Christ and His Church: Why Infallible?

Edward Holloway

CONTENTS

Introduction.

Authority follows from the Incarnation of God

Authority must be present effectively in the Church

The Plan of God from Beginning to End

The Claim to Authority is a humble Act of Faith

The Nature of Authority in the Church

Human Power alone can never give Certainty

Authority must exist in Fact in any Ecclesial Community

The Dangers of Humanism

The Credentials of Revival

Liberty and Authority: the Role of the Saint

Christ the Only Guarantee in the Church

EDITOR’S NOTE

In the years following Edward Holloway’s death is seems appropriate to reissue the best of his works. The opportunity has been taken to revise the texts carefully: a process which Fr Holloway’s extensive pastoral and theological work did not allow time for. In particular Holloway’s complex sentence structure has been simplified, and punctuation and occasional references have been amended. However the guiding principle of the editing has been to preserve the author’s original meaning.

S.J.D.

Christ and His Church:

Why Infallible?

Edward Holloway

Introduction

The decline of Christendom as a culture, as a way of life among the nations, can be located with convenience as beginning with the great division which split Western Christianity down the middle nearly five hundred years ago. No Catholic will feel holier-than-thou in saying as much. The seeds of the trouble to come can be found ripening in much of the thought of the late Middle Ages, especially in the philosophy called Nominalism which was very similar to the more individualistic forms of Existentialism today, and also in the moral scandals and worldly living which disfigured so much of the life of the Church at that time.

The Reformation—as it is rather sadly called in retrospect—marks more than a cultural decline in a Christendom once united. As we might expect, it is a landmark of decline also in the very faith, in the spiritual belief which underpinned the cultural and social living of Christian men in what continued to be called, in a much vaguer sense, ‘Christendom’. The founding fathers of the new Reformed Christianity dismissed many of the tenets of the common Christian faith as merely human accretions to pure, scriptural doctrine; but the denial of one tenet in particular was to open the door directly to agnosticism in religion, and would lead to final religious collapse.

This tenet, the theme of our present study, is the existence of authentic, authoritative, apostolic Tradition in the life of the Church and in the very constitution of the Church’s structure. The rejection of the divinely guaranteed authority of the hierarchy, in the final definition of basic doctrine of faith or of morals, is the de facto rejection of the inerrancy of the Church as the voice of Christ, speaking down the ages with the divine authority of God made man.

This defect has become more painfully obvious with time and with the deepening of modern knowledge. This point is crucial, and its significance and relevance is still not pondered adequately in modern movements towards reunion.

Authority follows from the Incarnation of God

An abstract, merely nominal authority in teaching, arising from a vague, personal interpretation of ‘the abiding spirit of Jesus’ or the like—which differs in content and moral values from individual to individual, and from one Christian community to another—is an ineptitude in Christianity, however pardonable or even natural in other religions. It is unpardonable in Christianity, because it makes God Incarnate to the image and likeness of human opinion,  and contradicts  in one age the solemn faith and moral teaching of an earlier age. Yet God became the ‘Son of Man’ in Jesus Christ to bestow on mankind the truth of the Eternal Word, the absolute and final truth of the Divine Intellect. If there is not, or cannot be, inerrancy and continuity of doctrine in one same sense in the Church of Christ, then we have rendered meaningless and have denied implicitly the most daring and challenging claim the world has ever known in religion.

For  Christianity  is  distinguished  from  other  religions  because  its founder claimed to be God in Person; literally so, but enfleshed as man for the life and salvation of men. The mission of Christ, if He is truly God made man, simply must include the “but I say to you” (cf. Matt 5:22ff) of that final truth, final authority, and exercised inerrancy that only God can give. It would be folly indeed to claim that Jesus Christ exercised it for some three years at the most in His earthly mission, and then, ascending from the turmoil of this earth, left “His own who were in the world” (John 13:1) to fall away into that Babel of voices and doctrines which is the inevitable result of human insufficiency—an insufficiency made vastly worse by the direct and indirect damage in human nature of original sin. If this breakdown in the original, wonderful gift of Christ to men was inevitable, the work of the Incarnation seems to lose its point. In any event Jesus Christ certainly could not say to the Twelve and their followers: “As the Father has sent Me, even so I send you.” (John 20:21) Unless He can guarantee the infallibility of His Church, He has made no provision for such a task beyond human powers, for these men were only men, whereas Christ was God taking the form of a servant, enfleshed in human nature.

Authority must be present effectively in the Church

If the claim of Christ is true, and if the mission of His Church really does continue down the ages one and the same in characteristics as when He Himself  walked  on earth, then the same divine and not merely  human authority in the truth—the same authority in reply to the Sadducee, the scribe, and the Pharisee—must  be present effectively, and not only as a vague notion, in the life and basic structure of the Christian Church. It is not enough to say it is there nominally, but has no real and dynamic exercise because it has no constitutional centre natural to the very structure of the Church herself.

There was no hesitation in the assumption of authority by Jesus when He was on earth. The faith which claims sanction for a world mission which is uniquely and literally divine, because “all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me” (Matt 28:18), must have the honesty to face up to what this claim really implies. If a man does not believe in the literal Godhead of Jesus Christ, without cavil, then he is not a Christian in the historic profession of the Christian faith—excellent man though he may otherwise be. Likewise the claim of the Christian faith to fulfil and surpass all the religions among mankind by which great souls have done their best to mediate God to men, cannot begin to be credible unless God lives and teaches in Christianity with the same divinity, authority and truth as when Christ walked in Galilee and Judaea.

Jesus, the Son of God, will not be any more vague today, or any less of a challenge today, in His Church and among men, than He was to Israel and Rome, Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate, some 2000 years ago. At that time as well they said, “‘This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?’ … After this many of His disciples drew back and no longer went about with Him.” (John 6:60,66) We need not be scandalised if they do so again in our own day.

Even if claimed in the essentials of doctrine, many find a claim to inerrancy intolerable. It is dismissed as impossible in the first place, and arrogant besides. This is more likely to be the reaction if, instead of the principle of inerrancy in doctrine, we write infallibility in doctrine. In the context of the nature and structure of the Church, the two words mean the same thing, but the latter term arouses emotions which prevent any deep weighing of the issues involved. When men dismiss the infallibility of the Church as something beyond credence, do they ever stop to ponder how very glib is their professed belief in Christ as “true God from true God”? Do they not give their basic creed only a notional rather than a real assent and understanding?

The Plan of God from Beginning to End

This question of the inerrancy of the Church of Christ in divine truth till the end of time reduces to the question of whether the Incarnation of God as man—as the Word made flesh—is credible at all. We claim that the Incarnation of Christ marks the climax of a long ascent of prophecy and doctrine, contained for us in the Bible and the tradition of faith it represents. We know that this age-long tradition of the Old Testament did indeed claim the special authority of God, and looked for a final culmination in a Messiah, who would give the total, final plenitude of the truth and joy of God to mankind. We know that Christ claimed to be God—that “before Abraham was, I AM” (John 8:58)—and that He declared that He was sending His disciples with His power and authority to all nations, because all power  was  given  to  Him,  in  heaven  and  on  earth  (cf.  Matt 28:18).

Moreover, He acknowledged that He had many things to say to them which they could not now bear, and solemnly promised them the guidance of the Holy Spirit who would “teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” (John 14:26; cf. 16:12) It is clear that Jesus did not regard His continuing mission on earth, after His Ascension from men, to be a steadily declining and second class work: one which must ‘run down’ because it had been handed on to men, who could not be expected to maintain within His mission the same characteristics of life and power, because they were merely mortal men, and He, Jesus, had gone from them. On the contrary, He said He had not gone from them, but “lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” (Matt 28:20) He is not “with us” in any useful sense unless as God He is able to maintain the full gift and power of His mission to us, and His union and communion with us. This requires Divine Truth, in order that we may know what it is to live Divine Love, and walk in its joy while we avoid plausible and subtle evil and deceit.

The Claim to Authority is a humble Act of Faith

Now arrogant such a claim can never be. None of us would be so foolish as to claim inerrancy in divine doctrine from the wisdom of men or the holiness of men. The holiness of men would not suffice even if God were able to guarantee heroic holiness in every bishop who succeeded the apostles until the end of time—in every priest too, even in all His people. The wisdom and holiness of man never suffices to guarantee freedom from the errors and mistakes of human ignorance, especially since sin.  History indeed does not bear out any divine guarantee of the inevitable holiness of priest or of layman. Inerrancy in the teaching and defining of doctrine, and sinlessness, are neither the same thing nor the same idea. The first belongs to the office of Christ in the Church, living and teaching in His apostles, the bishops, gathered with Peter; for Christ is her ever-living  and infallible Head. The other belongs to that utterly personal and impenetrable relationship of an individual to God, by which a man abides in God’s love and obedience.

The claim to abiding certainty in the truth of Christ down the ages, without loss, discontinuity or contradiction, can only be what it is in fact: the most magnificent and humble of all public acts of faith in the divinity of Christ, notwithstanding the fallibility and the sinfulness of man.

The Nature of Authority in the Church

We profess that Christ Himself is able through men—that is through the Pope, the successor of Peter, and through the bishops in communion with him—to guarantee that to God’s divine Word there will not be added and solemnly taught anything which is not true and of Christ’s revelation; and that from the same divine Word there will not be taken away by loss, contradiction, or distortion of meaning, anything that Christ gave us and taught us. This claim is even greater. It is a claim that the Church will develop in the fuller understanding of Christ and of His revelation. This development will be a continuity in a straight line—always divine, the true fullness of Christ’s  message  and  kingdom—by  the  power  of  Himself  the  Eternal Word, and the Holy Spirit, ever living and working within the Church.

It is very clear that no sense can be made of giving Peter the ‘power of the keys’ (cf. Matt 16:19) unless Peter shares in a special manner in that magisterial power to define and to rule, which belongs to the King of the Church alone, namely to Jesus Christ Himself. It is Jesus who delegates the power of the keys, but this power is the power of God made man—the power to decide, settle, and command with the certainty of God, and the power of rule that belongs to God. This is the same thing as to say divine certainty in the truth when defined, divine power of rule when exercised. For Christ is King of the final and fulfilling truth, as He Himself declared to Pilate at His trial. If for this Christ was born, for this Christ came into the world (cf. John 18:37), then certainly in giving to Peter, and to the Twelve gathered with Peter, His own divine ‘power of the keys’, Jesus Christ did indeed mean that His mission—as the Good News both spoken and written, through the ages—should  retain all the fullness and divine authority which He came on earth to give, so that men should have life, and have it more abundantly (cf. John 10:10). Indeed, as we have seen, Christ gave us no minimal gift before He ascended from this earth. He intended and taught that the Holy Spirit, “the Spirit of Truth” (John 14:17), would lead mankind, through the Church, into an ever greater and more coherent fullness of understanding and life through God’s revelation in Christ. It is clear that this cannot be done unless the word of Christ can be continued down the ages as the spoken word of God, and unless it can be defined and clarified against error, doubt, and new perplexities.

Jesus Christ was not ignorant either of who He was, or of the sweep of the mission of His Church down the ages. He warned the Twelve, and the disciples as a body, of the many contradictions, persecutions and trials they would have upon earth after He was gone from them according to the flesh in the normal form and figure of a man. (We put it this way, because in the Eucharist indeed Christ, as true God and true man, abides with us for ever.) He warned them—for He spoke not simply to those men, but to His apostles and disciples through the ages—that the time would come when the pressure of persecution,  turmoil and doubt would be such that they would “desire to see one of the days of the Son of Man” (Luke 17:22). Jesus knew the reality of Satan; He knew Satan’s desperate struggle to obtain possession of the Church herself, and to destroy the unity of the People of God as a family and a kingdom—a unity in truth, and in love through truth. And so, even more solemnly, Jesus said to Peter: “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you (singular) that your (singular) faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren.” (Luke 22:31-32)

Peter cannot confirm the brethren with the magistracy of Christ and the guarantee of Christ, nor can the apostles or the bishops of the Church teach and rule with Peter, except they do it through the word. This means they must do it day in, day out as part of the mission of the Teaching Church, and they must do it, in great moments of crisis and contradiction, by the solemn word of Council, or of Peter (the Pope) speaking and defining ex cathedra in the name of Christ, backed by the divine power, guarantee and protection of Christ.

Human Power alone can never give Certainty

The truth of good men, the consensus of dedicated and saintly men, does not suffice to maintain or guarantee the truth of doctrine, or the moral fullness of the good, which belongs to Jesus Christ. Human power alone can never give us this certainty, as well we know. Yet, if the Incarnation is to be believed—if the mission and the supreme authority of the Christian Church are to be credible—this inerrancy in the truth, and this fullness of moral goodness in life and standards, must go on and must be guaranteed.

Deny the power of Christ and the intention of Christ to maintain through history the infallibility of divine revelation and its bearing on new knowledge and on new manifestations of error and evil, and the way is thrown open to merely human interpretation and doctrinal standards, with all the doubt, loss of authentic Tradition, sectarianism, and finally humanism, that human weakness, ignorance and passion must bring in. All these human failings have occurred in plenty among Christians. They are the very legacy of that ‘private interpretation’ which followed upon the hoped-for Reformation of faith and morals after the great division within Christianity. (The outcome cannot be better or nobler if the same principles of sheer humanism are now to be allowed to run riot in the training colleges and teaching centres of the Catholic Church.) If it had been God’s intention, in the life of the Church as the Family of God, to lead and guide mankind through private and personal locutions and intuitions, through ‘charismatic insights’ of the Holy Spirit, and so forth, then sincere men should have found God’s own perfect unity and full intellectual agreement as the fruit of their diverse intuitions and insights. Manifestly they did not; manifestly they still do not!

Authority must exist in Fact in any Ecclesial Community

An organised community which is a working, teaching, and ministering society, cannot be long maintained without a ‘tradition’, and the Church of Christ is just such a community. We bear in mind that the economy of the Incarnation is the economy of the power of God, the truth of God, and the love and goodness of God enfleshed. This means that God in Christ contacts us, works upon us, communes with us and loves us through the material, which is natural to us men. He works as divine through solid human contact, through structures of teaching and rule in His Church, through sacraments by which He does things and confers lasting gifts and status. The Incarnation then, as an economy of the Word made flesh, continues the same communing, leading and teaching of the Word down the centuries. The Word needs a voice; a voice needs men who possess authority; and the exercise of authority needs a structure guaranteed by Christ, and a final centre from which solemn teaching is defined and ratified beyond further appeal. If the economy of the Incarnation of God really does continue down the ages, then inerrancy, i.e. infallibility, in the definition of doctrine must be also a necessary and inevitable mark of the Church—it follows  from  the  claim  of  divinity  which  we  Christians  make  for Christ, and from the identity of His work and teaching through time.

It does not take us very far to dismiss the claim for infallibility in the definition of Christian teaching in the name of humility. There is no place for this ‘humility’ anyway, for we are preaching not men but Christ, who is God. Besides, if anything is taught and done by an ecclesial community, by a ‘Church’ that is to say, there must be authority in fact and a position taken in fact, even in the most ‘democratic’ and admittedly fallible of Churches, whose ministers are nominees of the congregation,  and  whose  Orders cease, in every sense of cease, with demotion or resignation from office. The  decisions  taken  concern  the  future  integrity  of  doctrine  in  those churches for truth or error in the ages which succeed.

Very real authority passes to men of strong personality:  they teach with emphasis, deny with emphasis, and disagree emphatically with each other. Irreversible effects follow upon their teaching and decisions—effects which commit the religion of Jesus Christ as much as if these persons, and the communities gathered around them, had claimed some charismatic guarantee against loss and error in the inheritance they pass on of the truth given once by Jesus Christ. What sort of ‘humility’ would this be, in the most sacred and precious things of the faith; a humility which admits a human power to distort and destroy through the exercise of authority, but is too ‘humble’ to conceive that Christ—who is God and the Heir to the Ages—has divine power to protect and guarantee His own things, even through vessels as frail as all we men are?

The Dangers of Humanism

After some 500 years of Christian divisions and the decline of Christian faith it is plain to see, if we try to understand through humble prayer, how much of this basically human and humanist mentality was made to the image of man alone, and not to the image of God and the mind of God in His Christ. Because it is of man alone, and of human littleness, it leads to that disintegration  of faith which the Anglican might call ‘radicalism in theology’,  and  the  Roman  Catholic  ‘neo-modernist’,   or  just  simply ‘humanist’. Whatever label we tie to this emptying out of the divine content in Christ and in the teaching of the Christian Church, the principle of work is but one and the same: the modern heresy of Humanism—and here we mean not simply culture and its achievements, but rather taking the measure of man’s mind and experience as the norm of judgment for all things whatever, including the alleged divinity of Jesus Christ itself. Vagueness of doctrine, chaos over morals, disunity in real profession of belief, loss of true joy in union and communion with God, because there is no certain way, truth and life—this has been the accompaniment of the all too human reformation of the Church, not a continuous, organic development, ever coherent upon itself and its past.

This disintegration is the natural end-product of the initial agnosticism concerning truth, which is really concealed behind the personal dogmatism of this type of ‘progressive’ Christian. It runs parallel to the agnosticism which is the end-product of rationalist philosophy itself. At root it is one principle with that philosophy of man’s own self-sufficiency. It is a mendacious self-sufficiency which makes every man his own God, and the source of his own self-fulfilment, and is the very antithesis of “but our sufficiency is from God.” (2 Cor 3:5, Douay Version)

This self-sufficient agnosticism can become a crumbling into the very vaguest of deisms; and where, through ignorance of its bearing and the loss of a true Tradition of interpretation, the Old Testament becomes as ‘shocking’ as the New Testament is ‘symbolic’, it ends up leaving men who are ex officio bishops or leading churchmen with very much less than Abraham possessed himself, at the attainable beginnings of the era of our Messianic hope. When men have reduced the doctrine of the Incarnation to this sort of nebulosity, do they honestly understand any longer the very meaning of God?

Once the basic certitude has gone out of the faith, and out of the moral teaching of the Christian Church, nothing can ever put it back again, and Christianity will be finished. The authority by which men in a later age might ‘put it back again’ could not be greater than the authority by which men in an earlier, perhaps more decadent generation had ‘taken it away’— namely the opinion of men or the violence of men. It is essential to the very concept of the dispensation of the Church—because it is the Church of God Incarnate—that the fullness of the truth should never cease from within the Church, and should never need to be ‘put back again’ into its life or its structure.

The Credentials of Revival

If there is to be any hope of renewal, any new vision, any further synthesis of faith and reason to match the needs of this age and the recent Vatican Council’s aspiration of a united and revived Christendom throughout the world, then it must arise as a development of theology which is latent, awaiting development, in the integrity of historic Christian doctrine as understood in its sincere, historic sense. For this to be possible at all, the lasting integrity of doctrine must be capable of being found somewhere in the Christian world. We must look for a Church structure and a Church authority which affirms this very integrity of doctrine, which claims to be able to define it with infallibility in the name of Christ, and which in the same name of Christ—not of bishops or of Pope—requires assent to it in conscience from her believing members. If there is to be any hope at all for a continuing world mission for the Christian faith, this requirement must be found as a living reality in the world; for the characteristics we are demanding belong to the basic, imperishable idea of a Church which continues on earth the same, even the developing, mission of God Incarnate.

There  is  uniquely  one  place  and  one  centre  and  one  Church community where all of this can be found, and where the claim has been exercised with power, “welcome or unwelcome”  (2 Tim 4:2, Jerusalem Bible), down the ages: the Catholic and Roman Church, the college of bishops gathered together with Peter and in union and communion with him. There is no other such claim. By this fact alone—in what is claimed, exercised, and still found, even under the modern intellectual persecution—we know that we have found the one unique Church of the total fullness and plenitude of Jesus Christ. Around the year 100 A.D. St Ignatius, martyr bishop of Antioch of Syria, wrote in a moving and prophetic way of the Church of Rome. He salutes the Church beloved and enlightened in the will of Him who has brought all things into being by His own will, according to the love of Jesus Christ, our God. That Church which presides over the congregation of the whole Church, in the country of the land of the Romans, worthy she is before God, worthy of honour, of blessing, of praise, and of success. She is worthy in holiness, presiding as bishop over the Eucharistic love feast [the  agape]  of  the  Church,  blessed  in  the  name  of  Christ, blessed in the name of Father, whom I also greet in the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father: greeting those united in the flesh and spirit in every one of His commandments, filled with the grace of God without wavering, filtered clear of every alien and discolouring stain.1

Liberty and Authority: the Role of the Saint

Against what is written here of the nature of the Church, and her necessary infallibility through Christ’s protection in faith and morals, men will cry out that if the individualism, which can guarantee no divine law of life and knowledge, crumbles into the dust of agnosticism, then what we claim for the Church just as certainly must bring in authoritarianism. Let us grant that there will never be an age when the Church of God is free from all blemish and human imperfection. There will be a danger too, especially at certain times in history that men will try to use the prestige or sanction of divine power and holy order to serve merely human opinion and prejudices, or even worldly and political ends.

Nevertheless, there does exist within the true Church, but only within the uniquely true Church, the divine guarantee that human sin will never overwhelm or substantially distort the doctrine and the life of Christ in His Church. The unique answer to any threat of an authoritarianism, which would bind the power and authority of Christ to the warped will of men, is the prophetic figure of the saint.

The true, the real saint is raised up by God to teach, to witness, and to live the integrity of Christ according to his or her measure and office in the Church. It is the saint who will also direct a saving protest, where necessary, perhaps with indignation, in the likeness of Christ reproaching the scribes and the Pharisees. Yet (and this is why we wrote that the phenomenon of the saint is the answer only in the uniquely true Church of Christ) all that the saint does is done within the unity of the ordered, organic and membered obedience of the Body Spiritual of Jesus Christ, who cannot be either physically or spiritually divided against Himself.

In the last analysis the saint is the true reformer, because he or she is the true type of Christ, who was made obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross (cf. Phil 2:8). The saint—not the loudmouthed  worldlings, whose words of pride and defiance lie in every age like dead leaves along the library shelves of mankind—is the lonely guarantor of the rights, freedoms, and dignities of man. The rebel, which in this context means the leader of heresy or schism, mutilates the truth men had received from God, and tears asunder the seamless garment of the Church’s unity besides. He cannot take it, cannot “drink the cup that I drink.” (Mark 10:38) He burns with the anger of man, and such anger, St James warns us, “does not work the righteousness of God.” (James 1:20) He brushes aside Christ’s prohibition to Peter, draws the sword, and slashes with it. In his own day, and in this world’s way, he may be triumphant. But with time the limb he has severed from the life of the parent trunk begins to wither; the sap does not rise from the root which is Christ. In the end it decays into the dust of agnosticism, because it lacks the authority of Christ living within it. The scar of severance remains a lasting gash, and in part of its cause perhaps a lasting reproach, upon the Body of the Church. Yet, if the rebel had been the saint, he would have protested and reformed without error and without division—by going to crucifixion instead.

The saint also knows how to speak and act with decision. If, like his Lord, he must deliver himself up to those who judge him unjustly, he will go to his passion—never so much a branch of the Living Vine, and never so fruitful, as when he goes in the likeness of Christ crucified. Should it be priests and churchmen who crucify the saint rather than political tyrants and militant atheists, from the grave he will rise again and will prevail. In the case of the greatest of such spirits, the Church herself will canonise them, exalting them to the honours of her altar as sons and daughters who filled up in their bodies “what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.” (Col 1:24) The heedless, sin-soaked world is never so poor, never so much in trouble in its self-caused crises, as when there is a dearth of saints to love it without cause, redeem it in blood, and reclaim it through sweat and tears, no matter what price the venture should cost.  This analogy with our Redemption in Christ through pain, and the light it sheds upon the meaning of redemptive sacrifice, is great and precious—though we cannot pursue the theme now.

Christ the Only Guarantee in the Church

When ‘democrats’ and ‘progressives’ have run amok in religion, in moral values, and in natural philosophy; when all flesh has erred, and there seems no path back, and no water of life to survive in the desert of man’s own making;  one truth stands divinely  vindicated.  It is that whatever in the affairs of this world we seek to defend by our ‘democracy’, and whatever is precious and vital in the faith of God, is rescued by men and women who image divinely in their personalities and lives that norm of man which is revealed by God in Jesus Christ—that likeness of man revealed in the Son of Man, who was made flesh for the life of the world. Christ, Son of God and Son of Man, is the only criterion of human fullness, and His is the only true and fulfilling humanism for men to live and follow.

When we come to the end of the matter, mankind is saved because the Church cannot be a ‘democracy’, choosing her teachers as nominees from the body of her assembly, ‘making her mind up’ about the truth of Christ, its meaning and its relevance in every age by majority suffrages. God is the only norm and standard of absolute truth, absolute good, and perfect love. God has to declare His truth, His law of life and goodness; and we have to ponder it, to savour it, and to live it. We are made to be fulfilled in it and through it alone. We are not sufficient unto ourselves to find our life and our joy. We are made to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Life, and that Tree of Life is also the True Vine, Jesus Christ Himself.

The guarantee, in the life of the Church, of a balance between authority and liberty is not different in principle from the guarantee of her essential integrity, which is to say, the guarantee of her basic inerrancy at all times in teaching of faith and morals. In the one case the guarantee  is through the raising up of the great, clear sighted and brave soul, the saint; in the other it is the structure of the Church upon bishops and Peter, the continuity of doctrine and apostolic Tradition, the power to define with infallibility where need be. In both cases the only guarantor behind the guarantee is Jesus Christ, who is God. Men will not find some more prosaically human collateral, as men make a contract against gold in the bank. Nothing of this world is, or can be, the guarantee: the life is divine, the guarantee is divine, and the guarantor is divine. And history is the witness that Jesus honours His pledge down the ages.

What we are looking for—to give joy to the hearts of people who say they cannot believe, and to those who are yearning for full unity in faith and love—cannot be fashioned from the broken scraps of an agnostic, ‘radical’ or ‘humanist’ Christianity. It can only grow as a further fullness of that whole doctrine of Christ which men treasure already. It must grow as a child grows, in perfect continuity with its past, and upon the organic configuration it has possessed all through history. It must bring forth a fuller vision of the things that are Mine (cf. John 16:14), for this is the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church. There is no ‘ongoing revelation’, for God alone can declare what is true revelation.  And this He has done in the human words of the Eternal Word, who is the content of the Divine Intelligence. We cannot add to this, or to Him. There is however development of our understanding of that full inheritance of Christ, the meaning of all creation in Him, and His own relation to the Father and to us men: “all that the Father has is Mine.” (John 16:15) The renewal we seek will grow only on Christ’s terms, in the Holy Spirit, through the constitution and hierarchy of that Church which has always taught, and does always teach, with apostolic certainty and continuity, one unity of wisdom and truth in Christ. The heart of this is well shown to us in the formula by which a Pope, as ‘Peter’ in the Church, has defined a doctrine of faith: “By the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, and our own authority, we declare, pronounce and define the doctrine …”.2  One unity here, one continuity here; only one authority of Christ which embraces the entire apostolic  succession,  Peter and Paul, Ourself,  and the college  of bishops membered to the Pope as ‘Peter’. It is the work of the Holy Spirit to lead us further into that fullness once declared, to “guide you into all the truth.” (John 16:13) This fullness, this work, this entire inerrancy in the truth and in the life of grace both individual and structured as a ‘body’— this is the meaning and the measure of the Church of Jesus Christ.

From the teachings of the Church

In order to preserve the Church in the purity of the faith handed on by the apostles, Christ who is the Truth willed to confer on her a share in his own infallibility. By a ‘supernatural sense of faith’ the People of God, under the guidance of the Church’s living Magisterium, ‘unfailingly adheres to this faith’.

The mission  of  the Magisterium  is linked  to the definitive nature of the covenant established by God with his people in Christ. It is the Magisterium’s task to preserve God’s people from deviations and defections and to guarantee them the objective possibility of professing the true faith without error. Thus, the pastoral duty of the Magisterium is aimed at seeing to it that the People of God abides in the truth that liberates.  To fulfil this service, Christ endowed the Church’s shepherds with the charism of infallibility in matters of faith and morals. … This infallibility extends as far as the deposit of divine Revelation itself.

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 889-891

1 Epistle of St Ignatius to the Romans, Introduction. To avoid complications in the pamphlet, Holloway’s translation puts ‘the commentary into the text’.

2 Pius IX, Bull Ineffabilis Deus, 8 Dec 1854. Translation from J. Neuner and J.

Dupuis (eds.), The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic

Church, Alba House, New York, 1982, para. 709.

http://www.faith.org.uk

Table of Contents

Introduction.

Authority follows from the Incarnation of God

Authority must be present effectively in the Church

The Plan of God from Beginning to End

The Claim to Authority is a humble Act of Faith

The Nature of Authority in the Church

Human Power alone can never give Certainty

Authority must exist in Fact in any Ecclesial Community

The Dangers of Humanism

The Credentials of Revival

Liberty and Authority: the Role of the Saint

Christ the Only Guarantee in the Church

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