The Pure Church of the Pure: A Perennial Heresy

I've shared my thoughts on this problem in a post called "Making the Perfect the Enemy of the Good", which you might want to read after this.

From Crisis

By Charles Coulombe, STM, KCSS

The temptation to see one's self and our in-group as holier-than-thou is nothing new in the history of the Church.

O ye wha are sae guid yoursel’,
Sae pious and sae holy,
Ye’ve nought to do but mark and tell
Your neibours’ fauts and folly!
Whase life is like a weel-gaun mill,
Supplied wi’ store o’ water;
The heapèd happer’s ebbing still,
An’ still the clap plays clatter.
—Robert Burns, “Address to the Unco Guid”

During His earthly ministry, Our Lord taught His disciples the parable of the tares and wheat, using the symbolism of how they grow together and must be left thus until the harvest, lest uprooting the tares also uproot the wheat. Only at the harvest would they be celebrated. When asked to explain it, Christ declared that good and evil people would dwell together in the Kingdom of God—the Church—until the end. This is an important lesson for those who would understand the history of both the Church and the world—with the added realization that both tares and wheat grow in our own hearts.

From the beginning of the Church, there have been those who wanted either or both a morally exclusive Church for the elect and a secret esoteric doctrine of Christ communicated to those same or another elect, vastly richer and deeper than and vastly superior to the exoteric doctrine communicated to the faithful by the normal and often terribly flawed Church hierarchy. The exact nature of these two goals has varied wildly through Church history, but they have been with us from the beginning and subsist until today.

Perhaps the first body of doctrines associated with these ideas was the farrago of beliefs commonly called “Gnosticism.” Now, it is a slippery term. It comes from the Greek phrase Gnosis Kardias (“Knowledge of the Heart”). This knowledge was supposed to be essential for salvation; but what distinguished the varieties from each other was precisely what that knowledge was—and in the second and third centuries, it was considered a benevolent word—like “democracy” in our time. So it was that for St. Clement of Alexandria the real Gnosis was Catholic orthodoxy and its believers the only real Gnostics. He made it plain he had little use for the others who claimed the name.

But despite his efforts, it is these latter who are generally meant by the word today. They had a great many exotic beliefs that are hard to easily characterize; many, but not all, held to various kinds of “dualism”—the idea that there are two gods—one evil, one good. The good one created the spirit world—angels, human souls, etc. The evil one, often called the “demiurge,” created matter and entrapped souls in bodies made of it. These bodies are themselves evil, and they tempt the souls imprisoned therein to irresistible sin—which, in turn, according to some of the systems, would entrap the souls even longer in this world and cause them to reincarnate here. 

Of these, some sects identified the demiurge with the Creator of the Old Testament and remade Christ into a liberator from his rule. A very few used the same basis to basically become Satanists; the still-existing Yazidis in the Near East have a doctrine somewhat of this nature. One of the largest groups of dualists were founded by the “prophet” Mani and were called Manichaeans as a result. St. Augustine was one of these prior to his conversion. Spin-offs from this sect would cause the Church a great deal of difficulty during the Middle Ages. 

In the late 200s, the persecution of Diocletian erupted, in which many Catholics apostatized. Afterward, when the Edict of Milan legalized the Church, many of these wished to be reconciled. But a faction arose—the Donatists, named after one Bishop Donatus—who said that having left the Church they could never be readmitted. When the pope and other bishops declared that so-called lapsi could indeed be restored, the Donatists broke communion with them and, until finally being suppressed, waged war against the Catholics of North Africa, which was their center.

No sooner was this problem dealt with than the all-too-famous Arian heresy erupted; at one point, all but five of the world’s bishops—St. Athanasius, St. Hilary of Poitiers, St. Isidore of Seville, St. Eusebius of Vercelli, and Lucifer of Cagliari—accepted one or another form of Arianism or Semi-Arianism; “the world awoke, and groaned to find itself Arian.” Once the storm had passed, however, the last-named bishop refused to restore communion with repentant bishops and broke with the pope and his allies when these did. Like the Donatists, the Luciferians were too pure to have anything to do with such fallen folk, who could not possibly belong to Christ’s Church.

Although other heresies would break out subsequently, it became the established practice in the Church that those who repented of either heresy or schism could be reinstated. But by the 13th century, in many parts of Europe, many of the clergy led very poor moral lives. At this juncture, Manichaeans from the East came into Western Europe. The local varieties were dubbed Albigenses or Cathari. 

Being dualists, they believed that the physical world was evil and their disciples could not be expected to keep the moral law. Indeed, any sexual practice that did not lead to procreation and the ensnaring of fresh souls in the flesh was acceptable. But their ministers were celibate, vegetarian, and non-alcohol drinkers. Pandering to the laity’s lust and appearing to lead holier lives than the Catholic clergy, their church of the perfecti gathered many converts, requiring both the preaching of the Dominicans and a crusade to suppress them.

Three centuries later, the disruption caused by the recent Great Schism—with its three popes at once and the resulting drop in clerical morals—opened the way for Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and their imitators. These worthies declared the Catholic Church irredeemably corrupt and preached the formation of a new and invisible church, which would suffer from none of the doctrinal or moral failings of the Catholic Church. The result, of course, was 150 years and more of civil wars and conflicts in Europe and across the planet.

Beginning in the 19th century, you had any number of would-be mystics creating the myth of the “Church of John,” as opposed to that of “Peter.” The latter was either the Catholic Church, or else the Catholic, Orthodox, and Catholic churches all together, and it was the Church of “Rules” and restriction. But the Church of John was the church of love. It had its own origin story, broken off from Rome centuries ago and proceeding from the Gnostics to the Cathars, the suppressed Knights Templar, all the way to the present. 

Those who claim this membership range from Quakers to Eastern Orthodox, but most will maintain that dogma and ritual are secondary to direct experience of the Divine—whatever that may be. For many of these, such things get in the way of their relationship with God; indeed, the vaguer the belief, the better. Even the image of Christ Himself might come between themselves and the Godhead. For such as these, few if any earthly assemblies of believers are pure enough to suit them.

Bizarre as all of these manifestations of the Church of the Pure are, it must not be supposed that this impulse is lacking inside the Catholic Church of today; far from it! Well do I remember as a boy when the changes in the Church were brought in; certain folk who did not care for the changes were castigated as schismatics—the only true Catholics were those who “read the signs of the times” and did away with devotions, religious habits, Latin, altar rails, and much else. Purified from these things, a new “relevant” Church would arise, suitable for the special people of what way back then were “modern times.”

In response arose the Traditionalist movement, as many—both clerical and lay—sought to preserve the Church’s identity and mission against the first-named group. This group was horribly abused in many ways by bishops and priests. For many among them, it has become habitual to speak of the “Vatican II Church” versus the “Traditional Church,” as though there were two separate organizations. 

Among those for whom this is a conscious distinction, there is sometimes an actual belief that the Orders of the “Vatican II Church” are invalid—leaving the extremely varied varieties of Traditionalism to carry on. Some even believe that there is no salvation in the Vatican II Church. Some Sedevacantists take this further; for these, the idea that there has been no pope since 1958 becomes in itself a saving Gnosis. Of course, there are some among the so-called “Neo-Cons” who believe that Traditionalists are out of the Church.

For these latter, a great deal of reverence is paid to the theological and devotional traditions of the Church—but not the liturgical ones which were woven around them and around which they were woven. While venerating great saints, they are suspicious of the very Mass these saints offered (although, of course, Karl Rahner and Teilhard de Chardin also offered it). For them, unquestioning adherence to Vatican II and the last several popes are insisted upon, regardless of contradictions. This, too, is a sort of pure Church of the Pure.

Nor is this mentality entirely absent from the Eastern Catholic Churches, although their decidedly minority status undermines much of it—although not from all of them. Among some—especially Latin Western converts to the East, fleeing our liturgical wars—it is fun to hear people with Irish or Italian surnames proclaiming the supremacy of Eastern ways.

Doubtless one could multiply these examples by many others. But as with so much else in life, the idea of a “pure church of the pure” is not only a perennial heresy, it is also a chimera. To begin with, it presumes that those who consider themselves in a position to judge the Church are in some way superior to her. The truth is, of course, that while those in charge of her are sometimes decadent, immoral, and downright evil, she is indeed the Spotless Bride of Christ, hard won by Him through the Crucifixion. We are constantly tempted to want to change her in our image—to make her doctrines simpler and more comprehensible, or else more esoteric and even impenetrable; to make her morals far easier to accommodate our own failings, or else much stricter, in order to punish our neighbors’ many sins. 

But instead, she serenely sails on through the centuries, producing saints through the dogmas and sacraments given her by her Divine Spouse. Her leadership may try to ruin her, her children to alter her, and external enemies to murder her. But out of each of these attempts she rebounds, still bringing more souls to Heaven with a Faith at once simple and complex and morals at once rigorous and humane. She does make one demand of those who would be transformed by her: that they take her as she is, that they strive to conform themselves to her and her Spouse. Part of complying with this demand is accepting her children as she does.

What does this mean concretely? First of all, it means not trying to erect walls and divisions between those who accept the same four Creeds and the Sacraments that all Catholics must (if indeed they do). I may not like the Novus Ordo on the grounds that it does not express the Faith as clearly as the traditional liturgies of the Church, East and West—or in what I may see as the dodginess of its origins. But I have no right to claim that I am somehow in a superior or holier—above all, a different—Church than the one they inhabit. 

Similarly, if I feel that those who refuse to accept the New Mass have “schismatic tendencies,” I have an obligation not to think them outside the Church when the Church herself does not. In a word, I must avoid making myself judge, jury, and executioner for my fellow Catholics—and I must hold out the possibility that even I may be wrong.
Humanly speaking, the Church is and always has been a mixed bag. Throughout the Church’s history, Christ has allowed the tares to grow up with the wheat and the sheep and goats to be herded together. Let us pray that everyone—and most especially ourselves and those with whom we disagree most—may be numbered among the wheat and the sheep on that Last Day.