The One True Church

The Catholic Church, or The One True Church as believers would have it, is many things. Like all human institutions, it has its faults, and the Catholic Church has had more time than any other institution in our culture to accumulate those faults.

But I must confess (pun intended) that I have not adequately appreciated the Church's role in the history of our civilization. For starters, it is the oldest continual institution in Western Civilization, so we can safely assume that the Church must be doing something right.

When we assess the role of the church, we have to remind ourselves that for the overwhelming majority of its history, the church was dominant over the state. Henry VIII was the one who really got the ball rolling in the other direction, and the process of establishing the state's dominance over the church was halting and slow in most places.

The question here is not whether the state should be more powerful than the church. The question is what role the church played before the state was dominant. That role was mixed, of course, with a little humanity here and a little barbarism there, but it's an issue worth considering.

Until very, very recently, the church was the only institution in Western civilization that did anything at all for the poor, for example. There was no welfare, no social security programs, nothing but blood and iron coming from the state. Mercy and charity came only from the church.

It was the church that fed the poor, maintained the libraries, offered safe-haven to fugitives, and so on. The state did none of these things.

The church was also the first truly international institution, which claimed at least in theory that all Christians were equal in some sense. When we consider what havoc was wreaked by state-sponsored nationalism in the 20th century, the church-sponsored internationalism that preceded it clearly has its merits.

For every reactionary priest that burned a scientist at the stake, there were 10 priests who safe-guarded human knowledge accumulated by ancient civilizations during the Dark Ages. For every pedophile rapist that preyed on orphans, there were ten holy men who taught and fed those very same orphans.

Politicians today tell us not to compare them to the Almighty, but to compare them to the alternative. The church's problem is that it asks us to compare it to the Almighty, which makes its predictable human failings all the more grating on our collective conscience, but that should not obscure its good works.

The church today has a role much different than that which it played throughout most of its history. It is no longer involved in governance. And although this is a good thing, we should reflect on the fact that for centuries, it was the only institution in our culture that dispensed mercy, however imperfect, and the only institution which curbed the powerlust of kings.

For all its failings, it is a dark prospect indeed to imagine the past without the Catholic Church.