Two Churches: the significance of the political

Extract

There is a growing literature on the sociology of the Catholic Church which attempts to explain that institution’s present condition in terms of tension between an official church and an unofficial one, both of which now exist inside what was once monolithic Catholicism. The work of Vallier on Latin American Catholicism and of Coleman on the Roman Catholic Church in Holland uses ‘two-church’ models, though their theoretical framework is integrationist, in a Durkheimian sense. More explicitly, and on the specific issue of the respective roles of hierarchy and theologians, Dulles argues in the chapter, ‘The two magisteria; an interim reflection’ of his recent book on ecclesiology, that there is need for ‘two kinds of teacher—the official teacher, whose task it is to establish the official doctrine of the Church; and the theologians, whose function is to investigate the questions about faith with the tools of scholarship’. The law which should rule the relationship of these two elements is a dialectical one of ‘relative autonomy within mutual acceptance’, (p. 127). Using the two-church model in a more general way, Peter McCaffery, in his excellent thesis, ‘Catholic radicalism and counter-radicalism’, has analysed one tension between official and unofficial mind-sets within Catholicism. With the help of surveys of the literature, opinions and activities of ten groups in the Catholic Church in England and nine in Holland he probes the mediating role played by more or less loyal Catholic opinion in these national churches. He concludes that an unofficial presence has occupied a space inside the Church between the official Church and its external critics.