The Body of Christ is the entirety of human being, the entirety of a community including both individuals and lesser communities which is Christian civilization, I also claim the Catholic Church to be the central organ of the Body of Christ, not the whole ball of wax. To all appearances, the various Christian churches participate to various extents in this organ, but I’ll not go into any detailed speculations here on the specific natures of the Orthodox churches, the various Protestant churches, and those few which don’t fit into those standard categories.
Why would we think the Catholic Church came into existence in some sort of complete and mature state if the Body of Christ, the fullness of Christian community, is evolving and developing in a complex and seemingly chaotic manner? Why would we think the Catholic Church came into existence in some sort of complete and mature state if Jesus Christ Himself grew and developed in His human nature?
As I’ve pointed out again and again, as an echo to plenty of thinkers over recent centuries and a few from earlier centuries: we live in a world of evolutionary and developmental processes. All creatures in this world grow and develop, most certain is this true of complex human communities of all sorts.
Jesus of Nazareth, the human nature of the Son of God, was born a human baby, one who would grow and mature by way of specific responses to the world around Him. The Church was also born at an early stage of maturity, far from Her adult state, and has gone through various phases more distinct than the changes human beings go through from infancy to the states of toddler, child, adolescent, and so on. The Bible tells us the Church was granted certain, mostly limited, powers but powers which might well expand with Her knowledge and understanding of Creation, that very peculiar group of manifestations of divine thoughts. The Church has to change and mature in various ways just to Herself discover or learn from explorers the deeper and richer understandings of created being. History is consistent with these claims I’m making: the Catholic Church (and all Her separated children and brethren) grows and develops mostly in the way of other human communities.
History tells us the Church has changed, has developed in various ways, just as history told us through John Henry Newman and others that Christian doctrine has developed over the centuries. Christian doctrine in its revealed core content hasn’t changed but the totality of doctrine has been enriched and complexified. Even the core doctrines have changed in the way of understanding just as a man’s understanding of moral principles change, are enriched and completed, as he grows toward adulthood and—fallible creatures that we are—can often need more enrichment and completion even after that.
Yet, there are ever those who wish to freeze the Church, prevent Her growing and maturing, so that She be some sort of image they idealize as the true Church. One particular distortion is the exaggeration of the infallibility of the Church and the far lesser infallibility of individual popes. As I implied above, the Church’s developed faculties for finding or even seeing new truths is rarely up to the task when the world around Her changes in fundamental ways, perhaps because human beings have developed new ways of living or perhaps because human beings have discovered something unanticipated in the modern world. Sometimes the first possibility was forced upon Christians as when the Roman Empire fell and a long, slow process of developing Western Civilization began; sometimes it happened as a result of more open-minded and enthusiastic responses to new opportunities as has happened in the modern world with the freeing of so many from lives limited in ways not good. We’ve also seen changes come upon our world in recent centuries because of discoveries about the earth in regions formerly largely unreachable from Europe and because of discoveries about the nature of time and space and matter and also about human origins.
The Church hasn’t responded well to the world as it shows itself richer and more complex with each passing year Sometimes the world and, indeed, all of Creation seems to be changing with each passing day, in the reality of human communities or in improved human perception and conception of created being in its fundamental aspects or sometimes in aspects of complex, higher-order non-human entities.
Maybe the Church had, and has, no power to declare herself infallible in a more general sense? That is, maybe there is much that the Church and the clergy and other servants of the Church must learn by proper responses to God’s Creation? The Church moves through spacetime in this universe, responding well or not so well to the entirety of Creation, or perhaps trying to not respond at all. All the while, the Church and other human communities and individual human beings are changing as is our understanding of Creation.
My view of the Church is far from being entirely new, as I implied by my reference to Newman’s historical works on the development of doctrine. In a positive way, I can pull up one of my favorite quotes: The truth emerges in time through a communal process [Carroll Quigley]. I would suggest the more positive statement leads us to believe that the man is already showing in the child, but also leads us to realize the process isn’t so predetermined as we might think. That is, the Church will mature into certain powers as does a human being, but there is still much of great importance that is to be determined, some of which might well be determined by human choice. More importantly for now, the 6 year-old has not the powers of understanding that the 12 year-old has and both are short of those and other powers of their 55 year-old self.
The pope or any bishop or, indeed, any Christian leader who seems to have any legitimate authority should be regarded as historical characters, as men and women playing roles in a complex story being told by God. The Church, as I’ve said above, should be seen in the same light as the entirety of the Body of Christ, Christian civilization: as an entity yet being formed. We can only struggle to understand what emerges to view or to sometime anticipate the glorious reality of the Body of Christ and its central organ the Church when the maturing is complete, when the Body of Christ is perfect and complete.
We Westerners (and probably most modern peoples) of the early 21st century are out of sorts with reality. We can’t make any progress in solving our various problems nor can we recognize opportunities. Our institutions, being rigid and bureaucratic after generations of successful growth and then irrational growth, are in worse shape than we are as individuals. Our communities in general are in bad shape—and that includes the Catholic Church and other Christian churches and probably nearly all major religious communities.
We got into this sort of condition by not responding to reality, to the thoughts of God manifested in His Creation. Hubris set in as it always does to some extent in temporally successful peoples. We believed our own worldly fables, including those told by Catholics and other Christians. And we had become dependent upon institutions, some being true communities at one time, which had grown rigid and bureaucratic. Many of our institutions are self-serving and no longer do their job.
We Christians know the Church will survive, and likely many of Her separated children as well. We don’t know what She will look like, though She will remain an organ or member of a Christian Civilization embodying and allowing something like the fullness of good human life. Since we don’t know what the Church Herself will be in a generation or more then we also don’t know what role the Pope will take on nor the role that God wishes the Pope to take on, which often seems to have differed from the role preferred by popes of a given age.
The Church isn’t some sort of eternal neo-Platonic entity set into this world of evolution and development nor is the Pope the only human being (other than Jesus of Nazareth) with a fully predetermined role. The Catholic Church and all Her separated brethren and also the People of Israel and other peoples are living a story, a series of events which could be labeled random when we look out the front window or a mixture of random and factual when we look into the (sometimes very distorted) rearview mirror.