Fr. D. Vincent Twomey, S.V.D. holds a Ph.D. in Theology and is Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the Pontifical University of St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, Ireland. A former doctoral student under Joseph Ratzinger, Twomey is the author of several books, including The End of Irish Catholicism?, Pope Benedict XVI: The Conscience of Our Age (A Theological Portrait), and Moral Theology after Humanae Vitae. His most recent books are The Dynamics of Liturgy—Joseph Ratzinger’s Theology of Liturgy: An Interpretation (Ignatius Press, 2022) and Apostolikos Thronos, Rival Accounts of Roman Primacy in Eusebius and Athanasius (Emmaus Academic, 2023, revised edition). In 2011, Benedict XVI awarded the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice medal to Fr. Twomey for outstanding services rendered to the Church and the Holy Father.
If the Church is seen simply as a human construct, then it can be remade and refashioned according to the needs of the moment—but it will not be the Church willed by God.
Editor’s note: This essay was originally given, in a slightly different form, as a public lecture on the centenary of the foundation of the Central Catholic Library, Dublin.
Like many Catholics in Ireland today, I, too, have watched with a sinking spirit the drift away from the Church, the dramatic drop in vocations and Mass attendance, the slow but steady withdrawal of Sisters and Brothers from the schools and hospitals they founded and the resulting closure of the convents and monasteries that dominated the life of every town in Ireland. Now many are but dark and empty shells where once they were beacons of light and hope.
On a more personal level, I watched the evaporation of the missionary spirit that was once so vibrant. Over the past one-and-a-half centuries, the Irish Church sent out young men and women aflame with the Faith to counties all over the world to bring Christ to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death—and much else as well: education, health care facilities and action for social justice. Not surprisingly, I have been shocked and shamed at the revelations of abuse by my fellow clerics, and by what happened in the orphanages, Magdalen laundries, reformatories, and industrial schools manned by Religious. I have been both infuriated and frustrated by the increasingly atheistic and anti-Catholic tone of public discourse—and the way it is creeping into our schools, often in the guise of cultural Marxism and Wokism—not to mention the trauma of the recent referenda on abortion, the redefinition of marriage passed by large majorities of Irish Catholics, and the well-orchestrated move to introduce euthanasia.
Even more dispiriting is the lack of any inspirational leadership in the Church in Ireland today, no theological vision at the national level, and no courageous voice in the public square—apart, that is, from a handful of Catholic journalists.
An object of belief
Seen from a purely human perspective, it does not auger well for the future. But then I am reminded of the reply made, I think, by Pope Pius VI to Napoleon when the emperor boasted that given five years or so, he would destroy the Church: “Bonne chance, Your Majesty, we have been trying that for a thousand-eight-hundred years and have failed.”
And yet, paradoxically, what the present state of the Church in Europe and Ireland has brought home to me is a growing appreciation of what is nothing less than the divine nature of the Church. When I recite the Creed, I linger on the final articles of the Apostles Creed: I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy, Catholic Church, the communion of the saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. The Church is first and foremost an object of belief. The strange paradox is that the more threatened she is in a particular historical situation (from within as well as from without), the more evident it becomes that the Church herself is, in the final analysis, a mystery, more correctly, a mystery of the Faith.
The situation we face today, though unique in its physiognomy, is not unique in its nature as a crisis of enormous proportions. But it is a real crisis, and not only in Ireland. As Roberto Petici, Professor of Modern History at Bologna University, recently pointed out:
This overarching crisis is accompanied by the process of secularization and de-Christianization that has overrun the Western world and has accelerated in the last century, making Catholicism negligible even in contexts in which it had always been an element of identity of decisive importance.
Faced with this situation, he asks: is this an inexorable trend –indeed one destined to accelerate further—or is it possible to reverse this trend? His answer is “no” to the first question, and a strong “yes” to the second.
He bases his belief on the possibility of reversing this tendency by giving us an historical overview of Church history from the Council of Trent down to the Second Vatican Council. He shows how often it happened in history that a demoralized Church, seemingly on its last legs, crushed and derided by the world, and yet, to the astonishment of even its members, saw one rebirth after another, Indeed, something similar happened here in Ireland after the Great Famine (1845—1852) when an impoverished Church but recently emancipated seemed to have collapsed—and yet went on to be reborn with a vitality only matched by that of the early Irish Christian missionary movement which helped to drag a barbaric Europe out of the Dark Ages so as to help create Western Christendom in all its glory. To justify why we can look to the future in hope, we have to have recourse to theology. And there we will find the answer that was best summed up by Chesterton, who once said: “The Church had learnt, not at the end but at the beginning of her centuries, that the funeral of God is always a premature burial.” Chesterton’s aphorism needs to be teased out a bit and to do this, we need first to examine the nature of the crisis we are facing today from a theological perspective.
In The Ratzinger Report (1985), the interview he gave to the journalist, Vittorio Messori, Cardinal Ratzinger made no bones about the root of the crisis we find ourselves in today: it is nothing less than our understanding of what the Church is. Instead, the Church is increasingly understood as a purely human institution. Indeed, we in Ireland could add that the Church is viewed by not a few as an evil institution, exposed as they are day after day to nothing but continual reminders of what went wrong in the past in Catholic Ireland. But even within her ranks, as Ratzinger said: “Many [even some theologians] no longer believe that what is at issue is a reality willed by the Lord himself.”
If the Church is seen simply as a human construct, then it can be remade and refashioned according to the needs of the moment—but it will not be the Church willed by God. The paradox is that the Church is indeed made up of men and women who continually fail, but, despite such repeated failures, behind her external visage, “the fundamental structures of the Church are willed by God himself, and therefore they are inviolable”. Without this understanding, even the content of the faith is seen as ultimately something arbitrary.
In the so-called Synodal Path taken by the Catholic Church in Germany, we see the kind of dead-end into which a local Church can find herself when her leaders adopt such an exclusively humanist understanding of the Church. The President of the German Bishops Conference claimed almost as self-evident that the teachings of the Church as found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church were not written in stone.
What is the Church?
What, then, is the Church? Where can I find her? These are the questions that the Jesuit, Henri de Lubac, one of the great theologians of the past century, posed in his book: The Church: Paradox and Mystery. Decades before the Council, he had written extensively on the Church—such as The Splendor of the Church and Catholicism – but this little book was written soon after the Council. At the time, it was already becoming evident that the renewal, which the Council intended, was, in his eyes, not producing the intended effect. That situation forced him to confront yet again what he calls the fundamental question: what is the Church?
Seen from the outside, as it were, she is a complexio oppositorum: a bundle of contradictions:
I am told that she is holy, yet I see her full of sinners. I am told of her mission to raise man above earthly cares, to remind him of his heavenly vocation, yet I see her endlessly busy with the temporal things of this earth, almost as if she wished to install us permanently here. I am assured that she is universal […], yet so often her members, as if under some compulsion, huddle together in closed enclaves, just like human beings everywhere. She is immutable, the reliable lynchpin in the chaos of history, and yet look at her now! … A paradox of a Church for paradoxical mankind and one that on occasion adapts all too much to the exigencies of the latter!”
But then he adds: “… Since her early days, indeed, while she was taking the first halting steps outside the confines of Jerusalem, the Church was reflecting the traits—and the miseries of mankind.”
However, he continues, we can easily lose sight of the essentials if we don’t look at the fundamental paradox that is proper to the Church. And it is this paradox that can introduce us to the mystery:
The Church is at once human and divine, at once a gift from above and a product of this earth. She is composed of men each of whom resists with all the weight of a laggard and wounded nature the life the Church strives to infuse. She is orientated towards the past, which contains a memorial she well knows is never past; she tends towards the future, elated by the hope of an ineffable consummation of whose nature no sensible sign gives a hint. […] She is a people, the great anonymous crowd and still—there is no other word—the most personal of all beings. Catholic, that is universal, she wishes her members to be open to everything and yet she herself is never fully open but when she is withdrawn into the intimacy of her interior life and in the silence of adoration. She is humble and she is majestic. She professes a capacity to absorb every culture, to raise up their highest values; at the same time, we see her claim for her own the homes and hearts of the poor, the undistinguished, the simple and destitute masses. Not for an instant does she cease—and her immortality assures continuity—to contemplate him who is at once crucified and resurrected, the man of sorrows and lord of glory, vanquished by, but saviour of, the world. He is her bloodied spouse and her triumphant master. From his generous heart, ever open and yet always infinitely secret, she has received her existence and the life it is his wish to communicate to all.
Pardon the long quotation, but de Lubac is almost lyrical, and his words are worth pondering. It is impossible to define the Church, de Lubac confesses, and when she defines herself, as she did at the Second Vatican Council, she can only produce a host of biblical images: the sheepfold, whose indispensable door is Christ, a piece of land to be cultivated, the house of God. Let me quote from Lumen Gentium: “The Church […] is “that Jerusalem which is above” is also called “our mother”. It is described as the spotless spouse of the spotless Lamb, whom Christ “loved and for whom He delivered Himself up that He might sanctify her”, whom He unites to Himself by an unbreakable covenant, and whom He unceasingly “nourishes and cherishes”.
Here the Council takes up two of the most powerful metaphors of the Church—Mother and Spouse. Both images are found in the New Testament. Down through the centuries, the greatest Christian thinkers and mystics have had recourse to them when trying to articulate what the Church means to them. De Lubac himself tells us that, even before he began his search to identify the essence of the Church, as it were, he knew in his heart of hearts that “I can tell it in one word, the first of all words: the Church is my mother. Yes, the Church, the whole Church, that of generations past who transmitted her life, her teachings, her witness, her culture, her love to me; and the Church of today.”
More specifically, de Lubac writes:
In a word, the Church is our mother because she gives us Christ. She brings about the birth of Christ in us. She says to us, as Paul did to his beloved Corinthians: “for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the Gospel (1 Cor 4:15). In her maternal function she is spouse, ‘glorious and without blemish’, which the Man-God brought forth from his pierced heart to unite himself with her ‘in the ecstasy of the cross’ and to make her fruitful for all time.
Another Jesuit, Pope Francis, seems to echo de Lubac, when, at the beginning of his Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, he writes: “The Church is a mother and wishes to show to all the face of God, faithful to His love, mercy and always able to restore strength and hope.”
The other image favored by de Lubac is that of the Church as Spouse of Christ. Though rooted in Old Testament prophecy (beginning with Hosea), the metaphor has its immediate origins in the New Testament, more precisely in Ephesians, chapter 5, where St Paul compares the relationship of Christ to his Church to that of the love-union of one flesh between a man and his wife, which he calls, significantly, this great mystery (mysterion). Commenting on this text, the Australian theologian, Anna Silvas reminds us that: “Christ Jesus will never withdraw his love from the Church, never abandon her, no matter how compromised she may appear to be in the eyes of the world due to the sins of her children.”
And where do we find the Church? The Council states:
This Church of Christ is truly present in all legitimate local congregations of the faithful which, united with their pastors, are themselves called churches in the New Testament.” And it adds: “In any community of the altar, under the sacred ministry of the bishop, there is exhibited a symbol of that charity and ‘unity of the mystical Body, without which there can be no salvation’. In these communities, though frequently small and poor, or living in the Diaspora, Christ is present, and in virtue of His presence there is brought together one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. For ‘the partaking of the body and blood of Christ does nothing other than make us be transformed into that which we consume’.
In one sense, the Church is primarily an invisible reality. Augustine once said in effect that many are part of the Church in an only apparent way, while in reality, they live against her, while outside the Church there are many who—without knowing it—belong profoundly to the Lord and thus also to his Body, the Church. This raises a further question: what is the relationship of the Church to humanity as a whole? One of the key themes in Ratzinger’s ecclesiology is that the Church exists not for itself; she is made up of “the few”, who exist “for many”—for everyone. According to the anonymous second-century author of the so-called Letter to Diognetius: “What the soul is in the body, this the Christians are in the world.” Or to quote the words of Our Lord: you are the salt of the earth, the light of the world (cf. Mt 5:13-14).
But the Church is also a visible reality: it exists in human form as a corporate body, an institution. More than that, the visible Church is the indispensable means God uses to achieve his design for creation: the union of man with God. Where is the visible Church to be found? The short answer given by de Lubac is: in the celebration of the Eucharist—and in a Saint. “Just as the Church is entirely concentrated in the Eucharist, it may also be said to be entirely concentrated in a saint.”
As de Lubac confesses, thanks to the fact that he had absorbed the essentials of the faith from his Catholic upbringing, he knew what to expect when he encountered a saint. What he found, was not any accomplishment of human perfection “but a strange and supernatural beauty opening up unknown vistas to me … In a saint, I saw the whole Church pass.” Ratzinger has often repeated that the greatest apology for the Church is to be found in her saints and her art.
The catholicity of the Church and sublimity of the sacraments
To recapitulate. The Church is one because she is the one Body of Christ. She is one because she is made up of all those who live lives hidden with Christ in God (cf. Col 3:3). She is one because the unity of humanity (God’s design for creation) is already being achieved in this world, in our history, in the form of a seed that is in the process of spouting.
She is holy because she is constituted by the whole sacramental system—and this is the work of the Holy Spirit transforming us sinners from within. This is perhaps best seen in the sacrament of matrimony, where the grace of the sacrament is operative in the ups and downs of the lifelong union of spouses married in Christ. The Second Vatican Council described the Church herself as the universal sacrament of the world’s salvation. What this means is that, no matter how her members may fail, even her Popes who have failed a lot in the course of history, such failure cannot prevent God from achieving his plan for the salvation of the world. The ordinary means God uses is the very human Church, which “is in Christ like a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race” (LG #1). The sacraments are effective ex opere operato and so are not dependent on the state of soul of the one who administers them, so that a sinful priest [or even, in the case of danger of death, a laicized priest] can absolve a repentant sinner of his or her sins. The Church, the Body of Christ, as the “universal sacrament of salvation” (LG #48), the salvation of all humanity, is likewise not dependent on the sinful men and women who constitute the Church, though the closer they appropriate their lives to Christ the more efficacious they can be as the leaven of society.
The Church is catholic, i.e., universal because it is rooted in the Truth, which knows no borders, even though it must find expression in different cultural contexts. And that revealed Truth is guaranteed by the divinely instituted structure of the Church: The Apostolic Succession: i.e., the Bishops in union with the Pope, when (and only when) they act authoritatively in Council or whey the Pope acts ex cathedra. Together they constitute the “hierarchy”, a term that means quite literally “of sacred origin”.
Heinrich Schlier, one of the great German scriptural scholars of the last century, discovered the mystery of the Church through his study of the New Testament as a Protestant. It was above all his study of Ephesians that led to his conversion, a conversion that cost him dearly since he lost his university post. As he well knew, the truth always carries the sign of the Cross. For him, what he called the principle of catholicity was the Church’s capacity to make definitive statements about the faith: doctrine that is binding on conscience. This ability of the Church arises from the fact of God’s definitive entry into human history, the mystery of the Incarnation: The Word became flesh and dwelt among us (Jn 1:14).
It is this definitiveness, he claimed, that is the characteristic of Catholicity. It is manifested especially in the way the Church has the authority to teach definitively, namely her dogmas, so that in the course of history the Church, led by the Spirit, could plumb the depths of the mystery of revealed Truth without ever exhausting it. Ratzinger once wrote that the term “dogma”, which means opinion, has the same root as doxa (glory): the dogmas of the Church as the way she gives glory to God. All her dogmas have as their aim the true worship of God in spirit and truth.
But the Church’s dogmas are also the framework within which the thinker can be creative, just as an artist needs a canvas, a defined space, to create something new. It was based on such definitiveness that artists and architects down through the centuries could construct cathedrals such as Notre Dame de Paris or the Basilica of St Peter in Rome. The German poet, Heinrich Heine, once said when he stood before Antwerp Cathedral in awe at its beauty: “The men who built these had dogmas. We have only opinions. And with opinions, one does not build cathedrals.”