Father Richard McBrien's Church
by Emanuel Valenza
THE INVITATION extended to Gov. Mario Cuomo to lecture at Notre Dame by Father Richard McBrien, chairman of Notre Dame's Theology Department, came as no surprise to those familiar with Fr. McBrien's writings. He has spent his career fulminating against the Catholic Church and her teachings. His book, Do We Need the Church? (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), is vintage McBrien—a scathing denunciation of Holy Mother Church. An analysis of the book follows.
McBrien begins by defining what he means by "the Church": "By the Church I mean the community of those who profess explicit faith in the Lordship of Christ and who have ratified this faith in baptism" (p. 11; cf. also p. 126).
Obviously McBrien's Protestant definition of the Church is motivated by ecumenical concerns. For if his definition is correct, then vast numbers of Protestants need not be converted, for they are within the fold. According to McBrien our "separated brethren" are not separated from the Church because the Church is larger than the Roman Catholic Church. Thus he can say of Charles Davies, who left the Catholic Church in the mid-sixties: "It is not legitimate to exclude theologically a Charles Davies from the Christian community. He has simply (and I do not use the word casually) altered his place within the Body of Christ" (p. 178).
Needless to say, McBrien's definition clashes with the criteria for membership in the Church as stated by Pius XII in Mystici Corporis:
Only those are really to be included as members of the Church who have been baptized and profess the true faith and who have not had the misfortune of withdrawing from the body or for grave faults been cut off by legitimate authority (Dez. 2287; cited in The Church Teaches, p. 109).
Pius XII's criteria for membership in the Church is, therefore, threefold: 1) valid baptism; 2) profession of the true faith, that is, "everything must be believed that is contained in the written word of God or in tradition, and that is proposed by the Church as a divinely revealed object of belief, either in a solemn decree or in her ordinary, universal teaching" (Denz. 1792); and 3) adherence to the ruling authority of the Church.
McBrien's definition of the Church meets only the first criteria, valid baptism. He rejects the second criteria—submission to the teaching authority of the Church—because he is convinced that the Church does not have a genuine teaching authority given to her by Christ. According to McBrien, the Church should merely ratify the consensus of the Christian community; if she fails to do so, her teaching should be denounced by the "faithful." The following statements of McBrien are pertinent:
The Pope and bishops are symbols of unity and official spokesmen for the community. The idea that the Pope or the body of bishops could define something or authoritatively proclaim something which is rejected by the overwhelming majority of the faithful is a theological fiction. The Magisterium is not above the community. It exists to provide the community with guidelines for its own self-understanding and to be a channel for the community's convictions and beliefs (pp. 224-5).
The Magisterium must try, as always, to reflect the actual consensus of the Church. And if the Pope and bishops are convinced that the consensus of the Church is moving in the wrong direction, they have the obligation to attempt to create a new, countervailing consensus. If the Spirit is with them, the new consensus will eventually win the day. But the Pope and bishops never have the right to impose their own views on the Church, without such an organic process. If, by chance, they do attempt to impose such a position, the Church itself will, and must, reject it (p. 227).
The conclusion must be . . . that infallibility applies only to the Church as a community, and to the Pope as spokesman of the community and symbol of its unity . . . personal papal infallibility, as understood by post-Vatican I theologians, and admittedly by Pope Pius XII himself, is a theological fiction and cannot be supported or sustained (pp. 187-8).
In light of his rejection of papal infallibility and his penchant for false irenicism among Catholics and Protestants, McBrien's ridicule of Pius XII's infallible declaration of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven (Munificentissimus Deus, 1950), is typical. He writes: "Not only was it an unwise gesture (the ecumenical implications were clear enough), but it theologically unjustifiable" (p. 187)
Alluding to Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae (1969), in which artificial birth control is condemned as intrinsically sinful, McBrien lambasts both the college of bishops for allowing Pope Paul to make the final decision, and the Holy Father for not taking into consideration the convictions of the whole Church. Again McBrien: "The college of bishops, in an extraordinary abdication of responsibility, has allowed the Pope to reserve the final decision to himself. But the decision cannot be exclusively his. He must take into account the convictions of the entire Church (including the non-Romans!) as well as the convictions of all the bishops who represent various sectors of the Church (including the non-Roman!)" (p. 188).
McBrien holds the Gallican theory that the decrees of the Pope are not infallible unless they are accepted by the whole Church—a theory Vatican I declared erroneous when it included in its definition of papal infallibility the statement ''that such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are therefore irreformable because of their nature, but not because of the agreement of the Church" (Denz. 1839; cited in The Church Teaches, p. 102).
Moreover, that the Modernist and Gallican positions on the teaching authority of the Church are essentially the same is evident from the following Modernist position condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili (1907): "The teaching Church and the learning Church so work together in defining truths, that the only function of the teaching Church is to ratify the generally held opinions of the learning Church" (Denz. 2006; ibid., p. 107)
It goes without saying that if the infallible teaching authority of the Church is based upon adherence by the faithful, then the constitution of the Church is undermined, and the faithful, not the divinely appointed rulers and teachers, are the custodians of God's revelation and they exercise the power of jurisdiction. But all power and authority in the Church was conferred upon the Apostles and their successors irrespective of the acquiesce of the faithful; nor did the Apostles and their successors ever seek such confirmation in order to use their authority to govern, teach, and sanctify. In addition, supreme power in the Church was bestowed upon St. Peter—and only St. Peter—by Christ: "I will give thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 16: 19); "Feed my lambs . . . feed my sheep" (John 21. 16, 17). Through St. Peter the supreme power of jurisdiction with its gift of infallibility is passed on to his successors—and only his successors. Hence the Roman Pontiff's supreme power is employed independently of all others in the Church.
McBrien's conviction that all authority in the Church comes from the consensus of the faithful precludes a primacy of jurisdiction by divine institution. And so he is right on course when he states that
. . . there is a great disparity between the theology of "Catholicism" and its canonical expression. And the principal reason for this disparity lies in the unbiblical and untheological notion of jurisdiction. Canonically, jurisdiction refers to the public power of ruling the Church, and the Code of Canon Law insists that such power is of divine institution . . . And yet in the New Testament there is no basis for the kind of jurisdiction which either the Pope or the bishops currently exercise. The monarchical episcopate simply did not exist, nor did the papacy as an office possessing full and supreme, ordinary and immediate jurisdiction not only over each and every church but even over every pastor and lay person in the Church (pp. 181-2).
Parallel to McBrien's theory that the Church's authority is derived from the consensus of the Church is his Modernist position that revelation is man's experience of God, which experience he then "attempts to express . . . in concrete language so that he may share it with others" (pp. 191-2). "The experience" [of God], writes McBrien, "itself is the revelation" (p. 192). McBrien elaborates:
Revelation can be described more precisely as a personal union in knowledge between God and the human person in the context of an historical community. It should be pointed out, however, that revelation is not an exclusively Christian thing, nor is the historical community to be identified necessarily with the Church. God does not communicate with Christians alone. There is no law of logic or of theology to prevent him from drawing near and disclosing himself to those outside the Body of Christ. On the contrary, revelation occurs wherever and whenever man has an experience of God. It is an event which happens not outside of man but in his human consciousness (p. 193).
Like Modernists Loisy and Tyrrell, who also considered revelation as a personal experience of God, McBrien recognizes that the revelation must be interpreted "and expressed in language, otherwise it would remain a purely private affair. There would be no possibility of communicating and sharing the revelation with others. And, this in turn, would rule out the existence of the Church . . ." (pp. 190-91). These interpretations and linguistic expressions of the revelation are dogmas of the Church. Therefore the role of the Church is simply to sanction the collective religious sentiment of men; and she does this by interpreting and purifying this religious sentiment in her doctrinal formulations.
This Modernist conception of revelation is condemned in St. Pius X's Lamentabili. Relevant among the rejected positions are two of Loisy's: "Revelation can have been nothing more than the awareness man acquires of his relation to God" (Denz. 2020). And: "The dogmas which the Church proposes as revealed are not truths which have come down from heaven, but a certain interpretation of religious facts which the human mind has acquired by laborious effort" (Denz. 2022).
As the Modernists did before him McBrien affirms that dogmas must constantly be reformulated because they can never grasp the mysteries of the Faith. In fact, according to McBrien the traditional definition of heresy must be discarded because it is incompatible with the conjecturial nature of dogmatic statements. As McBrien puts it:
In my judgment, the traditional notion of heresy, ossified in the Code, has indeed expired . . . The rigid concept of heresy fails . . . to respect sufficiently the provisional and tentative character of dogmatic statements. The object of the Church's teaching is the mystery of our redemption in Christ. As a mystery, it is something radically inexhaustible, and therefore something that can never be described or defined adequately by human language alone. The doctrines of the Church will always be short of the mark. As such, they are always in need of reform and development, and are correspondingly open to varying theological interpretations (p. 222). (My emphasis.)
Apropos of the Modernist view of dogma, Pope St. Pius X's words in Pascendi are as applicable today as they were in 1907:
. . . it is necessary first of all, according to the teachings of the Modernists, that the believer does not lay too much stress on the formula, as formula, but avail himself of it only for the purpose of uniting himself to the absolute truth which the formula at once reveals and conceals—that is to say, which it endeavors to express but without ever succeeding in doing so (Readings in Church History, Vol. III, edited by Colman J. Barry, O.S.B.; New York: Newman Press, 1965, p. 114.).
According to the Modernists, the faithful are, to use St. Paul's words, "ever learning yet never attaining knowledge of the truth" (II Tim. 3: 7). For Modernists like McBrien, therefore, the Catholic Church is not "the Church of the Living God, the pillar and mainstay of the truth" (I Tim. 3:15). It also follows from their theory of dogma that the Modernists disbelieve that Christ asked the Father to give the Church "another Advocate to dwell with [her] forever, the Spirit of Truth. . . " (John 14: 16-17). Nor can the Church prevail against the gates of hell if she can never attain the truth. Similarly, the Church cannot be "without spot or wrinkle" or "holy and without blemish" (Ephes. 5:27), if she can never possess the truth.
It hardly needs to be mentioned that McBrien does not believe that the Catholic Church is the Kingdom of God!
Scripture uses the phrase "kingdom of God" in different senses, all of which are related to the Church. In one sense, the Kingdom of God is the Catholic Church. Christ spoke of the kingdom as identical to His one, true Church in the following parables: the Mustard Seed (Matt. 13:31; Mk. 4:30; Luke 13:18), the Grain and the Weeds (Matt. 13:24), and the Net Cast into the Sea (Matt. 13:47). These parables depict the Kingdom of God in its external, visible, and social aspect.
In another sense the Kingdom of God is the reign of God in the soul. Christ also spoke of this kingdom in parable form (Matt. 13:33; 44; 45). Through its sacramental system the Church produces the reign of God in the soul, that is, sanctifying grace.
Finally, the Kingdom of God is the Church Triumphant (Luke 22: 29-30; Matt. 16:25; Mk 10:26; Luke 13:23; Apoc. 19:11-16). The Kingdom of God on earth, the Catholic Church, prepares for this Kingdom as its true home.
Christ combines all three senses of the phrase "Kingdom of God" when He declares to Nicodemus the necessity of baptism: "Amen, amen I say to thee, unless a man be born again of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God" (John 3:5). Thus baptism is necessary to enter the Catholic Church; in fact, the Council of Florence calls baptism the "door" to the Church (Denz. 686). Baptism, in addition, confers sanctifying grace; and makes one an heir of heaven. It is necessary for salvation, as the Council of Trent says (Denz. 861).
Since the Catholic Church is the Kingdom of God, all are called to membership. Christ asserted that all who hear the teachings of the Apostles are obligated to accept them (Matt. 1.6:16). Similarly, all who hear the Church have the duty to obey her (Matt. 18:17; Luke 10: 16). And along with the necessity of baptism, Christ proclaimed the obligation of consuming His Body and Blood (John 6:54).
McBrien, as already mentioned, holds that the Catholic Church is not the Kingdom of God. He writes: "The Church . . . must be one of the major signs of the Kingdom, but only one of the signs. The Church is not itself the Kingdom" (p. 67). Similarly, he says: "The Church is not the Kingdom. It exists for the Kingdom and for no other reason" (p. 219).
McBrien tells us what he means by "Kingdom of God":
The Kingdom of God is realized wherever the Lordship of Christ is acknowledged. And the Lordship of Christ is acknowledged, at least implicitly, wherever his gospel is lived, when men love one another an bear one another's burdens (p. 193).
Since the Kingdom of God is not the Catholic Church, not all men are called to the Church. McBrien writes:
In summary: no convincing case can be made from the New Testament that all men are called to membership in the Church. All men are, indeed, called to accept and live the Gospel and thereby to create and enter into God's Kingdom, but the Church and the Kingdom are not one and the same reality (p. 98).
McBrien draws some logical conclusions from his Protestant conception of the Church:
* "Not all men are called to the Church, nor is the Church the ordinary means of salvation" (p. 76).
* "There is no advantage to being a member of the Church in terms of ultimate salvation" (p. 207).
* For, according to McBrien, the Church is not "primarily in the salvation business as understood by traditional theology" (p. 229).
* The Church is not needed because "A person who loves according to the imperative of Christ is already saved; he is already within God's Kingdom as it presently grows and develops" (p. 163).
* For McBrien, whether or not a person attends Church is a matter of indifference: "One cannot be a Christian apart from the Christian community. And one is a member of the Christian community whether or not he attends services in a specific church . . . baptism and explicit faith in the Lordship of Jesus constitute such membership" (p. 180).
* Since McBrien holds that the Church's doctrinal teachings are not the object of faith, and that one need not assist at Mass, then it follows that, as he puts it, "one can sever his relationship with the Roman Catholic Church without necessarily surrendering one's faith" (p. 177).* McBrien disbelieves that baptism is necessary for salvation. He writes concerning Mk. 16:16 and John 3:5:
Even apart from the critical difficulties these texts do not necessarily support the Ptolemaic thesis . . . The New Testament texts employed by the Council (Mk. 16:16; Jn. 3:5), will simply not do. The Ptolemaic mind has distorted them, first of all by treating them uncritically, and secondly, by reading them out of their proper theological context (pp. 157, 158).
Many heretics and schismatics advance their diabolical teachings in the name of Pope John's Council. McBrien is no exception. Do We Need the Church? was written when McBrien was Professor of Systematic Theology at Pope John XXIII National Seminary in Weston, Massachusetts—and it was written in memory of Pope John!
Moreover, McBrien attempts to justify the contents of his book by quoting from Pope John's encyclical Ad Petri Cathedram, which was written in 1959. Here is the passage:
There are many points which the Church leaves to the discussion of theologians, in that there is no absolute certainty about them. As the eminent Cardinal Newman remarked, such controversies do not disrupt the Church's unity; rather they contribute greatly to a deeper and better understanding of her dogmas. These very differences shed in effect a new light on the Church's teaching, and pave and fortify the way to the attainment of unity (pp. 7-8).
If Pope John were alive today he would be shocked to learn that both his Council and his own statements are being used to reject articles of faith. In his name dogmas are denounced because "there is no absolute certainty about them." In his name heresy and schism are promoted as good for the Church because they "do not disrupt the Church's unity; rather they contribute to a deeper and better understanding of her dogmas." Indeed, heresy and schism "shed in effect a new light on the Church's teaching, and pave and fortify they way to the attainment of unity."
McBrien does something else that is in vogue among Modernists—he attributes his book to the work of the Holy Ghost! This is how he goes about it. First, he quotes Cardinal Suenen's on the conciliar texts:
Because of the interplay of circumstances—and of men—certain emphases did not manage to have their full force for renewal. But the seeds are there, like unopened buds awaiting the sun: it will be the task of men moved by the Holy Spirit to draw out all the vital riches contained in the conciliar texts—and, for that matter, in all that was said both inside and outside the Council hall, but which has become an integral part of Vatican II (p. 8).
Then he writes, "This book takes the risk of opening buds."
McBrien therefore believes that he was "moved by the Holy Spirit" to write his book, in order to "open buds," that is, "to draw out all the vital riches contained in the conciliar texts—and, for that matter, in all that was said both inside and outside the Council hall . . . " He remarks that Vatican II had "limited achievements" because the Council "did not go nearly far enough." Thus McBrien felt obligated to show Vatican II what it should have written in the conciliar documents.
McBrien's conclusion is obvious: We do not need the Catholic Church, the one, true Church founded by Christ, which he contemptuously labels "the Ptolemaic, pre-Einsteinian Church" (p. 228). Rather, we need his kind of Church as described in his essay, which he affectionately labels "the post-Copernican, post-Einsteinian Church" (Ibid.).
Contrary to McBrien's belief, Christ and the Holy Ghost will remain with the Catholic Church forever, guiding her and protecting her from error in the promulgation of faith. Ipso facto, Christ and the Holy Ghost protect the Mystical Body of Christ from promulgating the heretical and schismatic teachings of Father Richard McBrien!
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