The Church Is Not Christ

 

THE CHURCH IS NOT CHRIST

“Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.”—Matthew 10:40

The Church is literally not Christ, the Church is not God—the Church is metaphysically something different, separate, and distinct. God of course exists in everything, including the Church, in various ways. God subsists in the Church in grace. However, the two are metaphysically not the same, so in this fundamental sense, the Church is not Christ.

To the point, the Church is a visible institution peopled by sinners, so that the sinful Church is not Christ because Christ is sinless. It’s a critical distinction. We do not treat the Church the same way we treat God. It would be idolatry to do so.

It’s a sin that is committed in so many ways. The clerical sexual abuse crisis, for example, is a consequence of this idolatry.

The words, “The Church is not Christ” are in fact not original to me—they occur throughout the literature on the recent clerical sexual abuse crisis.

Some links apropos of this subject:

https://www.snapnetwork.org/recommended_reading

—“Recommended Reading,” SNAP, 2018

https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/best-book-by-far-on-scandal-clerical-abuse/

—Dr. Jeff Mirus, “The best book (by far) on the scandal of clerical abuse,” Catholic Culture, July 8, 2020

https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316075582/bostoncom-20

—The Investigative Staff of the Boston Globe et al., Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church Hardcover (2002), Amazon.com

See in particular David Gibson, The Coming Catholic Church (2003), page 117, for the quote, “The Church is not Christ.”

Gibson cites the May 27, 2002 article “What Kind of Church Is This?” by Father J. Michael Byron in America:

“…Father J. Michael Byron, an assistant professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, offered a list of ‘correctives’ for a ‘chastened theology of church’ that would respond to the problems raised by the sexual abuse scandal. In an eight-point agenda that he presented in America magazine, Byron started with a call to teach that ‘the church is not Jesus Christ.’

“Byron noted that ‘this apparently obvious axiom in ecclesiology has received scant acknowledgment in pastoral praxis, in the documents that emanate from teaching authorities and in sermons preached on Sunday mornings. Several implications flow from this simple principle. One is that nothing is self-evidently God’s will simply because some cleric, council or Roman dicastery has said so. While Jesus Christ can be afforded that kind of respect, the church is a more ambiguous reality. However intimately and beautifully interrelated are Jesus and church, they are not coterminous. A related implication is that the reverence owed to the church, while real, is not the same as the deference due to Jesus Christ. That is because the quality of “holiness” attributable to each is not the same. The holiness of Jesus is such as to push aside all sin and darkness. The holiness of the church still allows for the possibility of harboring pedophiles. One who points out this fact in public is not thereby unfaithful, notwithstanding some recent Episcopal comments to the contrary.’” (Gibson, pages 117-118)

Gibson locates the root of the clerical sexual abuse crisis, wherein protection of the institution and its reputation took precedence over care for the victims, in clericalism, which he describes as follows:

“…the reflexive notion that clerics are a privileged fraternity whose sacred status guarantees them eternal protection from the reproaches of the world, even when they do wrong. This caste mentality is not unknown in other, especially male, cohorts. Look no further than the ‘blue wall of silence’ among police, or the sometimes pathological camaraderie of elite military units. Moreover, the clerical culture is in many ways no different from the corporate culture, in which executives see themselves and their interests as identical to those of the institution. It is a trap the rest of the church’s members, and the rest of society, inadvertently help to set by equating the men in Roman collars with ‘the church.’ Thus the Catholic sexual abuse scandal stems in large part from the same self-interest that regularly leads to the downfall of otherwise successful business titans and politicians. It is no coincidence that the worst abuses revealed by the scandal were committed by the most ‘corporate’ and least pastoral of leaders….” (Gibson, pages 202-203)

Elsewhere, he says:

“…the metaphor of priests as a clan unto themselves remains the defining mark of the clerical world. The priesthood is a ‘fraternity,’ after all, and bishops are supposed to be ‘fathers in Christ.’ Father Bruce Williams…wrote in an essay…‘How many people now raging at the bishops would be immune from the impulse to try to shield their own sons accused of comparable offenses? How eager would they be to deliver their children to the tender mercies of prosecutors, as bishops are now expected to do with accused priests?’

“But priests are not, in fact, the bishops’ sons, nor are priests defenseless children, and some critics see the enshrinement of the filial metaphor into a de facto dogma as a perilous development for the priesthood, one with profound psychological roots and enormous ramifications for the Catholic Church. As Thomas Reese put it, ‘The diocese is like a family business—Uncle Charlie may be incompetent but you can’t fire Uncle Charlie and you can’t fire a priest….Somewhere along the line some of them forgot that parents and their kids are also part of the family.’

“…In [Father Donald] Cozzens’ reading, which is both detailed and controversial, the new Oedipal triangle has the church as mother, the bishop as father, and the priest in the middle as son—one who upon ordination suddenly finds himself with hundreds of siblings in his brother-priests.” (Gibson, pages 207-208)

 

The Roman Catholic Church is an all-too-human institution, naturally abounding in human foibles, idiosyncrasies, and yes, even gravely sinful habits. We should deal with the institution accordingly.