THE BEAUTY OF THE CHURCH
by
Dermott J. Mullan
Summary: The Church invites its members to
participate in a life of grace that is the anti-thesis of a life of sin. The
beauty associated with a life of grace is best illustrated by reference to the
Blessed Virgin Mary.
Introduction
In the last few decades, a phrase
that has gained popularity among certain groups of Catholics is “We are the
Church” or “We are Church”. On a personal level, these phrases are, presumably,
meant to make people feel at home when they come to Mass. The phrases have
political overtones as well: if I can
think of myself as an active (or even an important) member of the Church, then
maybe I can have a say in how things are done in parish life.
However, the phrases can be
misleading, for they may cause people to imagine that they are holier or more
important than they actually are. In the Mass, we are brought face-to-face with
this point.
A phrase in the Canon of the Mass
During
Mass, following the recitation of the Our Father, the priest says: “Lord Jesus
Christ, look not on our sins, but on the faith of your Church”. This juxtaposition of phrases is striking. On
the one hand, our attention is drawn to the fact that I and the other members
of the congregation are the perpetrators of certain deeds (or misdeeds) that by
no means redound to our credit. So much so that we ask Our Lord to turn his eyes
away from the sins we have committed. We
admit that we are not, after all, so holy (or important) that we want Our Lord
to examine us too closely.
In the next
breath, we are reminded that there does exist something else that is worthy of Our Lord’s attention: we
ask Him to turn his eyes towards “the faith of your Church”. The contrast between “our” (in connection with sins)
and “your” (in connection with Church) is remarkable. There is
apparently a profound distinction between sins and Church.
The sins
can truly be said to belong to us: we own them to such an extent that the
phrase “our sins” is an accurate description of one aspect of the real world.
But there also exists another aspect of the real world: this is the Church that
can truly be said to belong to the person we are addressing in this part of the
Canon of the
This suggests in an-too-subtle manner that
there is more to the Church than simply ourselves. The phrase “We are the
Church” may be okay up to a point, but it does not go very far in capturing the
essence of the Church. What more might there be to the Church than the sum
total of its members?
The Creed of the People of God
A document
issued by Pope Paul VI in 1968 can shed some light here. The “Creed of the People of God” contains a summary of Church
doctrines. Most of the document re-iterates the major topics of earlier creeds
(such as the Apostles Creed or Nicene Creed).
However, the Pope adds emphasis to certain topics, highlighting these
teachings for the benefit of
contemporary Catholics.
Writing
about the Church, the Pope repeated the four standard marks of the Church: one,
holy, Catholic, and apostolic. Of these,
the Pope treated the adjective “holy” in a striking manner. He wrote:
“The Church is therefore holy, though she has sinners in her bosom,
because she herself has no other life
but that of grace. It is by living by her life that her members are
sanctified; it is by removing themselves from her life that they fall into sins
and disorders that prevent the radiation of her sanctity” (my emphasis added).
Here,
in Pope Paul’s writing, is a vivid and striking image of the Church. The Church
is not merely an institution. It is an entity that is alive in a unique sense.
Rather than being alive in a biological sense, the Church lives a special kind
of life, namely “no other life but that of grace”.
The life of grace
The “life
of grace” is a remarkable phrase. In the New Standard Dictionary, the theological meaning of the word “grace” is “the unmerited
love and favor of God in Christ…the divine
influence acting within the heart to regenerate and sanctify it…the
power or disposition to live the Christian life”.
This
definition, with its implication that grace gives us supernatural powers, means
that grace ultimately empowers us to live the life of glory in heaven. In
Cardinal Newman’s telling words, “Grace is glory in exile, and glory is grace at home”.
The Church lives a heavenly life which has the inevitable property that the Church
herself is holy.
Where did
this Church that “lives only by grace” come from? Scripture tells us that it came from the
death of Christ: “He gave Himself up for her to make her holy, purifying
her...to present to Himself a glorious Church, holy and immaculate, without
stain or wrinkle or anything of that sort” (Eph. 5, 25-27). In an image that
was beloved by the Fathers of the Church, the “holy and immaculate” Church came
into existence on Good Friday, born of blood and water from the side of Christ
as He slept in death.
The
implications of the Church’s “life of grace” are far-reaching. It is true that
the Church has human members, but no matter what individual members do, or how
much they sin, the Church herself
remains holy. Pope Paul had already stressed this point in Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism. An early draft of that decree
included a phrase “During its pilgrimage on Earth, this People (the Church),
though still liable to sin, is growing in Christ…” Pope Paul recognized that
this phrase contained error, and he insisted on altering this phrase by
inserting the key words “in its members” between the words “still” and “liable”.
The final version of the sentence emerged as “the Church, though still in its members liable to sin,…...”
Since the
Church lives a life of grace alone, that is, in effect, the life of heaven, it
is as impossible for the “holy and immaculate” Church to sin as it is for the
good angels to sin. This is why, when Pope John Paul II asked God to forgive
certain historical sins in connection with the Jubilee Year 2000, there was no
question of asking for forgiveness for the Church herself: the Church herself
has no sins that need to be forgiven. Instead, the Pope was asking God for
forgiveness for the sins of individual Catholics.
In a more
speculative vein, the words of Pope Paul suggest that the Church could (at
least in principle) exist as a holy (grace-filled) entity even if the number of
human members were to decrease to zero. Of course there have always been some
human members, i.e. people who live by faith. To be sure, the membership may
have been at times reduced to a very low level. In fact, on that dark and
terrible Saturday when Christ’s body lay dead in the tomb, there might have
been only one person who held on to faith: Christ’s own Mother. For that
reason, the Church to this day offers to priests every Saturday the option of
celebrating a votive Mass in honor of Our Lady.
Faith-filled life in the Church
Pope Paul
writes that the Church is always in existence to provide a life of grace for
anyone who wants to live that life. A person enters into that life by making a
profession of faith, and being baptized. But as the Catechism says, “It is the
Church that believes first, and so bears, nourishes, and sustains my faith”
(CCC No. 167). A profession of faith is indeed a personal act, but it is not an
isolated act: “No-one can believe alone, just as no-one can live alone” (CCC
No. 166). Whatever else a Christian is, he or she must participate in the
society that is the Church.
To live a
faith-filled life means to participate in the Church’s life of grace, that is,
to immerse oneself in that life. Pope Paul implies that the more immersion a
person undertakes, the holier that person becomes. The image here is striking: it suggests that
the Church is a reservoir of grace, and the more I immerse myself in the
reservoir, the holier I become. But if I pull away, and withdraw myself more
and more from the reservoir, I expose myself to the risk of committing sin.
From this
perspective, it is easier to see why, when I commit a sin, it is not the Church which sins, but only myself. In a sense, I can think of the sin as occurring in
that part of myself which I have withdrawn from Church life, i.e. precisely in
the part of myself that is NOT immersed in the life of the Church.
Thus, rather than thinking of grace
as something that comes to me and
“fills up my soul” when I perform certain acts of piety, Pope Paul’s words
suggests that it would be better to think of the inverse process. It is not so
much a matter of grace “filling me up” but rather that I myself go towards grace (drawn there by God’s invitation: “No-one
can come to me unless the Father draws him” Jn 6:44)
and immerse myself in the grace that is the essential life-force of the Church.
From this point of view, the saints
are people who immersed themselves more perfectly into the life of the Church
than other people did. The goodness that shone forth in their lives is goodness which belongs in the
last analysis to the Church itself.
Pope Paul’s teaching indicates that the Church continually possesses that goodness
whether or not any person happens to come along and allows it to operate in his
or her life.
Therefore,
when the priest prays at Mass “look not upon OUR sins but on the faith of YOUR
Church”, he is emphasizing an important distinction which exists between the
members of the Church and the Church herself. In principle, one might even
speculate that the Church could still exist even if very few people took
advantage of what the Church has to offer.
Grace and Beauty
Up to this
point, we have focussed on Pope Paul’s teaching about the “life of grace” as
referring to the aspect of holiness in the Church. But the word grace itself
has another connotation: when someone is described as "graceful", the
implication is that there is beauty
involved. In the New Standard
Dictionary, the theological definition of grace which I gave above is actually
only the fourth in a list of several possible meanings of the word. At the head
of the list comes a very different definition of grace: “beauty or harmony of
form”. And in another dictionary (Webster’s II Desk Dictionary), again among a
list of several possible meanings, at the head of the list comes the
definition: “seemingly effortless beauty”.
Because of
this, I believe that the “life of grace” which Pope Paul teaches about refers
to more than merely goodness (or holiness) in the Church. I believe that it
also refers to beauty.
There is
nothing novel about this idea. The
description of the Church which is found in the Book of Revelation (Chapters 21
and 22) uses images of a “bride prepared for her husband” to express the
intrinsic beauty of the Church.
Is there
any way for us to see that the Church is indeed beautiful? We can get a hint of
this by considering some events which occur in the Church from time to time:
apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Since the year 1829, the Church has
approved eight series of such apparitions. Although the messages in the various
apparitions are different, a common thread runs through them all. All of the
visionaries comment on an overwhelming sense of the beauty of Our Lady. For
example, St Bernadette Soubirous of
What can we
learn about the Church from the beauty of Our Lady? Well, Our Lady is a member
of the Church par excellence. This means that, from the perspective of Pope
Paul’s writing in the Creed of the People of God, Our Lady has immersed herself
more than any other purely human creature into the life of grace by which the
Church lives. As a result, according to Pope Paul’s teaching, Our Lady shares
in the holiness of the Church more than any other human being. By analogy, I
suggest that Our Lady also shares in the beauty of the Church more than any
other human being.
The beauty
that the various visionaries saw in Our Lady can be thought of as beauty that
she possesses in part because she belongs to the Church. If this is correct,
then I submit that, if we could see the Church as she really is, the Church
would possess all the beauty that Our Lady has, and more.