The holiness of the Church and clerical scandals

Does gravely immoral activity by the clergy detract from the holiness of the Church as it is on earth, the Church militant? It sure seems so. But I want to argue, very speculatively (and I will withdraw the claim if it turns out that the Church teaches otherwise), that it directly detracts no more—or at least not significantly more—than equally gravely immoral activity by similar numbers of laity would.

Consider the three features we desire the Church as found on earth to have: doctrinal orthodoxy, liturgical integrity and holiness of life.

The doctrinal orthodoxy and liturgical integrity of the clergy does indeed especially contribute to the doctrinal orthodoxy and liturgical integrity of the Church. If a priest or especially a bishop is unorthodox, all other things being equal, that in itself detracts more from the orthodoxy of the Church on earth than when a lay person is unorthodox, simply because of the teaching role of the clergy. Similarly, if a priest or bishop engages in liturgical anarchy, say by changing some prayers at Mass, that detracts from the liturgical integrity of the Church more than if a lay person does so, all other things being equal.

But when a deacon, priest or bishop (including a pope) is wicked, that no more (and no less) directly detracts from the holiness of the Church than when a non-cleric person is wicked, when the degree of wickedness is the same. We can see this by considering the happier flip-side. Think of a non-cleric like St Teresa of Avila (she was a nun, of course, but a nun is a non-cleric[note 1]) and a priest like St John of the Cross. The holiness of their lives directly contributed to the holiness of the Church. But it would, I think, be mistaken to say that St John's holiness contributed more, or was a more central contribution, than St Teresa's just because St John was a priest and St Teresa was not. To say that would be to engage in clericalism, and is perhaps a species of the same error that leads to Donatism. The clergy's activity makes a special constitutive contribution to the Church's orthodoxy and liturgical integrity. But a layperson's holiness is just as constitutive of the holiness of the Church as the holiness of a deacon, priest or bishop. Mary makes a greater direct contribution to the holiness of the Church than any deacon, priest or bishop—not counting Christ the High Priest—ever did or would.

Of course, wickedness in a deacon, priest or bishop (and especially when the bishop is pope) typically has a greater negative effect on the Church's holiness, because it is more likely to scandalize others, leading them either to imitate the wickedness or abandon the faith. This indirectly detracts from the Church's holiness.

Suppose every single Catholic priest next year committed some particular grave and scandalous sin. That would be a terrible thing, would have a very unfortunate negative effect on the Church, and may God preserve us from this disaster. But it would no more directly detract from the Church's holiness than if some other group comprising 0.04% of the world's Catholic population committed an equally grave sin.

That said, a sin that is otherwise of the same sort may be graver when committed by a cleric, because (a) the cleric bears a responsibiity for avoiding the further negative effects and (b) is less likely to be excusable through ignorance. The above assumes we are dealing with sins of equal gravity.

Christ promised that the Church would be holy. The above argument shows that an argument based on clerical crimes that the Catholic Church cannot be Christ's Church because Christ's Church is holy is no stronger than argument based on equal numbers of non-clerical crimes would be. But an argument based on the crimes committed by non-clerics would fail: we do not expect the Church's holiness to imply the sinlessness of her members. The Church while holy as a body—the body of Christ—is yet a Church for sinners who need Christ's reforming grace. Thus the argument based on clerical crimes also fails.

And then, of course, there is always Boccaccio's argument.

Naturalist theories of mind and corporate personhood

All theories of mind need to do justice to the multiple realizability intuition:

1. Conscious beings in general, and persons in specific, could have a physical constitution very different from ours (e.g., silicon, plasma cloud, etc.), with the computational algorithms being significantly different as well.

On a naturalist theory of mind, all there is to a person or a conscious being is the physical constitution together with external connections. Therefore, on naturalism, what (1) says is that there could be persons radically different from us in their overall constitution. This means that the naturalist theory of mind must have a very flexible account of what it is to be a person or a conscious being. Presumably, this account is going to be something like this: Conscious beings are ones that represent the external world in certain ways—the best stories about this are causal in nature—and respond in other ways (or at least are of a kind to do this). The specification of the ways in which representation and response are done is not going to be too specific—it must be at a high enough level of generality to do justice to (1). And then persons are going to be the subset of conscious beings tha have (or at least are of a kind to have) a particularly sophisticated form of representation and response—perhaps the right kind of representation of the internal patterns of response together with a self-directed response to those patterns.

Here, now, is my hypothesis. Any naturalist story that does justice to (1) will be apt to count many human social groups as both conscious and as persons. Social groups do represent the environment and themselves, and respond to such representations in various sophisticated ways, including self-reflection analogous to that which persons engage in. Social groups have corporate representations that are not the same as individual representations and corporate desires that are not the same as individual desires. To a very rough first approximation, a social group believes p provided that a majority of the members believes p in a way that is appropriately explanatorily connected with their group membership (e.g., their belief is in the right way explained by or explains their group membership), and desires p provided that it has the right kind of tendency to pursue p. Anything that can design an airplane is likely conscious and a person. But an airplane can be designed by both an individual human, and a social group such as two brothers.

2. If naturalism holds, then many human social groups are conscious and a number of these are persons.

Notice that the computational sophistication in human social groups can be very high. For human social groups contain a number of human brains. Think of a computating cluster: a cluster while having some ponderousness can compute anything its parts can.

But:

3. Human social groups, other than perhaps the Church, are not persons.

(The naturalist is unlikely to worry about the exception.) If this won't do as a direct intuition, then we can argue for it on ethical grounds in the case of many social groups. For instance, an academic Department will often be such as to force the naturalist who does justice to (1) to count it as a person. But a respect is due to a person which is not due to an academic Department. A University administration should not dissolve a Department willy-nilly, but the gravity of dissolving a Department is not nearly comparable to the gravity of killing a person.

The dualist does justice to (1) without falling into an assertion that social groups are persons in a very simple way: a necessary condition for being conscious is having a soul or something like that, and a plasma cloud could have that, and social groups, at least other than the Church, in fact don't have that. (I am not saying that social groups couldn't have that, though I think they couldn't. I am inclined not to consider the Church literally a person, either.)

Objection 1: The naturalist can make it a condition of personhood that one not have persons as proper parts.

Response: If naturalism is true, the nerves in my shoulder could so grow that they would engage in the kind of computation characteristic of persons, and then a person would be a proper part of a person.

Objection 2: Social groups don't exist.

Response: It would be tough for a naturalist to hold that social groups don't exist and human beings do—both are appropriately posited by developed special sciences.

Christian Revelation

Catholics and the Orthodox see the primary repository of divine revelation (in the sense which Protestants call "special revelation", i.e., as distinguished from the revelation embodied in nature) as the Church. The inerrant and inspired Scriptures are the written tradition of the Church (the Church is the New Israel, so this includes the Old Testament), but the Church also expresses divine revelation in liturgy, oral tradition, the Councils and the Magisterium.[note 1] Protestants, on the other hand, tend to find divine revelation primarily in Scripture, though there are some Protestants who think that the Church is the primary respository of revelation, but that this revelation is only found infallibly in the Church's Scriptures.

It is often argued that seeing the Church as primary here makes much sense in light of the fact that the canon of Scripture is defined by the Church.

Here I want to suggest a different argument. The primary object of our faithful trust is Jesus Christ. But the Church is the mystical body of Christ. In trusting the Church, we are trusting Christ. Seeing revelation as embodied primarily in the Church fits well with the christological focus of our faith. While, of course, the Holy Spirit who inspires the Scriptures is perfectly trustworthy, New Testament faith is primarily a trust in Jesus Christ. Trust is an interpersonal relation, so it makes sense to distinguish the persons of the Trinity in respect of it. Seeing the Church, the mystical body of Christ, united as such by the Holy Spirit, as the primary respository of revelation fits particularly well with the christological nature of our Christian faith.