The Answer to the Problem of Ecclesiadicy

Read this after posting The Theology of Bad Bishops: Catholic New Testament scholar and convert Leroy Huizenga’s reflections on the problem, titled Ecclesiadicy, which he explains means “an attempt to justify the concept of apostolic succession in light of episcopal sin in the same way theodicy concerns attempt to justify an all-good, all-loving God in the face of profound human suffering.”

He quotes St. John Chrysostom’s famous remark about the road to Hell being paved with the skulls of bishops, notes the frequent justice of that judgment, and writes:

I’m an Augustinian at heart, since I first read parts of The City of God as a youth, and was raised Lutheran, so nothing produced from the darkness of human nature in Christian or pagan man surprises me, whether grave sin or major omission or simple misjudgment. Hurts, yes; angers, yes; disappoints, yes; frustrates, yes; but scandalizes? No. Bishops are human, and will err and sin in all sorts of ways. And unless one is going to dispense with organized Christianity altogether”an option neither Jesus nor the New Testament leave open for us” someone has to mess up administrating a church. It may be a Baptist congregation that votes wrongly on something of import. It may be a presbytery or a General Assembly affirming heresy and immorality with eager ebullience. It may be a congregation’s church council covering up crimes.

In thinking through the question of ecclesiology and the problem of ecclesiadicy, he came to believe that God created the Catholic Church and then quotes the great apologist Frank Sheed:

 We are not baptized into the hierarchy; do not receive the Cardinals sacramentally; will not spend an eternity in the beatific vision of the pope. Christ is the point. I, myself, admire the present pope (John Paul II), but even if I criticized him as harshly as some do, even if his successor proved to be as bad as some of those who have gone before, even if I find the church, as I have to live with it, a pain in the neck, I should still say that nothing a pope (or a priest) could do or say would make me wish to leave the church, although I might well wish that they would leave.