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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2024
Is the Church a democracy? It is a question which cannot be answered by a simple yes or no, and without preliminary definition of the term. Democracy does not necessarily imply the rule of all by all; it does imply first of all a society in which the citizens are complete individuals, persons, whose life and destiny the State must not subjugate to its own purposes, but serve; and it does imply, secondly, that the individuals contribute, according-to their different gifts and therefore their different functions, to the shaping and growth of the life of society. And is the Church a democratic society in this sense? There are many, catholic as well as non-catholic, who would be inclined to answer no. Information, direction, power, they would say, all alike come from above ; for the rank and file there is nothing to do but to receive what is given and to do what is commanded.
It is easy to find solid arguments for this view. Faith and law and power are indeed given from above; the Church, the ecclesia docens, has the office of guarding and giving them ; you find in the Gospel the picture of the sheep and the Shepherd, and what have the sheep to do but to obey, and be fed by, the Shepherd? What has the ordinary catholic to do but obey his pastors and so make his way to heaven?
1 It is a scandal that in this country we should have had to wait till the end of February, 1944, for a translation of this encyclical, given at Rome on June 29th, 1943. (It has now been issued by the Catholic Truth Society, price 9d., under the title The Mystical Body of Jesus Christ.) For the purposes of the present article, which was written before the appearance of the English edition, I made use of the American version, published by the National Catholic Welfare Association, Washington, D.C., and obtainable from Burns and Oates, D'Olier Street, Dublin. As this translation is considerably less ponderous and opaque than the English C.T.S. version, I have kept the quotations from it in the text; though for the convenience of readers I have changed the references given in brackets after the quotations to corresponding sections in the C.T.S. pamphlet.
But may one take this opportunity to plead for a policy, in the matter of translation, other than that of strict verbal fidelity to the orotund formality of the Latin original of the encyclicals? There is good reason for the impersonal aloofness and weightiness of the Latin: there must be about the encyclicals, for all their immediate relevance to actual problems of the moment, an element of timelessness, for they are expressing truth which is eternal, and their very remoteness from the idiom of a particular epoch gives them the enduring quality of granite. But the vernacular translations have a different purpose: they are needed to bring the thought and teaching of the Pope to busy priests and laymen; they ought to convey the thought, not only without the necessity of painful analysis of involved sentences and locutions, but also in a way that immediately shows its immediate relevance. Surely then we need sentences that are short and crisp and instantly intelligible; we can do without the verbal flourishes, the rhetorical epithets; we do not want a period piece, we want the answer the Pope provides to our immediate pressing needs, and we want it in language which is as clear and intelligible and unforgettable as the thought. Is ‘there any good reason why we should not have it?
2 It may be well to refer here to a passage in the early part of the encyclical, dealing with the membership of the Church, which if taken nut of its context might cause needless anxiety and distress. This says that those only are members of the Body who have received baptism and profess the true faith, and have not cut themselves off from the Body nor been expelled from it for grave crimes (cf. C.T.S. 20). The sentence is of course to he read precisely in its context, which is the discussion of the Church's visible structure and therefore the conditions of visible membership of it. This is indeed sufficiently clear from the second half of the sentence, from which the first half cannot he isolated. ‘cut themselves off, … expelled.’ The point that the Pope is making is that the Body cannot of itself be divided: therefore those who are. personally guilty of the sins of schism or heresy or apostasy cannot be members of it, for these sins, unlike other kinds of sin, however grave, themselves imply a deliberate severance from the Body. You cannot be a member of the Body if you wilfully and knowingly reject that which makes a man a member of the Body: unity of faith and baptism and government. But all this is in no sense a contradiction of the common doctrine concerning those who, through no fault of their own, are not visibly members of the Church, but who none the less are given grace by God, even if only through the ‘baptism of desire.’ and are therefore invisible members of the visible Church. (Cf. Victor White, O.P.: Membership of the Church, Blackfriars, Sept., 1941, p. 455.)
3 In this context the Pope singles nut for special commendation the Apostleship of Prayer as an association ‘most pleasing to God’ (107).
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