In Spite of All of Us Catholics, the Church Is Still Standing

Surely this blog post’s title is wrong. I mean, isn’t the Catholic Church standing because of us Catholics? I would say, “not really.” It truly is more in spite of us Catholics that the Catholic Church still has a presence in the world, let alone a global, billion-plus population presence.

If you think that is a heretical statement, consider that Pope Benedict says the same thing:

Peter Seewald [speaking of how many splits in Christianity there have been, in particular within Protestantism]:

Over against these there is still the Roman Catholic Church with the pope at her head, which claims to be the only true Church. She remains at any rate, and despite every crisis, indeed the most universal, historically significant, and successful Church in the world, with more members today than at any time in her history.

Pope Benedict:

I think that in the spirit of Vatican II we ought not to see that as a triumph of our prowess as Catholics and ought not to make much of the institutional and numerical strength we continue to enjoy. If we were to reckon that as our achievement and as our right, then we would step outside the role of a people belonging to God and set ourselves up as an association in our own right. And that can very quickly go wrong.

[Devin's note: The pope has spoken elsewhere about the Church potentially needing to shrink and even the current parish-based structure of the local Church needing to change to adapt to a decrease in faithful Catholics.]

Perhaps you know the mediaeval story of a Jew who traveled to the papal court and who became a Catholic. On his return, someone who knew the papal court well asked him: “Did you realize what sort of things are going on there?” “Yes,” he said, “of course, quite scandalous things, I saw it all.” “And you still became a Catholic,” remarked the other man. “That’s completely perverse!” Then the Jew said, “It is because of all that that I have become a Catholic. For if the Church continues to exist in spite of it all, then truly there must be someone upholding her.”

And there is another story, to the effect that Napoleon once declared that he would destroy the Church. Whereupon one of the cardinals replied, “Not even we have managed that!”

There have in fact always been plenty of human monstrosities in the Catholic Church. That she still holds together, even if she groans and creaks, that she is still in existence, that she produces great martyrs, and great believers, people who put their whole lives at her service, as missionaries, as nurses, as teachers, that really does show that there is someone upholding her.

We cannot, then, reckon the Church’s success as our own reward, but we may still say, with Vatican II–even if the Lord has given a great deal of life to other churches [e.g. the Orthodox] and communities [Protestants]–that the Church herself, as an active agent, has survived and is present in this agent. And that can only be explained by the fact that he grants what men cannot achieve.

– God and the World, Prologue

Yes, we’ve been trying to sink the Church ever since St. Peter rebuked Jesus and told him that he surely wouldn’t be betrayed and die, but happily we’ve failed, and any success the Church has had in converting people’s hearts to Christ, in serving the needy throughout the world, in making the Holy Trinity known, is thanks to God and not something we can take credit for.

Rather than being something negative, a self-criticism, it is a great thing: God has not given us a weight that we cannot carry; instead, he has carried it himself. His Church can never fail, for he promised the Apostles that the gates of hell would not prevail against her.