The people are the Church and corrupt people have made the Church corrupt.
The Church is without error in the deposits of Faith, but the Church in fact, under the leadership of various Popes, engaged in warfare for power and control. Popes had their own armies and some Popes even fought with them.
Sorry if these facts upset you. But the faster you come to grips with it, the stronger your faith will become.
Jim
Jim, one’s faith is strengthened by truth, but not by ignorance of the Church’s identity.
In Lumen Gentium 1:4 (The Dogmatic constitution of the Church) we find: “Hence the universal Church is seen to be a people brought into unity from the unity of the Father, the Son and Spirit.” (Which, btw, was a quote from St. Cyprian of Carthage.)
Here, St. Cyprian, of course, and the 2nd Vat. C. also, spoke of “A PEOPLE” as one organic whole, not as merely the sum of the number of individuals. That is because the Church is One Mystical Person of Christ and Body in a supernatural union of Grace by the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit in three states: of blessedness in Heaven, of purification after death, of visible communion on earth. This means that Christ dwells in all and only in all that comes from Him (what He joins to Himself), but not in any of what contradicts Himself. This is why there can not be a facile identification of the Church with its visible members with all the actions of all or any of its members. All that comes from the sin of its visible members, of course, is not the Church, because it departs from union with Christ. The opposite distortion is this “we are the Church” materially understood as one would of any other sociological grouping of humanity, which is a radical secularization of a Divine Mystery. This is why one can say that every member of the Visible Church sins, but the Church does not sin. Thus in the late John Paul II’s “apology” we see clearly that he does not identify the Church herself with the sins of which her sons and daughters, however lofty their position, have committed.
Thus the Church is Holy, not sinful as its members are (taken individually or materially, for there are many dead members of the Visible Church who are only materially, i.e., externally, joined to the Church and to Christ, who nevertheless have the opportunity of being revived, especially by the prayers and sacrifices of the alive members.)
It can be difficult for some to see this since they approach the issue superficially, materially, without understanding the depth of the union of Christ with His Visible Body. When that Visible Body teaches it is Christ Who teaches.
Thus only what is done out of this union with Christ in us is the Church, such as teaching on faith or morals by the Magisterium, the sacramental life of the Church, the acts of virtue done in grace by the faithful, above all the lives of heroic sanctity of the Saints. All this is Christ in us who cooperate with Him. The errors in teaching by individuals or sections of the Church, the moral failures, the exercises in poor judgment, the omission of doing good when the circumstances require it, all this is done not by virtue of union with Christ, but by virtue of sinners’ own initiative as first cause themselves, and thus not by the Church. It takes divine faith that the Church is this Great Mystery of union between Christ and His Body to see this; a purely sociological approach misses this entirely as does an historical/scientific approach without faith.
This article further addresses the nature of the Church:
bringyou.to/apologetics/a45.htm
But to the topic at hand, obedience is the foundation on which understanding grows. The Church in its wisdom has put forward for us certain great Feast Days on which all members of the Body are to set aside a brief time to come together in worship and thanksgiving for what God has wrought for our wonder. It is not too little to expect His children to do so with eagerness and docility to His voice through His Body.
