Communion of
Saints and Sinners
Loving an imperfect church
The church is full of sinners. On this much pretty much
everyone can agree. If one took the secular media’s typical presentation of the
church as truth, one might even think that the church is full of nothing but
sinners. Actually, that too is true. What is less apparent is that those in the
church know this well; it is why we cling to this church.
One of the most popular and rich images of the church is
that of the body of Christ. The Catholic Church is meant to be the visible sign
of what is now otherwise unseen: the risen body of Jesus of Nazareth. And
perhaps no scene in Scripture represents the confounding character of this
church’s constitution better than that recorded in latter verses of the Gospel
of Luke (23:33–43). Here we learn that Jesus was hung upon the cross not alone
but with two criminals flanking him: one on his right, the other on his left.
Reviled and exhausted, Jesus spent the last moments of his life between two
justly condemned criminals, indistinguishable and interchangeable, at least
until the 39th verse. For then the two are differentiated, as one rebukes and
turns away from the so-called Messiah, while the other beseeches and turns
toward him. In the middle of these two fundamental orientations hangs the body
of Christ.
This is a pre-eminent image of the church. It is not a
church of just the right or just the left. It is the church that holds together
repentant sinners and unrepentant sinners, the latter of whom it hopes to convert
by holding the whole communion together. In that communion all manner of sin is
collected, all those shadowy effects of a world that does not know the light
from which it comes and to which it is meant to go. We who cling together in
this church do so not because we believe ourselves to be pure and just, but
precisely because we know we are not.
We cling together because we know we are sick and in need of
healing. This church is our hospital, for here, together, we receive the
medicine to open up closed hearts and release us from the unclean spirits that
seek to define us by what we can do, accumulate or dominate in this world, or
what can define or dominate us. It sometimes seems that the masses gather
around this hospital, yelling up to the windows to tell us just how sick we
are. Yes, we know. That is why we are here.
Human and Divine
The French Dominican Yves Congar released a book in 1969
with a title that, if released today, might lead it to be either widely ignored
or sharply lampooned: This Church That I Love. As one of the leading
theological minds behind the Second Vatican Council, Congar used this little
book as yet another opportunity to make known what the documents of Vatican II
attest time and again: the Catholic Church is composed of both human and divine
elements. As is all too obvious (especially now), this church is certainly not
a purely divine institution, such as would unimpeachably exemplify a perfect
society. But at the same time, this institution is not a purely human enterprise
that establishes itself and sets its own mandate. It is both at once.
The church is human with all that is good about our
humanity, but not without those parts of us that have been corrupted through
pride, the lust for prestige, acts of violence and hidden malice. The church is
also divine, for the love of God, which is God’s very being, touches us here to
first heal the corruptions of our humanity and then elevate our humanity toward
a relationship with God.
What Congar and others rediscovered at the council was that
the church does not exist as an idea or in the imagination, but is in fact a
living, breathing, beautiful and wounded body, whose very life is generated
from the grace of God, though it is not yet fully what it is called to be.
Though not the full realization of its divine calling, the church does not
cease to call all persons and every people into its communion. In its head,
Christ, who is fully human and fully divine, the church is to be, as the
“Dogmatic Constitution on the Church” states in its very first paragraph, “a
sacrament—a sign and instrument, that is, of communion with God and of the
unity of the entire human race...so that all people...may achieve full unity in
Christ.” If the sickness of the world is its inability to love genuinely, then
the church is intended to be the place where we learn how to love, first in
receiving the love of God in Christ and then in bonding ourselves to one
another in acts of charity.
This is what the church is. And yet the sin of its
members—all its members, though some more than others—keeps it from growing
fully into what it is meant to be. In our own time, nothing has scourged the
church so much as the sexual abuse of the most vulnerable of our members at the
hands of those entrusted to be their shepherds and caretakers. The scandal of
these acts of abuse, along with the failures of those in authority to
intervene, stop and correct these abuses, gravely afflicted all involved,
deeply scarring many: the victims by force, the perpetrators by will and the authorities
by compliance. As for the causes of this odiousness, there is no shortage of
opinions. It is, some say, due to the vow of celibacy, the unmarried clergy, an
outmoded governance structure, the myth of papal infallibility, antiquated
doctrine, unsophisticated magisterial instructions and on and on.
Of course, all of these things—even in their misrepresented
and misunderstood forms—are interconnected in the life of the church, but not
one of them is the source of the scandalous things in the church. The only
source is sin. It is pride, the closure to love, the preference for self over
others, the rejection of truth and the disregard for true beauty, the
unwillingness to give in charity what one receives in love at the altar: this
is the sin that rends the church. It is the darkness that the light has yet to
dispel.
Ironically, this means that within the church itself exists
the source of sickness and its healing. The very structure that is at times
used to communicate corruption and harm is the same one that communicates
healing and charity. This is because the divine that touches the human in the
church seeks to transform the human into what it is meant to become: a
communion of charity. The point of the church is not to gather people together
to feed them individually for the sake of their separate spiritual journeys.
The point of the church is to bond people together in the love of God so that
they become what they receive.
This is what Henri de Lubac, S.J., reminded the church in
recovering the dual meaning of the Eucharist as the mystical body of Christ (corpus
mysticum): the Eucharist is both the gift of God that is bestowed upon the
people and the gift of God that the people become. The Eucharist is never a
private affair, because it is the gift of making a communion of the people who
assemble—in all places at all times—through the very gift of God’s self to the
world. God makes himself one with us in Christ so that we may become one with
each other in him. The making of communion means healing all divisions,
remedying all ailments and forgiving all sins.
The Church’s Mission
Often, segments of the secular media can seem divided
regarding their own views of the church. Some outlets critique the church for
its failures in holiness, chiding it for falling short of what the world must,
implicitly at least, believe the church should be. Other outlets claim that the
church is irrelevant, outdated, one of the last remaining relics of foregone
and forlorn times. At one and the same time, critics of the church both
explicitly reject the claim that the church makes and implicitly critique the
church on the basis of the very claim that they reject. Perhaps therein lies
our society’s fascination with the church at times like these: it both wants
the church to be better than it is and does not want the church to be at all.
The real issue, though, is that the only way to truly see
the church is to see it for the mystery it is. It is the inner union of divine
and human elements that has yet to become fully what it already is most
basically. It is hard to see this when one only critiques from the outside and
refuses to step inside, even for a moment. The church is the communion of
sinners—both repentant and unrepentant—that is also the communion of saints. It
holds out hope for those who rebuke and turn away from the Messiah in its
midst, it receives the confession of those who ask for his healing and it
communicates the charity of those who have become one with others in the love
of Christ.
The modern world wants the church to be a liberal democracy,
an egalitarian society, a masterfully managed international organization, a
philanthropic agency, a modern communications outlet and a perfect society, all
while seeming to want it to go away altogether. The church is thus judged
according to the criteria pertaining to these (and other) ideals. In the end,
though, the church is measured according to a standard much deeper and much
broader than these, one that is thoroughly transcendent. The church is the sign
and instrument of the openness of the world to God, who came to the world
definitively in Christ and now reaches out to the world through and with the
church.
What is seen when the church gathers in communion at the
Eucharist is a sign for the world of God’s singular desire: to draw us all
together in the bonds of charity, of common will. This communion is also meant
to bring about what it signifies, in reaching out in charity to all, in
upholding the dignity of all, in offering healing and forgiveness to all, in
seeking healing and forgiveness from all and in growing together in the love of
God, who alone is the fulfillment of our deepest desires.
The church is not just an odd entity passing through the
world, but precisely that which seeks to participate in the transformation of
the world. Even when it is what it should be, the church’s speech and movements
will seem strange to the world, for it is trying to lead the world beyond its
own limits. And in what is the richest irony of all, God elects to work through
and with ordinary, sinful human beings in this plan of salvation. For the plan
is to save us together for each other, not separately for our lonesome selves.
It is the communion of sinners that is the sign and instrument of this
salvation.
Leonard J.
DeLorenzo is the director of the Notre Dame Vocation Initiative
(Notre Dame Vision) in the Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre
Dame, where he also teaches in the theology department. He is currently working
on a book on the theology of the communion of saints.
Labels: america magazine, catholic, church, DeLorenzo, Pope Francis, saints, sinners
