At his most authoritative, the Pope of the day has been the one who speaks on behalf of the community of Catholics, at times even on behalf of the community of all sacramental Christians—in centuries long past, those now called Eastern Orthodox accepted the authority of popes of the caliber of St Leo the Great. In recent decades, non-Catholics accorded some substantial personal authority to St John Paul II.
In a similar vein, those who translate and explain the Bible as well as those who give us narratives of the history of the Pilgrim Body of Christ (and not just the Christian churches) also exercise substantial authority (validly and invalidly) over the ways in which Christians understand even the revealed truths.
I entered the Catholic Church in the late 1980s because of my readings in the history of Christianity and the belief I developed that the Church of Rome was in some strong sense the center piece, or at least the largest piece, of the pilgrim Body of Christ—though I wouldn’t have phrased it that way until the past decade or so.
That pilgrim Body of Christ has various organs and I now believe the Christian Church is the central organ of that Body—unlike St Paul who seemed to think the Church is the entire Body of Christ. Starting more than a decade ago, I’d been emphasizing the importance of a civilization to the pilgrim Body of Christ and then about eight years ago, I began to suspect that the Body of Christ is like a civilization—the completion and perfection of all aspects of human being—with the Christian Church as its primary organ.
The Body of Christ existed on Earth in an embryonic form so long as Western Civilization existed, however uncertain its true adherence to Christian beliefs and practices. This should not be taken as a chauvinistic claim—Western Civilization wasn’t more pure or more Christ-like than, say, Russian proto-civilization, rather was it more complete in having manifested a relative fullness of human attributes in communal forms. (See Freedom and Structure in Human Life — What Can We Say About the Body of Christ? or download the book, The Shape of Reality for a discussion of my developing views on communal human nature.)
Yet, the Eastern churches are also manifestations of the Body of Christ, those in communion with Orthodox patriarchs; there are also the ancient churches of Southwestern Asia—neither in communion with the Latins nor with the Greeks nor with the Russians, yet having a valid priesthood with an Apostolic succession. Western Civilization has been so successfully purged of its Christian foundations, and there are not available `pagan’ foundations to replace them—assuming it be possible to do something of that sort without bringing the original civilization to a crashing halt and then starting a multi-century reconstruction. We Western Christians have been passive collaborators in the destruction of the pilgrim Body of Christ.
In any case, I’m not making an effort in this essay to settle this issue conclusively as there are many groups with at least a plausible claim to be (perhaps radically incomplete) manifestations of the Body of Christ. What I am trying to make clear is the primacy of the Body of Christ rather than the primacy of the Pope or the entire hierarchy of Rome or the entire hierarchy of all plausible Christian churches. The descendants of the Apostles themselves are those selves only so long as they are part of the Body, leaders in some ways of the Body but also humbly subordinate to that entirety.
Christ is the point of it all, and that means that the Body of Christ is the point of all earthly human being.
We don’t understand the Body of Christ in real-world terms and it would be a sheer grab for power if the leaders of the Catholic Church in Rome were to claim that Body is necessarily and inherently centered on the Pope or the Roman hierarchy in general. Those particular Christian leaders have, in fact, been morally irresponsible in not seeing the clear need to respond to God’s Creation; some, such as Pope Francis, seem to see some need to respond but they are far more likely to do as Francis is doing—trying to make peace with the dominant inhuman and inhumane ideology of the recent past, secular liberalism or cultural Marxism or whatever term you may prefer. Those terms are largely misunderstandings.
A truer understanding points to a deformed human mind, truly inhuman and inhumane in some important ways. Don’t go to modern books of political philosophy, whether the creative originals or textbooks; don’t go to modern books of religious thought or spiritual feelings; don’t listen to the frantic analyses of the Web’s political and religious commentators. Read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, The Birth-mark, and contemplate the self-serving, calculating coldness which defined the human being of the Calvinists of the Northeastern states of the US. It was the Calvinists of the American Northeast (call them New Englanders for short), dark of mind, self-centered and cold, who are the source of much which is wrong in the modern world or, at least, they are the most prominent manifestation of this distortion of human being.
We are in a mess because we are a mess. Pope Francis and most other Christian leaders, including the so-called Christian intellectuals, are worse off than most are.
To the extent that I’m right, Western Civilization was once the bulk of the pilgrim Body of Christ; if it was not the God-ordained center of the entire Body, it was certainly the dominant part of that Body—for good as well as bad. It is that Body, not even so central an organ as the Church and its hierarchy, which comes to some understanding of God’s Creation, of our relationship to our Creator, of our history, of our futures as individuals and communities in the Body of Christ.