Speaking of “the Church”

A friend commenting on an article I’d commended — Rebecca Hamilton’s The Murder of Innocents is Wrong and Every Human Being Knows It — criticized her use of “the Church” in this passage, which I’d quoted:

The arguments which gave legal abortion sufficient moral gravitas to hook into the public imagination were based on real terrors such as rape and the fear of being forced to give a baby up for adoption.

These arguments found their traction in the sexual double standard and the vast cruelty and hypocrisy — oftentimes supported by the Church — that allowed it. Abortion was taken as an answer to violence against women, discrimination and prejudice against women, and the suffering of women because of these things. We turned to the murder of innocents rather than face our sins against women and repent of them.

My friend wrote: “Not to state the obvious, but ‘the Church’ did not support cruelty and hypocrisy. Individuals Catholics, albeit some with great power, did.”

I see her point, and it’s often true that when critics of the Church say “the Church” they are using the sins of some people in a huge, ancient, complex, and diverse enterprise to attack the whole. Because so many western bishops enabled sexual abusers to continue abusing children, the whole thing is a failure or a fraud from the beginning, is the kind of thing you see. Bad medieval popes, the Inquisition, Catholic Nazis, and lots of other scandals are used this way.

But sometimes the term is a legitimate way to describe what was in effect the attitude, or practice, or culture of the whole Church, the Church as she is experienced at a specific time and place. What, to put it another way, you could reliably expect from the Church’s representatives in a particular situation. You can legitimately say, for example, that the Church was careless of the sexual abuse of minors for many decades because almost everyone in authority would not deal with it rightly.

The other side of this, however, is that we can speak of the Church when we speak of the characteristic good works of her people. We can speak, and proudly, of the Church’s defense of the unborn and other marginalized people whose lives are endangered. We can speak of the Church’s many corporal acts of mercy.

Rhetorically, in other words, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.