clergy. I’d like to share with you some thoughts from a book published fifty years ago by Professor Ratzinger who later became Pope Benedict. The book is An Introduction to Christianity and in the last section of the book, he deals with two problematic areas, one of them being the idea of the church being “holy.” Here are some of his thoughts:
“For many people today the Church has become the main obstacle to belief. They can no longer see anything but the human struggle for power, the petty spectacle of those who claim to administer official Christianity, seem to stand in the way of the true spirit of Christianity…How can we reply?
…The word “holy” does not apply in the first place to the holiness of the human persons but refers to the divine gift which bestows holiness in the midst of human unholiness…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 a holiness that radiates as the holiness of Christ in 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 through which the reality of grace as the pardoning of those who are in themselves unworthy continually becomes visibly present in history…
In the human dream of a perfect world, holiness is always visualized as untouchability by sin and evil, as something unmixed with the later; there always remains in some form or other a tendency to think in terms of black and white, a tendency to cut out and reject mercilessly the current form of the negative. In contemporary criticism of society and in the actions in which it vents itself, this merciless side always present in human ideals is once again only too evident.
That is why the aspect of Christ’s holiness that upset his contemporaries was the complete absence of this condemnatory note – fire did not fall on the unworthy nor were the zealous allowed to pull up the weeds which they saw growing luxuriantly on all sides. On the contrary, this holiness expressed itself precisely as mingling with 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 judgement 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? 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, love which does not keep its distance in a sort of aristocratic, untouchable purity but mixes with the dirt of the world, in order to overcome it? I must admit that to me this unholy holiness of the Church has in itself something infinitely comforting about it…”
I find Fr. Ratzinger’s reflection very consoling at a time when it appears the Church’s leadership has failed us. God continues to work in the Church – choosing to be with us in spite of our sinfulness. The Church will pass through this time of pain to a better place – because of what Jesus is doing among us.
Peace,
Fr. Damian