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How Corrupt is the Church?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Michael Dummett
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Nothing is more important than that Catholics should continually ask themselves: how bad a state is the Church in? We are all aware of the possibility that the Church may appear to be corrupt, and of the actualization of this possibility at various times in the past. But we tend, I think, to assume that such corruption will always be glaringly obvious, a matter of simony at the papal court, or pluralist bishops, or priests with concubines and children : we therefore conclude that, to the extent that things seem all right, so they must be all right. Whereas in fact, I suspect, corruption is seldom easily recognized at the time. Perhaps even the examples I have just mentioned, which seem to us so scandalous, were not felt at the time as symptoms of deep-seated disease: after all, we know that the Church is composed, not of angels, but of men, and that we have no right to expect perfection from Christians, bishops included; so probably these things were usually put down as instances of the kind of human weakness that we know that we have to reckon with. Thus we must be prepared, at any time, to find that the Church can be deeply corrupted, a corruption for which we shall be sternly judged but to which we have long been blind.

When we have recognized that the Church can be corrupt, we have to enquire what could make it possible for this corruption to take place: and this is the most serious theological enquiry that can be made, for it concerns our understanding of the nature of the Church.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 46 , Issue 542 , August 1965 , pp. 619 - 628
Copyright
Copyright © 1965 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 While respecting a contributor's right to freedom of opinion, we should point out as a matter of fact, that Pope Pius XII several times spoke in the strongest terms against nuclear warfare. In particular, in his Easter allocution for 1954, he castigated weapons that lead to ‘gigantic destruction’, with the ‘peril which can arise for future generations’. And in an address to the World Medical Association, 30 September, 1954, he specifically condemned warfare that would lead to ‘the pure and simple annihilation of all human life within the radius of the destructive action’. This, the Pope said, ‘is not permissible on any account’. Pope John XXIII's words in Pacem in Terris are equally relevant. ‘Nuclear weapons should be banned, and a general agreement should eventually be reached about progressive disarmament and an effective method of control’. Editor.