Your institution is morally bankrupt.

Question

The Catholic Church spent decades concealing the systematic sexual abuse of children by its clergy. The Borgia popes ran the Vatican as a criminal enterprise. The Vatican Bank has been implicated in money laundering across multiple decades. Inquisitors burned dissidents. Bishops blessed colonial conquest. An institution with this record is not a credible vehicle of divine truth, regardless of what its doctrines claim on paper.

The Pastor · Answer

I will not defend the indefensible. I will tell you what I have seen.

The abuse crisis is the worst thing the Catholic Church has done in my lifetime, and possibly in centuries. I will not soften it, contextualize it, or compare it to other institutions. Children were raped by priests. Bishops covered for them. The institutional apparatus that should have protected the victims protected the perpetrators instead. Anyone who wants to be Catholic in this century must look at this directly, without flinching, and let it do its work on them.

What I can tell you is what I have also seen. I have seen a Church that, slowly and incompletely, has begun to face what it did. I have seen survivors who, against every reason, returned to the sacraments and found something there that the men who hurt them had not destroyed. I have seen priests of my generation who entered seminary knowing the cost of the collar in this era and went anyway, because they believed there was something here worth saving. I have buried good men and ordained good men, and I will not pretend either set was the whole story.

The question the objection asks is whether an institution this compromised can still be the vehicle of grace. The Catholic answer, hard-won and historically ancient, is yes — not because the institution deserves to be, but because grace is not contingent on the worthiness of its ministers. The God who entrusted his Church to Peter, who denied him three times, has always worked through unworthy custodians. This is not a defense of the unworthiness. It is an account of the strangeness of how grace travels.

John Henry Newman · Answer

The holiness of the Church does not reside in the holiness of her members.

The Church is at once a divine institution and a human one, and the human side is exactly as broken as humans are. To expect otherwise is to expect what the Church has never claimed for herself. The Creed says I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church; it does not say I believe in a Church whose members are uniformly holy. The first is a doctrinal claim about the institution's character and mission; the second would be empirically refuted on any given Tuesday.

What the Church claims is that, despite the sins of her members — including her highest officials, including in some periods the majority of her bishops — the deposit of faith, the validity of the sacraments, and the indefectibility of her core teaching are preserved by the action of the Holy Spirit. This is a strong claim and a humble one. It is strong because it survives the historical record; it is humble because it does not depend on pretending the historical record is better than it is. The Borgia popes did not invalidate the Eucharist. The Inquisitors did not unmake baptism. The bishops who covered for abusers did not erase the Gospel they failed to preach.

To grant the institution's corruption is therefore not, by Catholic lights, to refute the institution's claim. It is to confirm the doctrine of original sin, applied to the Church herself. The skeptic and the saint agree that the Church is full of sinners. They disagree about what follows.

Augustine · Answer

The Donatists asked this question first. The Church gave its answer.

In my own day there was a movement, the Donatists, who held that the sacraments administered by sinful or compromised clergy were invalid. The bishops who had handed over the Scriptures during the persecutions, they said, had forfeited their priesthood; the Church needed to be a Church of the pure. I argued against them, at length and with the support of councils, and the Church's settled answer is this: the validity of the sacrament does not depend on the holiness of the minister, but on the action of Christ working through him.

This is not a convenient excuse. It is a hard-won doctrine, paid for by a long controversy. If the worthiness of the minister determined the validity of the sacrament, no one could ever be sure his baptism was real, his marriage sacramental, his absolution effective — because no one can be sure of another's worthiness, and most of the time the minister himself cannot be sure of his own. The doctrine ex opere operato — that the sacrament works by the work worked, not by the worker — is what makes the sacramental life possible at all.

The corollary is the one the objection misses: the Church has always known she was full of sinners, including in her sanctuary. The Catholic position is not "look how holy we are." It is "look how holy the grace is that works even through us." The historical record of clerical corruption is not a refutation of this teaching. It is the situation the teaching was developed to address.

G.K. Chesterton · Answer

The Church has been going to the dogs for two thousand years and somehow keeps outliving the dogs.

Every generation produces its critics who announce that this time the corruption is terminal, the Church cannot recover, the credibility is finally and definitively spent. The Arian crisis of the fourth century, when the majority of bishops were heretics. The pornocracy of the tenth century, when the papacy was openly trafficked. The Avignon captivity. The Borgias. The wars of religion. The French Revolution. The Modernist crisis. The abuse crisis. Each of these was, in its moment, the final blow. The Church somehow keeps burying her undertakers.

I do not say this to minimize the present scandal. I say it to put it in its actual historical context. An institution that has survived two millennia of being run by sinners, including some of the worst sinners of their respective centuries, is not on its face less credible than an institution that has been around for fifty years and has not yet had time to discredit itself. The atheist's argument requires us to believe that institutional rot is dispositive. The historical record suggests that the Catholic Church specifically has a property — call it whatever you like, divine preservation or stubborn historical accident — that makes it unusually resistant to the rot that has dispatched its peers.

The man who looked at the Church under Alexander VI and concluded that the institution was finished was making a reasonable bet on the evidence available. He was also wrong. This does not prove the modern critic is wrong on the same grounds. It does suggest that the kind of argument he is making has a poor track record.

Your institution is morally bankrupt.

The objection, in full

The holiness of the Church does not reside in the holiness of her members.

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