church discipline

quote below from comment 330 here: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2012/09/i-fought-the-church-and-the-church-won/#comment-38720

You wrote:

They (both Jesus and the apostles) clearly taught the importance of discipline in the local church. The local church. That is where it is possible, and that is where it was commanded.

Discipline in the local Church is meaningless unless all the local Churches are under the same government. Otherwise, the excommunicated person just goes to the next local Church, or starts his own (since, as you stated above, the Church is those who have a personal faith, and so long as he retains personal faith, then therefore he cannot be kicked out of the Church). Tom Brown and I addressed this in much more detail in “Christ Founded a Visible Church.”

and From the link on Christ Founded a Visible Church:

Without an essentially united visible hierarchy, Church discipline would not be possible. That is because only Catholic ecclesiology is sacramental, i.e. non-gnostic. Any ecclesiology in which members, whether these be individual Christians or congregations, are said to be fully united to Christ’s Church through an internal invisible connection, nullifies the spiritual consequences of visible excommunication. Yet every ecclesiology denying that Christ founded an essentially united visible hierarchy must posit an invisible connection between the members and Christ.

from comment 37 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2012/10/the-holiness-of-the-church/#comment-126191

The identity of the Church as the Church Christ founded does not change when her members, whether clergy or lay, commit grave sins. Christ does not come down from heaven and start a new Church. He remains faithful to the one He founded. But these sinning members will have to answer to God some day for their heinous crimes. If they die without repentance, they will spend eternity in hell separated from God. The Church on earth is not the set of persons presently in a state of grace, but is a visible communion, and thus includes both wheat and tares, i.e. both persons in a state of grace, and persons not in a state of grace.

This is true even when the sin in question is the failure to discipline a member of the clergy who ought to be disciplined. The failure of a Church leader to discipline someone who ought to be disciplined is either a sin of some sort (e.g. cowardice, laziness, fear of men, a deficiency of charity, etc.) and/or bad judgment on the part of that leader. It may even be a crime, in cases where a bishop knew of an illegal action on the part of a priest, and for whatever reason chose not to report it to the proper civil authorities.

But sins of failing to discipline are not qualitatively different than any other grave sins with respect to changing the identity of the Church. Nor do they constitute a change in Church moral teaching. In the Protestant paradigm, without a magisterium, and thus without dogma, the doctrine of the Church just is the practice of its leaders. And this leads some Protestants to believe mistakenly that the failure of the Catholic Church to discipline certain persons just means that the Catholic Church condones such practices, rather than that this is a failure on the part of a leader or leaders to conform to Church teaching. The irrevocable doctrine of the Church, however, condemns all sin, including sexual sins. This is precisely why sins are sins against the Church’s holiness, rather the detractions from or subtractions from the Church’s holiness.

This is also reflects a fundamental difference in the Catholic and Protestant paradigms. In the Protestant paradigm discipline is a mark of the Church. (See comment #21 in the “Peter Leithart’s Tragedy of Conversion” thread.) But in the Catholic paradigm, discipline is not a mark of the Church. In the Catholic paradigm, the four marks are those set forward in the Creed: one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. And the “holiness” mark is not the same as the Protestant “discipline” mark, as the lecture above explains. Moreover, from the Catholic point of view, the Protestant move of making discipline a mark of the Church was an unauthorized addition to the four marks. So then from the Catholic point of view, the Protestant appeal to discipline as a mark of the Church, used against the Catholic Church, presupposes the very point in question between the two paradigms, namely, the possession of the authority to establish the marks of the Church and determine how they are to be understood.

Resolving that disagreement requires stepping back to consider preliminary questions such as how do we rightly determine what are the marks of the Church, and who has the authority (and why) to determine or establish what are the marks of the Church? Disagreement about the marks does not leave us at an impasse, because we can step back to prior questions regarding the determination of the marks. But it does mean that we cannot use our own paradigm’s conception of the marks to criticize the other paradigm, without presupposing precisely what is in question between the paradigms.

One possible objection to the Catholic teaching on holiness as a mark of the Church is claiming that the great divergence between the Church’s formal moral teaching, and the abusive practice of bishops and priests shows that she cannot be the Church Christ founded. This objection conflates the distinction between persons in the Church, and the Church herself, as if when a member of the Church sins, the Church sins. In actuality the Church does not lose her holiness when a member of the Church gravely sins. Rather, the Catholic who sins gravely (whether laymen or cleric) thereby cuts himself off from the holiness of the Church, and it is through the holiness that indelibly remains in the Church (in the sacraments) that he is restored upon repentance and confession. So the problem with the reasoning in the objection is that it mistakenly treats sins by Catholics as if they are sins “of the Church” rather than as sins by members of the Church, and therefore as detracting from the Church’s holiness, and/or indicating that this set of persons is not “the Church.” In this way it presupposes that the Church is the set of all those mere humans in the state of grace, rather than as a visible communion whose head is Christ, and whose life is the Holy Spirit.

Of course one can look at particular incidents of failing to discipline abuse and declare that this “says alot.” But as long as we use ambiguous phrases like “says alot,” anything can be “proven” with any evidence. Whether some particular event “says a lot” is not the question. The question is whether sins by Catholics, and especially Catholic clerics, make the Church Christ founded into something that is not the Church Christ founded. And the true answer to that question is “no.” We don’t get to leave and start a man-made ‘church’ whenever persons in the Church Christ founded commit grave sins. We must stay and work to build her up, even if that involves suffering and sacrifice. Forming a schism from the Church Christ founded would be just adding one more sin to the others. Nor can anyone reform the Church from the outside.

Or one can say that the situation is “so bad” that the Church cannot be the Church Christ founded. But that conclusion does not follow from that premise. In order to get the conclusion to follow, one must add another premise stipulating that some number and gravity of sins committed by clergy are the point at which the Church is not the Church Christ founded, or is shown never to have been the Church Christ founded. But that added premise would be a mere stipulation out of one’s own mind, either (a) that there is a certain number and gravity of sins by members of the Church Christ founded that turns the Church Christ founded into something other than the Church Christ founded, and that that number and gravity of those sins has been reached in the Catholic Church or (b) that there is a certain number and gravity of sins by members of a community that demonstrates that this community was not founded by Christ, that one knows what that number and gravity are, and that it has been reached in the Catholic Church. And that is just doing ecclesiology by mere human reason, i.e. with one’s own standards. But Christianity is a divinely revealed religion. We cannot justifiably by our own human reason either add to the marks of the Church, or stipulate by our own human reason what any one of the marks must mean. To do so is to create a religion in our own image, to set up an idol.

If Christ founded the Catholic Church, then nothing can presently make it the case that the Catholic Church is not the Church He founded, and over which the gates of hell shall not prevail. Just as Judas betraying the Son of God did not make it false that the Twelve were the Church Christ founded, so likewise the sins of the successors of the Twelve do not make it false that these successors (along with the laity in communion with them) are the Church Christ founded. That is why if Christ founded the Catholic Church, then even if her leaders commit grave sins, she remains the Church Christ founded.

The other important factor to remember is the role of the media in distorting perceptions by its focus on particularly egregious cases, and its relative silence not only regarding the vast majority of faithful priests, but on the prevalence of abuse cases in other institutions and denominations. The data indicate that the rates of abuse are comparable or even higher among Protestant denominations. Seethis link, and this one. See also “Evangelicals Worse the Catholics on Sex Abuse,” and “Has Media Ignored Sex Abuse In School?.” See also “Benedict’s Peculiar Record on Pedophile Priests,” and five myths about the issue in “Myth Buster.”

When non-Catholic persons watch some documentary on the sex abuse scandal, and then ask me how could ever trust their children around a Catholic priest, I ask them how many Catholic clergy do they know personally? In my eight years as a Catholic now, I’ve known hundreds. I’ve taught in a Catholic seminary, and come to know many more men who are now ordained. And I would say that in the entirety of my experience there were less than five that I didn’t trust (none of whom were in the seminary). What one is getting if one simply goes by the media, is a very skewed picture, because the media focus on the outlandish cases (which are, of course, horrendous), and do not include a proportionate picture of all the upright, solid, faithful, Christ-loving priests who are steadfast moral heroes, but for which there are no sordid details to make a news story sufficiently sensational.

But even if the rate of untrustworthy priests were much higher, even higher than that of the pastors in a particular Protestant denomination, that would not change the identity of the Catholic Church as the Church Christ founded, or make that Protestant denomination into the Church Christ founded, any more than sins by one’s child do not change the fact that so many years ago this child was conceived from one’s own body, and is thus forever one’s child. The founding of the Church by Christ was likewise an event in history, and present sins by her leaders do not, and cannot, change that history. If one stipulates the notion that if one cannot trust one’s children with some particular minimum percentage of the priests of the Church then it is not the Church Christ founded, one is making up one’s own religion, by imposing and inserting one’s own philosophical standard derived from one’s own fallen and flawed human reasoning into what is in fact a divinely revealed religion. And this kind of theologizing is man-made religion, because it involves making up one’s own standards for what does and does not preserve the identity of the Church Christ founded, rather than allowing the divine authority of Christ through His Church to provide those criteria. And strictly speaking, that is idolatry, which, paradoxically, is an even greater sin than sexual sin, though because it is not as sensationally salacious, it won’t make it onto any television documentary.

Just as we know that our children remain our children no matter how wicked and shameful they become, so Catholics know that we’re in this together. When one member sins, we don’t get to bail out, form a new ‘church,’ and thus avoid the suffering and shame. Rather, we are called to suffer the shame with that sinful member, on account of that sinful member, even as we pray and work for the healing of all those harmed, and for the reform, renewal, and restoration of the sinner him or herself.