Aquinas believed that faith in Christ necessarily involves trusting the Church, because Christ cannot fail to guide and protect the development of His Church.
I came to see that I did not fully trust Christ, not because I thought Him untrustworthy, but because I had not understood that Christ founded a visible hierarchically organized Body of which He is the Head, and which He has promised to protect and preserve until He returns. I had not apprehended the ecclesial organ Christ established through which the members of His Body are to trust Him. I came to see that faith in Christ is not something to be exercised invisibly, from my heart directly to Christ’s throne, as though Christ had not appointed an enduring line of shepherds. Inward faith was to be exercised outwardly, by trusting Christ through those shepherds Christ sent and established. Jesus had said, “The one who listens to you listens to Me, and the one who rejects you rejects Me; and he who rejects Me rejects the One who sent Me.”29 This is the sacramental conception of faith, not simply belief that, but belief through. This is the sacramental conception of the Church, the basis for the priest speaking in persona Christi.
As I began to grasp that, I began to grasp that my Church-less faith was too small. Apart from the Church, I had conceived of faith in Christ as something entirely inward. But upon coming to understand that Christ founded a visible hierarchically organized Body of which He is the Head and which He promised to preserve, I came to see that the way to trust Christ is to trust His Church of which He is the Head, just as the early Christians trusted Christ precisely by trusting the teaching of the Apostles. Trusting the Apostles did not subtract from (or compete with) their trust in Christ. On the contrary, when Jesus tells the Apostle Thomas, “Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed,”30 He implies that greater faith is required and shown in those who trust in Christ not by seeing Him, but by believing the testimony of the Apostles. Jesus refers to this way of believing when He prays, “I do not ask in behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word.”31
The difference between these two ways of understanding faith can be seen in this quotation from the late Fr. Richard Neuhaus:
[T]here are two kinds of Christians: those whom I would call ecclesiological Christians, and those for whom being a Christian is primarily, if not exclusively, a matter of individual decision. There are those for whom the act of faith in Christ and the act of faith in the Church is one act of faith. And those for whom the act of faith in Christ is the act of faith, and the act of faith in the Church, if there is one, is secondary, or tertiary, or somewhere down the line.32
The distinction between these two kinds of faith follows from the distinction between the Gnostic conception of the Church and the biblical conception of the Church as a living and hierarchically unified Body. When we come to see “the act of faith in Christ and the act of faith in the Church [as] one act of faith,” then we have to let go of ecclesial deism. In that respect ecclesial deism is a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion,’ a form of unbelief, a stance of doubt, and hence a defect in faith. But that does not mean that everyone holding some form of ecclesial deism is doing so because he or she consciously or culpably distrusts Christ. It may simply be because this person does not recognize or grasp what it is that Christ founded when He founded His Church. In the history of the Church, we can find this stance of doubt in the early heresies, including the Montanists, Novatians, and Donatists. Their distrust expressed itself as distrusting the legitimate shepherds whom Christ had appointed to feed and govern His flock. But the Catholic exercises faith in Christ by trusting and serving those shepherds whom Christ has appointed and authorized to govern in His name. In doing so, the Catholic is not replacing faith in Christ with faith in the Church, but trusting in Christ precisely by and through trusting Christ’s Church.
Does this mean that we do not need to have a relationship with Christ Himself? Not at all. There are two possible errors here, like two vices in relation to a virtue. These two errors are possible with any sacrament, because every sacrament has both a material and formal principle, and either one can become the focus to the exclusion of the other. One error is the one discussed above, the Gnostic or Montanist error of disregarding the Church, as though Christ did not establish the Church precisely to be that through which we come to Him and receive grace from Him in the sacraments. The other error is the rationalistic or ritualistic error of disregarding who it is that is the Head of the Church, and whose Life is given to us through the sacraments, and whose fellowship and comfort we enjoy in prayerful communion with Him. In both errors, the eyes of faith are lost, but in a different way: one by losing sight of the matter through which we receive the Life of Christ, and the other by losing sight of the Life of Christ offered to us in this matter.
Indefectibility of the Mystical Body
What is the alternative to ecclesial deism? How would the integrity of the Gospel be preserved while it was taken to all the world over hundreds and now thousands of years? God graciously arranged that the things He had once revealed for the salvation of all peoples should remain in their entirety, throughout the ages, and be transmitted to all generations.33 He did this by entrusting them to the Church, and providing the Church with a gift or charism by which she would be protected from losing or corrupting any part of the deposit of faith. St. Irenaeus speaks of this charism when he writes:
They [the bishops] have received the certain charism of the truth [i.e., gift of truth] according to the pleasure of the Father, with the succession in the office of bishop.34
The Church has this charism because the Church is the Body of Christ, and He, the Truth, is the Head of the Body. That ontological reality underlies Christ’s promise that the gates of Hades will never prevail against His Church,35 that His Holy Spirit will guide her into all truth,36 and that He will be with her to the end of the age,37. It underlies the Apostle Paul’s statement that the Church is the pillar and ground of truth.38
The indefectibility of the Church is a gift from Christ to the Church by which she is preserved to the end of the age as the “institution of salvation.” She can neither perish from the world nor depart from “her teaching, her constitution and her liturgy.”39 The gift of indefectibility does not imply that the members of the Church, even members of the Magisterium, cannot sin or err. But it does entail that the Magisterium of the Church can never lose or corrupt any part of the revelation of Christ, which includes both matters theological and moral. This gift of indefectibility is essential to Christ’s purpose in establishing His Church as the means of continuing His saving work to all the nations and peoples of the world until the end of the age. Regarding this purpose, Pope Leo XIII wrote, “What did Christ the Lord achieve by the foundation of the Church; what did He wish? This: He wished to delegate to the Church the same office and the same mandate which He had Himself received from the Father in order to continue them.”40
The commission Christ gave to the Apostles in Matthew 28:19 did not end with the death of the last Apostle, because this commission was given not only to the Apostles, but to their successors and the whole Church. The task of taking the Gospel to all nations and the ends of the earth goes beyond what the Apostles could accomplish in their own lifetime. In the same way, the promises of Christ do not extend only to the Apostles, but to their successors and all in union with them.
Notes:
Luke 10:16. [↩] John 20:29. [↩] John 17:20. [↩] “That They May Be One,” Touchstone (July/Aug. 2003), available here. [↩] Dei Verbum 7. [↩] Adv. haer. IV 26.2. [↩] Matthew 16:18 [↩] John 16:13 [↩] Matthew 28:20 [↩] 1 Tim 3:15 [↩] Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, p. 296 (TAN, 1955) [↩] Satis cognitum 4. [↩]
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