Before the Church
Catholic Companion — Cosmological Grace Anchor Series — Theology
The Catholic tradition produced the most beautiful and the most institutionally severe wounds in the Christian family. The sacramental system — grace mediated through the physical: water, oil, bread, the body of a priest, the structure of the Church — was a genuine and serious theological achievement, a claim that the physical world is the place where the divine becomes available. Before the Church honors that achievement in full before naming what it cost.
The wound has two forms, one doctrinal and one catastrophic. The doctrinal wound: when grace is organized as something the institution mediates, the institution becomes the gatekeeper — and the person whose conscience cannot remain inside the institution has, within that framework, no recourse. The catastrophic wound is the abuse crisis and its cover-up: the institution that was built to carry the prior grace used its institutional power to protect itself over the people it was built to serve. The conscience that tried to name this from inside the structure found the structure organized against its naming.
The booklet returns to the sacramental instinct and reads it through the prior grace: the water and oil and bread were always pointing beyond themselves. The sacrament was always saying, in its own language, that something is present here more prior than this vessel. The incense, the quality of light through colored glass, the body’s memory of something real — these are not conditioning. They are the prior grace working through physical form to name what was always already present. The institution failed the form. The prior grace did not fail with it.
Before the Church is for Catholics who love what the tradition was reaching toward and can no longer stay inside the institution that was reaching. It names what the Church was built on — and shows that what it was built on was there before the Church was built to carry it.