Reader Question: What Is the Church?

Friday September 12, 2008

A reader writes:

I read your blog posts on the definition of the Church. I also read George Weigel's "One Body, Imperfect Parts," where he seems to consider the "Church of Jesus Christ" as composed of every Christian body.
As Weigel writes, "Why 'imperfect?' Because different Christian communities have different understandings of the nature of the Church that is the one body of Christ," and "The Catholic Church, at the 'liberalizing Second Vatican Council' (to use the standard journalistic trope), declared that, according to its self-understanding, it is the fullest, most rightly-ordered expression of the will of Christ for his church. The Catholic Church also acknowledged, at Vatican II, that there are important and life-giving elements of sanctification and grace in other Christian communities."
So, what is the Church? If the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church and if the Protestant ecclesial bodies only receive the grace that accrues to them from the Catholic Church by derivation, how are they "the Church"?

The reader is referring to a series of six blog posts that I wrote in July 2007, entitled "What Is the Church?" (You can find links to the six posts at the end of this entry.) Those six posts examine a short document entitled "Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church," released by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) on July 10, 2007. The reader seems to be suggesting that George Weigel and I have interpreted the document somewhat differently--and she is right. The heart of the CDF document is a restatement of traditional Catholic ecclesiology--that branch of theology concerned with understanding the nature of the Church--as the first two paragraphs of the document make clear. Weigel, writing for Newsweek's "On Faith" online column, does not mention ecclesiology by name, and he confines his discussion of it to a somewhat confusing parenthetical remark more than halfway through his piece: "(Which of these communities are 'Churches' and which are 'ecclesial communities,' as the Catholic Church understands them, has to do with the sacramental system, or lack thereof, in these various expressions of Christian faith.)"

This explains the reader's confusion. Weigel, by setting the question of ecclesiology aside, avoids discussing the fifth and final question raised--and answered--by the document:

"Why do the texts of the [Second Vatican] Council and those of the Magisterium since the Council not use the title of 'Church' with regard to those Christian Communities born out of the Reformation of the sixteenth century?"

Those Christian communities, the document states,

"do not enjoy apostolic succession in the sacrament of Orders, and are, therefore, deprived of a constitutive element of the Church. These ecclesial Communities which, specifically because of the absence of the sacramental priesthood, have not preserved the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic Mystery cannot, according to Catholic doctrine, be called 'Churches' in the proper sense."

The answer to the reader's question, then--"How are Protestant ecclesial bodies 'the Church'?"--is that, sadly, they aren't. Mr. Weigel, by not discussing ecclesiology, does not address the fact that the entire document is an attempt to clarify this very point.

That is not to say that those who belong to such communities are not Christians--far from it. The document states that these communities contain "numerous elements of sanctification and of truth," and those elements allow the Holy Spirit to use those communities as "instruments of salvation" because, "as gifts properly belonging to the Church of Christ, [those elements] impel towards Catholic Unity." (It is significant that this quotation comes immediately after the document notes that to say that "the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church"--the formulation used by Vatican II--"indicates the full identity of the Church of Christ with the Catholic Church.")

But in the Catholic understanding, these "ecclesial Communities" as communities are separated from the Church by their lack of a sacramental priesthood. To the extent that they act as "instruments of salvation," they do so precisely by drawing the Christians in them closer toward the fullness of the Church of Christ, which subsists in the Catholic Church.

Further Reading:

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