Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

In Wednesday’s General Audience catechesis Pope Benedict addresses the calling of Matthew as an Apostle. He notes the nature of Matthew’s life as a tax collector and Jesus’ mission to sinners and proclaims:

Jesus no one from his friendship. More than that, precisely when he is seated at the table in Matthew-Levi’s house, answering those who were scandalized by the fact of his frequenting rather undesirable company, he makes the important declaration: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I came not to call the righteous but sinners” (Mark 2:17).

This is an important truth that we need to continually keep in the forefront of our thoughts. Fortunately, this is not one of those truths that was attenuated in the fuzzy catechesis of the last generation or so. However, Benedict reminds us that Jesus comes to us sinners for another purpose than to just hang…:

Today one cannot admit attachment to what is incompatible with the following of Jesus, as are dishonest riches. Once he said openly: “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me” (Matthew 19:21). This is precisely what Matthew did: He rose and followed him! In this “rising” one can see the detachment from a situation of sin and, at the same time, the conscious adherence to a new life, upright, in communion with Jesus.

Jesus’ love is an offering of communion with the divine nature. However, this communion can only be had when we conform ourselves to the inner Trinitarian structure of love. That is, it must be a total gift of oneself to God. What that means is that one cannot hold on to those aspects of himself that are not in accord with divine life. I am speaking here of choosing disordered self love for which the 10 commandments provide a clear outline.

The preachers of “inclusivity” do not generally make this connection. They recognize that Jesus loves everyone and invites everyone to communion with Him. That is why they love to preach about Jesus’ mission to sinners and outcast. However, when they preach in this way, it is usually aimed against those (especially the Catholic Church) who point to the Gospel’s demand for personal interior and exterior transformation. When they do this they presuppose that when the Church points out this need for personal change, She is saying that God does not love those who refuse to amend their ways. This is why they counter with Jesus’ going to the lowly and sinful as a counter example to the moral demands. This is where these preachers would do well to better understand some metaphysics.

The Church teaches that God does not change. He is immutable and so the only change that occurs…is with us. We either return God’s love with a total gift of ourselves or we remain in our separated condition. Jesus’ love is inclusive yes, but we are free to exclude ourselves from it if we so choose. So there is the possibility of exclusion, by self exclusion. Rather, as with Matthew we must detach ourselves from those things that weigh us down…and I am not talking about guilt. We have to detach ourselves from sinful attachments that annihilate our communion with God. Lust, pornography, adultery, fornication in all of its forms, gluttony, sloth, calumny, theft, abortion, artificial contraception, and every other form of radical selfishness. This is the first step because one must first possess himself. But it does not stop there.

Total self giving only begins with self possession because you cannot give what you do not have. However, the Beatitudes show the rest of the way. We have to be perfect by giving ourselves totally to God and so to others. This is achieved through forgiveness of others, humble faith, purity of heart, and the embracing of our crosses among other things. Luther thought that the Beatitudes were an ratcheting up of the requirements of the Law. He taught that they were given in order to lead us into despair so that we could recognize the Law was impossible and be freed of it by choosing the Gospel. However, he was wrong because he did not understand the intrinsic nature of grace. God’s grace is a gift of Himself; it is participation in the divine nature. Through it we can be divinized, overcome our fallenness, and by cooperating with His grace, achieve the interior transformation to which Jesus calls us all. That is the purpose of the Sacraments. The sacramental life is the path to true communion with Jesus.

Benedict XVI’s Wednesday audience catecheses on the Church continues with three lessons on St. Peter (May 17, May 24, and June 7). B16 has been devoting some time to the nature of the Church, especially her hierarchical structure, by discussing its foundation on the Apostles and what is meant by Apostolic succession. With the May 17th audience, he now is looking at the Apostles individually. And so appropriately, he begins with a look at St. Peter.

In the first catechesis, Benedict reminds us that he is talking about the Church in terms of a family, and now he looks at Peter’s place in it. He shows Peter as the leading figure among the Apostles. Unlike the homilies one often hears these days which like to belittle Peter and his lack of faith, B16 is much more fair to him by recognizing his strengths (trust, sincerity, and generosity) as well as his weaknesses (impetuosity and strong will). Peter is the leader and so he also receives the most correction from Jesus (e.g. “get behind me Satan” Mk 8:33). Benedict shows from Peter’s experience, that the journey of faith is an up and down adventure; it is not a one time statement. If it is that way for a man who has enough faith to walk on water and still run away then we ought not be too comfortable in our illusions of self-sufficiency. It also ought not scandalize us too much when we see bishops or even the Pope fail.

The second catechesis focuses on Peter’s strength and his openness to the Holy Spirit (e.g. his response to Jesus’ “who do you say I am” in Mark 8 and his response to Jesus’ “will you also leave me” in John 6) which are followed by Peter’s weakness in denying the condemned Jesus. Benedict points out in John’s Gospel, how Peter is called to confront his weaknesses when Jesus asks Peter by the Sea of Galilee if he loves Him. The term John uses to describe Jesus’ question about Peter’s love is agape. Agape is the strongest, selfless and unconditional love. Peter responds and uses a term for love that show he now recognizes his weakness of faith. He tells Jesus that He already knows that Peter’s love is still only one of filias. As with Peter’s triple denial on Good Friday evening, Peter is called to thrice admit His total insufficiency without God’s grace. Peter is cut to the quick but he now knows what it means to be a leader in Christ’s Church. Peter responds three times about his yet insufficient love. In response, each time Jesus tells Peter to guard and tend His family, His flock. Benedict suggests that through this exchange, we can see that when we put our trust in the Church and the successor to St. Peter, we realize that from the beginning that this trust is not ultimately in a human institution or a human person, and not in our own faith. Rather we recognize that as with Peter, even when we have leaders with the right heart and earnest will, they will sometimes fail. Rather, our trust is in the divine institution, the Church, because She is guaranteed by its Head.

The final session on St. Peter looks at the significance of a name change in biblical times. Jesus changes Simon’s name (wavering) to Peter (rock). This name change reflects almost an ontological change in the person. The change also reflects a new mission; Peter is no longer a fisherman in his father’s employ but a fisherman in the employ of Christ. In the audience, B16 shows that Scripture consistently shows that Peter has primacy from the start (the only exception is Acts 15) and that both he and the other disciples recognize this (e.g. Peter is always first of the three who accompany Jesus in most significant events such as the Transfiguration, Jesus prays only that Peter’s faith will be saved in order to strengthen the brethren [Luke 22:30-31], the tax collectors in the Temple go up to Peter to ask about the Temple tax and Jesus has Peter pay it only for Himself and Peter, etc.). This primacy has a significant connotation when we recognize Jesus as the Son of God, a term which refers to the king in the line of David and this Davidic King is the promised Anointed One. Peter is the King’s prime-minister.

B16 treats the triple metaphors in Matthew 16: the Rock, the keys, and the authority to bind and loose. He shows the manner in which Christianity has always understood them. In other words, this three metaphors establish St. Peter with the primacy of authority over the Church. B16 goes on to point out that giving Peter the mission of strengthening the brethren in the context of the Last Supper reveals the ultimate meaning of his primacy: “Peter must be the custodian of the communion with Christ; he must guide in the communion with Christ so that the net will not tear but sustain the great universal communion.”

Peter is the sign and instrument of Church communion/unity with her Head, Christ. As St. Ambrose of Milan wrote in the fifth century, Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia (where is Peter, there is the Church).

Benedict XVI’s May 10th Wednesday audience brings the importance of Apostolic succession to the issue of Apostolic Tradition. Apostolic succession is the guarantee of Tradition’s authenticity. Benedict shows that Scripture testifies to the implicit understanding of the first Apostles that there was a vacant office that had to be filled (cf. Acts 1:15-26). This pericope from Acts is the framework for understanding the structure of the Church.

St. Matthias was elected as bishop (the term was to come into use later) to fill the office vacated by Judas when the latter succumbed to despair over his treason. Benedict explains that the term bishop, from the Greek episcope, refers to this office as one of shepherds of souls who are entrusted with guarding the flock as St. Peter points out in his first letter.

Benedict points out that above all, Apostolic succession is to be understood in terms of the historical continuity of ministers but also the spiritual sense of the privileged action and transmission of the Holy Spirit (by which he means Holy Orders). This is an important reaffirmation of the traditional understanding of Church structure. In the last few decades, some Catholic ecclesiologists (primarily those involved in ecumenical dialogues with Lutheran and Anglican communities) have begun to float the theory that Apostolic succession means only the transmission of Apostolic faith. The reason for this speculation is that it would allow them to posit the validity of orders in these ecclesial communities if they were able to also show that for the most part, these communities remained close enough to the Apostolic faith. This, I think, is why Benedict chooses to make this statement here. He is clarifying for those confused theologians, that these novel theories have no standing.

Benedict goes on to quote a bishop from the second century, St. Irenaeus of Lyon, who explicitly ties the office of bishop to the succession of the Apostles. St. Irenaeus says that the office of bishop, and more explicitly, the bishop of Rome is “the sign, criterion, and guarantee of the uninterrupted transmission of the apostolic faith.” He said that every church, to be one, has to be in harmony with this Church in Rome.

Thus, Benedict concludes that from the very beginning of the Church, the Apostles and their successors, identified through Apostolic succession, have been seen as the sure sign and guarantee of Apostolic faith. The Catholic Church today, exists and guarantees the purity of the faith not because of a “mere material concatenation” but because of the Holy Spirit who makes present Jesus Christ as the Head of His Bride, in the person of His priests and bishops. This gift of the Holy Spirit is transmitted through the sacramental matter of the laying on of hands.

Here Benedict makes it clear again: Apostolic succession is guaranteed through Holy Orders which are valid only with the proper sacramental form and matter. This prerequisite is completed by the assurance of being in union with one’s bishop who in turn is in union with the Bishop of Rome.

After a little hiatus, I will return to (and catch up on) Pope Benedict XVI’s catechetical series on the Church. I left off on his May 3 audience. Here, Benedict continues on the theme of Apostolic Tradition. In the previous installment (April 26) he showed that authentic Tradition is not some dead thing but a living continuation of Christ’s gift of Himself to His Church.

In the May 3 lesson, B16 invokes the teaching of the Second Vatican Council’s Dei Verbum (Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation). In citing Dei Verbum, Benedict shows that the Council describes New Testament Tradition in terms of divine revelation that began as oral under the watchful care of the Apostles, who saw their vocations to guard and preach the deposit of faith. However, Tradition extends beyond simply the cognitive content of faith. While it includes the gospel message of salvation from our sins, it also contains the living means of this salvation–namely, our access to grace. Living Tradition then is Church doctrine, life, and worship. It is also the Holy Spirit acting in history and in the lives of those who are being called to salvation.

The Holy Spirit makes Christ present to every place and time; He is the gaurantor of this living river of life the Church calls Tradition. Christ isn’t separated from us by a 2000 year gulf since His Incarnation and Resurrection, but through the Spirit He is present to us today in His Church through His Mystical Body, the Church.

Some things to note in this audience: B16 refers to the Catholic Church as “eschatological Israel” (which is inferred by his theme of apostolic succession). This is significant for several reasons. First, it emphasizes the continuity of the Catholic Church with Old Testament Israel. The Old Testament Church was not abrogated with Pentecost in A.D. 33, but it was brought to fruition as promised by the Prophets. The Prophets told of YHWH’s betrothal to His People (in Hebrew ‘am, connoting family).  Israel in her relationship to YHWH, was eventually referred to as Kahal, the “called out” (connoting those called out of Egypt).  YHWH’s betrothal to Old Testment Israel (the Kahal) is fulfilled with Christ’s marriage to His People, the New Testament Church.

The continuity of the Old Testament Kahal/Church with the New Testament Church (Greek - Ecclesia) can be seen etymologically in the Greek Old Testament (the LXX) in which Kahal is translated Ecclesia. This is the term the New Testament selects for that body which Jesus established upon St. Peter.  Ecclesia makes its way from German to “church” in English. But this continuity is more than etymological. When it comes time for the marriage, the betrothal is not abrogated; it is completed and brought to fulfillment. There is a real continuity between the Old Testament and New Testament people of God.  This covenantal understanding of man’s relationship with God is the context behind Benedict’s use of the term “eschatological Israel” and it explains why he shows that Israel, in Christ, is being opened and extended to the whole world.

A second point to be made here is that in calling the Catholic Church “eschatological Israel”, the Pope is contradicting modern notions that the Catholic Church is just one Church among many (I am thinking here especially of those who make much of Lumen gentium’s use of “subsists in” [8]). Rather, he intimates that Christ founded one Church and all who belong to this monolithic (in terms of its being) Church, belong to the Catholic Church in varying degrees, depending upon the extent to which each person possesses the fullness of truth.

Back to the issue of continuity: another thing to notice here is the importance B16 places on the continued continuity of the Church from the Apostles until the present time. Benedict cites Pope St. Clement of Rome (the 4th Pope) as a first century voice of the Church (well before Constantine by the way) who emphasized Apostolic attestation to the divine institution of the Church hierarchy. In other words, those who dream dreams of the Church as an egalitarian commune, or a western democratic political entity impose an anachronistic view on the reality of the first century when they claim the Church was without a hierarchical structure in the earliest of days. One need only read through the Early Church Fathers to see how anyone from the time was to determine if they were in union with Jesus’ gospel message. The Fathers asked them if they were in union with their bishop. It soon became clear that the bishops were in union with the Church, if they in turn were in union with the Pope.

Benedict wants to make clear, as he said at the beginning of this series, to accept Christ is to accept the whole Christ.  This includes the Church structure that he established.

After a couple of weeks dedicated to Holy Week and Easter, B16 has picked up again his new catechetical series on the Church. This series, if you recall, is aimed at correcting the all too common but mistaken Christian individualism which desires a relationship with Christ without His Church. Benedict shows that this is an impossibility. Scripture, the early Church and the entire Christian Tradition demonstrate that the Church is the extension and prolongation of the Incarnation. In other words, if you want Jesus you have to accept the whole Christ–which is His Mystical Body.

His audience this week continues the theme of communion with Christ in His Church through the Holy Spirit. However, B16 moves on to the topic of Tradition. Tradition, coming from the Latin traditio which in the biblical sense means that which is handed on, has negative connotations for many Western Christians who have been raised in the polemics of the Reformation communities. I will leave aside showing that Sola Scriptura is unbiblical, unhistorical, and illogical as there are a plethora of resources for this and more importantly B16 does not directly address it in this audience. Instead, I will focus on his positive affirmations.

Benedict XVI begins his discussion by emphasizing that there is an authentic communion that unites the universal Church throughout the world today (synchronic) but this communion also transcends time, past, present and future, and unites Christians throughout all time (diachronic) as well. This is effected by Jesus’ work of salvation and is made effective in time through the Spirit making use of the Tradition left by Christ. He says:

The Spirit appears as the guarantor of the active presence of mystery in history, who assures its realization through the centuries. Thanks to the Paraclete, the experience of the Risen One, made by the apostolic community in the origins of the Church, will always be able to be lived by successive generations, in the measure that it is transmitted and actualized in faith, in worship and in the communion of the People of God, pilgrim in time. And, in this way, we, now, in Eastertide, live the encounter with the Risen One not only as something of the past, but in the present communion of the faith, of the liturgy, of the life of the Church.

Benedict has shown that Jesus left Another Paraclete and also a Church, the latter of which is now led by successors to the apostles with sacramental means of conveying saving grace. All of these things are the Church’s Tradition. All of this was handed on by Christ and continues to be handed on to believers through the successors of the apostles vivified by the Holy Spirit. B16 shows, especially using the Acts of the Apostles, that there is a certain fusion of the action of the Holy Spirit with St. Paul in administering to the Church the salvation won by Christ. He indicates that God has chosen to work through His visible Church to apply the grace of the Cross to believers in time. This is authentic Tradition; it is the patrimony handed on by Jesus Christ by which salvation is applied throughout time. Tradition is not some dead letter:

Concluding and summarizing, we can therefore say that Tradition is not the transmission of things or words, a collection of dead things. Tradition is the living river that unites us to the origins, the living river in which the origins are always present, the great river that leads us to the port of eternity. In this living river, the word of the Lord that we heard at the beginning from the lips of the reader: “And behold, I am with you always, until the eng of the age” is fulfilled again (Matthew 28:20).

Understanding Tradition in this way, one recognizes it as a living breathing reality that, because it is a gift from our Savior, ought to be loved and cherished as we do Sacred Scripture. It is the means of effecting Our Lord’s presence in a salvific manner. Tradition is nothing less than the means to eternal life in Christ through the Spirit.

The Holy Father’s Wednesday audience catechesis series continued this week with a look at the origins of the Church to see what this reveals of Her essential aspects and Her structure.  He continues to demonstrate that the anachronism of Christian “individualism” is problematic by showing that Christianity has always understood that in order to embrace Christ one must accept the Whole Christ–which includes His Church in her totality.

B16 continues to go back to the early Church Fathers for this reason.  He recognizes that those who espouse individualism, incorrectly assume that the early Church was anarchic, egalitarian, and amorphous and that hierarchical Church structure is a mistaken historical accretion.  As such, Benedict cites St. Irenaeus of Lyon in his work, Against Heresies, from the second century:

Where the Church is, there also is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and all grace, as the Spirit is truth” (”Adversus Haereses,” III, 24, 1: PG 7, 966).

Here the Pope finds Irenaeus shows two aspects of the Church and her relationship with the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit edifies and gives truth and grace to the Church.  However, there is a certain reciprocity (though certainly not in the sense of necessity on the part of the Holy Spirit) in this relationship in that the Holy Spirit does not eliminate Church’s humanity–to include human weakness and failings.  Thus, from the Church’s very beginning there has been a communion in truth, love and grace coexisting with experiences of trials, Judas-like betrayals, and wounds to communion.

B16 shows that both divine communion and human failings have always existed in the Church.  St. John shows that from the first days of the Church have been those Christians who separated themselves from Church unity (cf. 1 John 2:19).  John goes on to say that those who separate themselves harm the communion.  However, he also indicates that communion is not possible with those who do not accept the teaching of the Church (cf. 2 John 9-11).

It is left to those on earth to lead the family of God in truth and unity.  Benedict says that this is what the apostles were called to do in their ministry:

And here we come to an important point. The Church is totally of the Spirit, but it has a structure, the apostolic succession, which has the responsibility to guarantee the Church’s permanence in the truth given by Christ, from which the capacity to love also proceeds. The first summary of the Acts of the Apostles expresses with great effectiveness the convergence of these values in the life of the early Church: “They devoted themselves to the Apostles’ teaching and fellowship (’koinonia’), to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42).

Here it is.  Unity is ultimately from the Holy Spirit but it is also mediated by human beings.  The Holy Spirit uses the apostolic ministry, the ordained priesthood, to keep and promote communion.  The gift of communion, kept and promoted by the hierarchical aspect of the Church, is a two-fold ministry.  It is a ministry of truth and charity.  These are two sides of the same gift of communion and cannot be separated.  You cannot have one without the other.

Separating oneself from the truth as proclaimed by the Magisterium necessarily separates one (in degrees) from communion with the Church and the Holy Spirit.  Picking and choosing which truths one wishes to follow is not simply illogical because it presumes and denies the authority of the Church at one and the same time, it is also an act which attenuates charity because truth and charity go inseparably together. 

Benedict XVI concludes the lesson exhorting Christians to pray for the successors of the apostles–the bishops, and for him–Peter’s successor so that they may be faithful custodians of the truth and mediators of charity such that communion never be extinguished in the Church and in the world.

This post will catch me up on B16’s Wednesday audiences catecheses…until tomorrow. The title of the March 29th audience is the “Gift of Communion.” I have indicated that I think his trajectory is one of deconstructing modern Christian individualism with an approach infused with covenant theology and Christian personalism.

In this talk, he resumes the lesson from his discussion of the role of the apostolic witnesses testifying to the truth of the Person of Christ. Jesus Christ has been witnessed to each and everyone of us, by the Church. Benedict’s argument shows that it would not be possible for anyone to know Christ if the early Church had fallen into the modern error that claims that religion is a purely personal and private affair. But in this catechesis he shows that the Apostles are more than simply witnesses.

He cites Pope Clement who at the end of the first century showed that the structure of the Church was hierarchical. Benedict says:

The Twelve Apostles — as the third successor of Peter, Pope Clement, said at the end of the first century — took care to provide their successors (cf. 1 Clement 42, 4) so that the mission entrusted to them would continue after their death. Throughout the centuries, the Church, structured under the leadership of legitimate pastors, has continued to live in the world as mystery of communion, in which in a certain sense, the Trinitarian communion itself is reflected, the mystery of God himself.

B16 goes on, in the rest of the article, to discuss the relationship between a personal communion with Christ and the ecclesial union of Christians with one another. In fact, he says that you cannot have one without the other. There is no union with Christ without communion with His Church because the Church is the mechanism by which Jesus joins each individual into His Mystical Body. Benedict refers to this as a “double communion” in which our koinonia, our communion, with God and each other cannot be separated from one another.

The gift of communion requires that we come out of our solitudes and participate in the love, the communal life, to which God calls us. This of course, is reminiscent of JPTG’s emphasis that love and communion with God is achieved by means of a total gift of self. Communion is a remedy to this loneliness and alienation into which we are born because of our fallen world.

In the end, our call to Trinitarian communion can be actualized by means of the Incarnation, the latter to which we have access through the Church–Christ’s Mystical Body. This means we have access to this koinonia through the Church in Her totality, which includes the faithful and the hierarchy.

Cartesian presuppositions have deluded many into cafeteria types of religious sentiments. B16’s catechesis is showing why we cannot pick and choose. That to accept Christ is to accept the whole Christ, which includes His Catholic Church. Tomorrow’s audience will reveal where he is taking us next.

I have not posted on B16’s new catechetical series since the first back in mid March; however he did continue the new theme as you might expect. I don’t suppose it would have been much of a series if he had devoted only one lesson to it. The second in the series focused on the Apostles as envoys of Christ.

In the first installment B16 shows where he is going it seems. I believe that he is taking aim at what he sees as a major problem for Church unity. That is, a deficient individualism. The first installment contextualized the discussion. B16 showed the Church as the fulfillment of God’s covenant promise to Israel. Old Testament Israel was God’s family, this family becomes a universal family in the Universal, the Catholic, Church. However, it is His family in a radically new way. We become “sons in the Son” as the Fathers put it. This family union is established and maintained through Christ’s Mystical Body–the Church. The Church is ontologically, the extension and prolongation of the Incarnation. Christ is still present among His people. Thus, Benedict concludes one cannot live the fantasy of a solely personal relationship with Christ.

The second installment maintains this classical ecclesiology infused with insights from more recent covenant theology, but he begins to add a personalistic perspective. He begins the Audience citing a passage from the Epistle to the Ephesians, a pericope with which the new Catholic apologists are quite familiar. It tells us that the Church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus as the Cornerstone (cf. 2:20). B16 is starting to bring out the fact that we as a Church have always had Christ mediated to us by witnesses, beginning with the Apostles.

Here is a key point, we has been witnessed to us is not simply intellectual content, not simply the writings of Apostles and Apostolic men, but we have people witnessing to us, a Person–the Person of Jesus Christ. The deformation of Christian faith that suggests that faith is solely private and personal–that authentic Christian faith is just “me and Jesus”, must reckon with this historical fact. We can and ought to have a personal relationship with Christ but we cannot have it without the Church. And this Church is one that is in union with the Apostolic faith.

B16 also continues his covenant theological focus of the New Testament as fulfillment of the Old. He shows Jesus to be the fulfillment of Israel’s hopes for a “Chosen One” who is to gather all of the sheep together into one flock. Jesus begins with proclaiming the Good News that God’s promises have been fulfilled, first to the Covenant People and subsequently to the rest of the nations.

Human persons, the Apostles, join in Jesus’ mission to preach the Good News. They will soon be the only witnesses when Jesus fulfills His mission. Communion with Christ will be possible for those who have not had a direct experience, through the witness of a Person by persons. His next audience will look more closely at this idea of communion.

 

Benedict XVI has completed JPTG’s final catechetical cycle and this last Wednesday began the first of his own on a new theme.   In this new series B16 is addressing the relationship of Christ to the Church.

B16 is motivated to refute the radical individualism that arose from errant philosophical ideas, made its way into Christianity through the Protestant Reformation and has in the last century taken its hold on most Catholics.  Here I am talking about the “Jesus and me” mentality that allows one to deceive himself into thinking that the Church is extraneous, an optional add-on, or perhaps an infinitely elastic institution that has more to do with human desire than the Truth.   What is left depends upon your upbringing.  For Protestants and some Catholics all that is really important is a “personal relationship with Christ.”  For other Catholics, it is just knowing that Jesus is love so I can do whatever I want because Jesus loves me just the same. 

Separating Christ from His Church is not a new idea.  St. Cyprian of Carthage combated this false notion as early as the 3rd century.  Some probably recall his famous dictum:

No one can have God as Father who does not have the Church as Mother (St. Cyprian, De unitate. 6: PL 4, 519).

What is new is that these views are now much more strongly reinforced by the individualism of Western culture than they have been in the past.  That is one reason why many Catholics have adopted this line of thinking.  It provides justification for Catholics not evangelizing because faith is just a personal thing; it allows them to justify their decision to quit going to Mass because ‘God knows that they love Him’, and a host of other fallacious ideas.

B16’s point of departure is JPTG’s Novo millennio inuente, in which the latter exhorts the faithful to seek the face of Christ.  B16 shows why the face of Christ is reflected in the face of His Church.  The Church is the extension and prolongation of the Incarnation.  It was established by Him as the vehicle of salvation.  In other words, rather than being an optional opportunity for an attenuated “fellowship,” the Church is the sacramental means by which we are saved through a real and substantial communio, a koinonia, a communion with Christ.

B16 shows that the novelty of individualism is contrary to the gospel and is a foreign importation into Christianity.  It is a modern hermeneutic imposed upon Judeo-Christian thought.  He uses covenant theology to show the covenantal nature of God’s relationship with His “people.”  The Hebrew which “people” translates is ‘am, a term with familial connotations. 

Covenant theology has found that in the Old Testament, covenants were the means by which one could extend family bonds beyond biological ties.  The inspired authors of the Old Testament used this social structure to convey the meaning of the relationship of God to His people.  God has always had a covenant, a family relationship with His ‘am, His people.  Scott Hahn has done an excellent job in popularizing this covenant theology and showing how the Old Covenant was actually a series of covenant renewals which pointed to and were fulfilled in the universal Covenant–the Catholic family of the New Testament.

This Catholic family, established by Christ upon the Rock of St. Peter cannot be reduced to its constituent parts whereby one might select some parts of it and reject others.  For example, one might hear ‘I like the people but not the Pope, or the hierarchy, or the morality, etc.’  This cafeteria style of Christianity reflects a fragmented view of the Church and its essence as an extension of the Risen Christ.   

B16 says that there is no opposition between Christ and His Church regardless of the many failings of Her members, even failings among some of Her leaders.  He warns:

Therefore, there is no way to reconcile Christ’s intentions with the slogan that was fashionable a few years ago, “Christ yes, the Church no.” The individualist Jesus is a fantasy. We cannot find Jesus without the reality that he created and through which he communicates himself. Between the Son of God, made man and his Church, there is a profound, inseparable continuity, in virtue of which Christ is present today in his people.

Fantasy though it is, there are still all too many who in one way or another, make this categorical mistake.  It underlies the spirit of dissent, the spirit of Protestantism and the spirit of individualism.  It seems that those who go astray from Church teaching begin in a confused ecclesiology abetted by a poor philosophical foundation.  We are so blessed to have two excellent theologian Popes back to back, who are so well versed in the philosophical errors of our times.  Pay close attention to this series, we will…