by Dale Ahlquist
"Mary, Sign of Salvation" by Fr. Brian Daley, S.J.
October 2004
"Catholic Social Teaching and the Law" by Michael Scaperlanda
"The Catholic Church: Defender of Freedom?" by H.W. Crocker III
December 2004
"How Tradition Gave us the Bible" by Mark P. Shea
"God Speaks to Us: The Liturgy of the Word" by Rev. Peter Stravinskas
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"Angels and Demons" by Alfred Freddoso
"The Da Vinci Code" by Bishop Robert Morlino
"The Year of the Eucharist" by Bishop Robert Morlino
What is "Church Authority"?
By Peter Kreeft, Ph.D.
What
pictures flash automatically onto your mind’s inner screen when you
hear the words “Church authority”? The Inquisition?
Witchcraft trials? The Gestapo? Where do those pictures come from? How did they get into your mind? Did they come from your own mind calmly and honestly thinking about what the Catholic Church actually says about herself? Or did they come from the media images that our culture put there, from movies and TV?
Are those images fair? Are they true? Does our culture understand the Church? Does our culture even know what the Church teaches?
Ours is a culture that kills almost one of every three babies that is conceived before he or she can be born. The Church is almost the only thing that dares to stand against this culture. The Pope is almost the only one who dares to call it “a culture of death,” as President Regan was almost the only one who dared to call Communism an “evil empire.” And the images of the Church that you see in the movies and TV are invented by this culture. How can Catholics let these images teach them what the Church is? That would be almost like a Jew in Nazi Germany learning what Judaism is from Nazi anti-Semitic propagandists.
The images of “Church authority” that we all receive from our culture tell us two big lies: one about the Church and one about authority. They tell us that the Church is “organized religion” and that authority is power.
They tell us that the Church is an “institution,” and that “institutional religion” is inhuman and unfeeling and impersonal. They tell us that the Church is an “organization,” and that “organized religion” is like big business or big government or a big military.
No. Speaking of “organized religion” is like speaking of an “organized family,” or an “organized romance.” The Church may act like a dysfunctional family sometimes, but it is a family. It is an organism, not an organization—something more like an animal than like a business.
What is the correct alternative to our culture’s images for the Church? What does the Church herself give us? Two of the images the Church uses to define herself are “the mystical Body of Christ” and “the people of God.” That doesn’t sound like the language of business or government.
The Church is not the building we worship in. The buildings crumble and die, but the Church remains. The Church is not the abstract set of words and patterns of command that Christians share and that make all these buildings “Christian” rather than Muslim or Jewish or Hindu. Those two things, unlike the buildings, never crumble and die: they are the Church’s creeds and codes, her theology and morality, which are her message from God to mankind. But they are words; the Church is the One who speaks the words. They are her textbooks, she is the living teacher.
Who is this teacher? Jesus Himself, God-become-man. When He was on earth, before He ascended to Heaven He left us His Church as His Body and His Holy Spirit to be the Church’s soul, so that He could fulfill His last promise to us, “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” (Matthew 28:20) To find out what the Church is, read the New Testament.
Jesus is the “Head” of His Body the Church. What did He mean by that image? The “head” of a business or corporation is called its CEO (Chief Executive Officer); he is the “boss.” But the head of your body is not a boss. It’s the most important part of your body. It’s that hairy ball between your shoulders. It’s not somebody up there in the board room, far away.
Jesus is not the Church’s CEO, Jesus is the Church’s Head. We are not His employees, we are His family, His brothers and sisters. These people, these “people of God,” are not His employees but His Body. And that’s us!
The ultimate image for the Church is Jesus Christ Himself. If the Church is His Body, that’s Him! Your body is you. If I kill your body, I kill you. If I embrace your body, I embrace you. So whatever we do to Christ’s Church, Christ’s family, Christ’s people, we do to Christ. That’s exactly what He said to His disciples, and what He will say to us at the Last Judgment: “Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, you have done it unto Me.” (Matthew 25:31-46)
Only when we begin to see the Church through His eyes do we see through our culture’s big lie about her. And then we can also see through the second big lie, the one about authority, through the same eyes, the eyes of Jesus. Jesus is the key to understanding both words in the phrase “Church authority.” After all, who’s the expert on Jesus, and the Church that Jesus founded, and the authority that He gave to her? Jesus? Or Oprah, Hollywood, and the New York Times?
The authority of the Church is not the same kind of thing at all as the authority of a business or a government or an army. Instead, the authority of the Church is the same kind of thing as the authority of Jesus. It is the authority of Jesus—according to Jesus Himself. For this is what He Himself said to His apostles whom He chose to carry on His work after He left: “I am the vine, you are the branches” (John 15:5), and therefore “He who hears you, hears Me” (Luke 10:16).
The New Testament also tells us that these apostles ordained successors, so that they could ordain successors too, so that the authority of Jesus could continue to exist on earth after they died. These successors of the apostles still exist today. They are the bishops of the Catholic Church. As the bishops are the successors of the apostles, in a historically unbroken line (called “apostolic succession”), so the Popes, the Bishops of Rome, are the successors of Peter, the leader of the apostles, to whom Jesus said, “You are Peter, and on this Rock I will found My Church, and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:18)
That is one of the four “marks of the Church” listed in the 4th century Nicene Creed which Catholics recite at every Sunday Mass: “I believe in one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church.”
But what does “authority” mean?
We can understand this best if we contrast it with what it does not mean. Once again, we turn to the source, the New Testament. Here is the New Testament describes Jesus’ authority (and therefore also that of His Church, His body, His people): “He spoke with authority, and not as the scribes” (Matthew 7:27). What does that mean?
The “scribes” mean the “writers,” the intellectuals, the teachers in Jesus’ culture. Today, our “scribes” are journalists, political speechwriters, university professors, movie makers, TV executives, novelists, and talk show hosts.
How is Jesus’ authority (and therefore His Church’s authority too) different from the authority of the scribes? The single most common, and most destructive, misunderstanding of authority that is everywhere in our culture is the confusion of authority with power.
Not only are these two ideas different, they are almost exact opposites! To see this, look at the passage in the Gospels (Matthew 8:5-13) where Jesus exercises His authority in response to the faith of a man who understands authority rightly.
A Roman centurion approaches Jesus and asks Him to heal his servant, who is dying. We need to know two facts about Roman centurions to understand this incident: first, that a centurion has 100 soldiers under him, who obey him totally; and second, that Jews were not allowed to enter the houses of pagans, especially Romans, whom they despised. The centurion asked Jesus to heal his servant, who is dying. Look at the exact words of his appeal. He said to Jesus, “I am not worthy that You should come under my roof. Just speak the word, and my servant will be healed. For I too am a man under authority (another translation is: “For I know how authority works”): I say to one man ‘Come!’ and he comes, to another man ‘Go!’ and he goes, and to a third ‘Do this!’ and he does it.”
This centurion understood the nature of authority perfectly. For Jesus praised the state of soul revealed by the centurion’s words, and replied: “I have not found such faith among Israel.” And then he healed the centurion’s servant instantly, from where he was, without even entering his house.
Look carefully at the centurion’s words. This is what they mean: “I know that You as a Jew may not enter under my roof. But I believe that You can heal my servant even from far away, from here, because You have authority over the whole world, and you can heal this dying man because You have authority even over death itself.”
But no one has authority over death except the Creator of life. So the centurion is implicitly expressing his faith that Jesus is divine. That is what Jesus meant by praising his faith. That much is pretty clear. But what about the nature of authority? That’s what readers usually miss in this passage. Don’t let yourself miss it.
What gives Jesus authority over death? Look again at the centurion’s words: “For I know how authority works. I say to one man ‘Go!’ and he goes,” etc. Why does this one man have such total authority over a hundred rough, tough Roman soldiers? Not because of his power but because of his submission. The centurion was probably no tougher or bigger than his men; in fact he may have been what kids today might call a little geek, dork, or nerd. The old Yiddish word for it is a “schmuck.” But when his men heard his words, they heard not Simon Schmuck from Sicily, but Augustus Caesar, Lord of the world, the Emperor reigning from Rome. That’s what they heard when the centurion commanded them because the centurion was totally submissive to Caesar, and therefore He was exercising Caesar’s authority, not his own.
Just suppose he was not. Suppose he followed American pop psychology of self-esteem and self-assertion instead of submission and surrender to higher authority. In that case, his soldiers would say to themselves, “Why should we obey this schmuck?”
Now this centurion, who understands that authority comes from submission, says to Jesus, in effect, “I am asking You to heal my servant because I believe that You have authority even over death itself, because You are totally submissive to Your Father. You see, I know how authority works.” That is the understanding of authority that Jesus praises.
The word authority contains the word author. Authority means author’s rights. God is the author of life, so He has the right over life and death. He has the power because He has the right.
This is exactly the opposite of “might makes right.” It is right making might. The power, or might, of rightful authority comes from its right.
Jesus gave His Church the same kind of authority. For His Church is His own Body, not His “organization.” Remember, your body is you! When I look at your body, I see you. And when you look at Christ’s Body, the Church, you should see Him.
The power, or might, of this authority comes from its right; and its right comes from its goodness, and goodness ultimately means love. Jesus has divine power, power even over death, because He is divine love. He is the love of God incarnated. This love is the absolute love of absolutely all people, including pagans, including Roman tyrants, including sinners. (Are there any other kind of people?).
Jesus is also God’s love of life. Life is not just a biological accident. It is a divine power and a divine gift. It is a divine power because only God can create life. It is a divine gift because no one can deserve to be created. How could one who didn’t yet exist possibly deserve anything? This love is also unselfish. God did not create us to fulfill any needs because God has no needs. It was sheer generosity.
So Jesus’ authority comes from His submission to His Father, who is this divine love, and the authority of His Church comes from her submission to Him. That’s also the idea behind the New Testament’s philosophy of Christian marriage, most completely expressed in Ephesians 5: 21-33. This passage contains what is in our culture the single most unpopular verse in the Bible: St. Paul’s command to wives to be “submissive” to their husbands (verse 22). Yet the surrounding passage is, I believe, the single most profound and beautiful thing ever written about marriage. It says that this submission is not submission to a boss, or a CEO, but to love; that is, to husbands who are submissive to God’s love. Wives are to “submit” to their husbands “as unto the Lord.” (The Lord Jesus is not a “boss”!) Read the whole passage carefully and you may see something you never saw before.
Now it is this authority, the authority which comes from submission (which even the pagan centurion understood by human reason) and the authority of divine love (which Christians know by divine revelation), that has such power that it conquers death and even sin. (“You shall call His name ‘Jesus’ (‘Savior’) because He shall save His people from their sins.” – Matthew 1:21)
How much power resides in this authority? It has no limit. It is total, infinite, eternal, unchangeable, and infallible. Jesus says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me.” (Matthew 20:18) This authority has no limit because it is the authority of Jesus, not of Centurion Schmuck—or of Bishop Schmuck.
We want this. We want the authority of Jesus to be total because it is authority over sin and death, because that is the authority that saves us. When we go to Confession, even if we are “liberal” in other matters, we become very “conservative,” or traditional, about authority in that holy place. For if we are honest enough to go to Confession because we know we are sinners and need forgiveness in order to be able to endure the presence of a perfect, holy God in Heaven forever, then we want, we passionately want, the priest to really have the authority to pronounce in the name of God and with divine and infallible certainty that our sins are forgiven. We don’t want authority to be wimpy or iffy or uncertain then!
For that is what the authority of Christ’s Church is used for: to forgive, to save, to love. It’s “tough love,” sure; it’s not cheap and easy “nonjudgmental love,” but it’s love. It’s not “cheap grace,” but it’s grace. Every aspect of the Church is for love. Love is the meaning of all the laws and creeds and liturgies and hierarchies and organizing and even fund-raising. That’s the Church’s business: to “show and tell” God’s love in Christ to the world. She shows it by her saints, and she tells it by her teaching authority.
The Church’s authority is unlimited in one way but limited in another. It extends all the way to Heaven, but not to everything on earth—not to “secular” things like armies and money and science. Its two areas of infallible, divine authority are doctrine and morals, creeds and codes, theology and morality.
Why these two? Because they are what we most need to know, but also what we least are able to figure out for ourselves. We can no more know who God is without divine revelation (God telling us) than a bug could know a man or a dog could know an angel. And our sins make us poor moral philosophers. Although we know much morality by conscience and natural reason, we also rationalize our own sins and give ourselves excuses. We’re sin addicts, and addicts can’t judge their addiction clearly. It doesn’t take a drunk to judge the sober, it takes the sober to judge the drunk.
In other words, we need correction. We need the Church to tell us where we’re wrong, not where we’re right (because we know that already). In ancient times, this was mainly in theology, in hammering out the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation against theological errors (“heresies”). In modern times, it is mainly in morality, in applying the Commandments to our lives, especially where our lives have gone off the tracks of God’s loving plan. And today this is especially in two areas: the value of human life and the nature of love, sex, marriage, and family. The Church is always counter-cultural. Like Christ.
Peter Kreeft, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy at Boston College. He is the author of over 40 books including: Handbook of Christian Apologetics, Christianity for Modern Pagans, Fundamentals of the Faith.
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