The 'sinner Church'?
Getting it straight
The formula is increasingly popular, but is misunderstood and foreign to the Christian tradition.
Saint Ambrose referred to the Church as a "chaste whore" in the sense that her sanctity overrides
the sins of her children.
ROME, April 26, 2010 – In reporting on Benedict XVI's meeting with the cardinals at the fifth anniversary of his election,
L'Osservatore Romano wrote that "the Pontiff referred to the sins of the Church, recalling that she, wounded and sinful, experiences the consolations of God even more."
But it is doubtful that Benedict XVI expressed himself in exactly this way. He has never used the expression "sinner Church" - which he has always held to be mistaken.
[Unfortunately, the Vatican Press Office never did publish a transcript of what the Pope said, exactly. However, anyone who has followed what Benedict XVI has said all these past five years cannot doubt that for him, the Church is always holy - it's part of what we profess in the Apostle's Creed, 'the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church' - but the people who compose it are sinners, as are all human beings, and so they are in the Church to be continually purified and sanctified.]
To cite just one example from among many, in the homily for Epiphany in 2008 he defined the Church in a completely different way: "holy and made up of sinners."
And he has always defined it in this other way with careful consideration. At the end of the spiritual exercises for Lent in 2007, Benedict XVI thanked the preacher – who was Cardinal Giacomo Biffi that year – "for having taught us to have more love for the Church, the 'immaculata ex maculatis', as you have taught us with Saint Ambrose."
The expression "immaculata ex maculatis" comes from a passage of Saint Ambrose's commentary on the Gospel of Luke. The expression means that the Church is holy and without stain, although it is made up of men who are sinners.
In 1996, Cardinal Biffi, a scholar of Saint Ambrose – the great fourth century bishop of Milan who baptized Saint Augustine – published a book dedicated to precisely this issue, using St. Ambrose's expression in the title: "Casta meretrix," chaste whore.
This last formula has for decades been a commonplace for progressive Catholicism. To say that the Church is holy, "but also sinful," and must always ask forgiveness for its "own" sins.
To confirm the formula, it is usually attributed to the Fathers of the Church as a group. For example, Hans Küng, in his 1969 book
The Church – perhaps his last book of real theology – wrote that the Church "is a 'casta meretrix'
as it has often been called since the patristic era."
Often? As far as can be determined, in all the works of the Fathers the formula appears only once: in Saint Ambrose's commentary on the Gospel of Luke. No other Latin or Greek Father ever used it, before or after.
The recent fortune of the formula may have been fostered by a 1948 book on ecclesiology by the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, entitled precisely
Casta meretrix. In which, however, there is absolutely no direct application to the Church of the nature of "sinner."
But in what sense did Saint Ambrose speak of the Church as a "casta meretrix"?
Left, Cardinal Biffi's book in English translation; right, engraving of Rahab.
Saint Ambrose simply wanted to apply to the Church the symbolism of Rahab, the prostitute of Jericho who, in the book of Joshua, sheltered and saved fugitive Israelites in her home (above, in an engraving by Maarten de Vos from the end of the sixteenth century).
Even before Ambrose, Rahab was seen as a "prototype" of the Church. In the New Testament, and then in Clement of Rome, Justin, Irenaeus, Origen, Cyprian. The formula "outside of the Church there is no salvation" emerged precisely from the symbol of Rahab's house of safety.
Here is the passage in which Saint Ambrose applies the expression "casta meretrix" to the Church:
"Rahab – who was a whore figure but who expresses the mystery of the Church - had in her blood the future sign of universal salvation amidst slaughter in the world. She does not reject union with the numerous fugitives - and is more chaste the closer she unites with the greater number - she who is immaculate virgin, without wrinkle, uncontaminated in her modesty. public lover, chaste whore, sterile widow, fecund virgin... Chaste meretrix because many lovers come to her for the attractions of love but without the contamination of sin" (In Lucam III, 23).
The passage is very dense, and is worthy of closer analysis. But to limit ourselves to the expression "chaste whore," here is how Cardinal Biffi explains it:
"The expression 'chaste whore', far from alluding to something sinful and reprehensible, is intended to indicate – not only in the adjective, but also in the substantive – the sanctity of the Church. Sanctity that consists just as much in adhering without wavering and without inconsistency to Christ her spouse ('casta'), as in the desire of the Church to reach all in order to bring all to salvation ('meretrix')."
The fact that in the eyes of the world the Church itself might appear to be stained with sins and struck by public disdain is a fate that echoes that of its founder, Jesus, also considered a sinner by the earthly powers of his time.
And this is what Saint Ambrose says again in another passage of his commentary on the Gospel of Luke: "The Church rightly takes on the appearance of a sinner, because Christ also assumed the aspect of a sinner" (In Lucam VI, 21).
But precisely because it is holy – with the indefectible sanctity that comes to it from Christ – the Church can welcome sinners into it, and suffer with them for their evils, and care for them.
In disastrous times like the present, full of accusations meant to invalidate the very sanctity of the Church, this is a truth that must not be forgotten.