Quote of the Day (Eugene Peterson, on the Church’s Value as Institution)

“Frederick von Hugel said the institution of the church is like the bark on the tree. There's no life in the bark. It's dead wood. But it protects the life of the tree within. And the tree grows and grows and grows and grows. If you take the bark off, it's prone to disease, dehydration, death.

“So, yes, the church is dead but it protects something alive. And when you try to have a church without bark, it doesn't last long. It disappears, gets sick, and it's prone to all kinds of disease, heresy, and narcissism.”—Mark Galli, “Spirituality for All the Wrong Reasons: An Interview With Eugene Peterson,” Christianity Today, March 2005

Presbyterian minister and author Eugene Peterson is speaking of Christianity at large, but his metaphor-tinged justification for the institutional value of the church applies just as strongly to the Roman Catholic Church at a time when disaffection with it is running rampant.

In the vast ideological supermarket that is America, this testing and sometimes discarding of inherited beliefs should not come as a complete surprise. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life finds that one-fifth of Catholics say they’ve sometimes attended non-Catholic services (compared with a somewhat larger three-in-10 Protestants).
Eastern and New Age religious practices have become more common, as have beliefs in two or more supernatural phenomena (reincarnation, spiritual energy located in physical things, yoga as spiritual practice, the "evil eye," astrology, contact with the dead, consulting a psychic, or experiencing a ghostly encounter).

Nothing wrong with all of this, I think, if it involves greater tolerance for other faiths. But I’m not sure that’s frequently the case. In a number instance, it might simply involve ignorance about one’s own faith as well as others, what scholar Stephen Prothero calls, in a bestselling book, Religious Illiteracy. (Former Chicago Bulls basketball coach Phil Jackson, defending then-player Dennis Rodman for anti-Mormon remarks: "To Dennis, a Mormon may just be a nickname for people from Utah. He may not even know it’s a religious cult or sect or whatever." Whatever, Phil.)

The dangers of the church as institution are undeniable, but let’s be fair: so are its values. Both are spelled out by columnist and former Presidential speechwriter Peggy Noonan, a one-time lapsed Catholic, in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, in a piece that examines the sexual-abuse crisis in the Church in the larger context of this past decade’s undermining of belief in other institutions (e.g., Wall Street, Congress). Below is the nub of her argument—minus Peterson’s metaphor, but with a concrete and important historical example—applied to the Roman Catholic Church:

The Catholic Church, as great and constructive an institution as ever existed in our country, educating the children of immigrants and healing the weak in hospitals, also acted as if it had forgotten the mission. Their mission was to be Christ's church in the world, to stand for the weak. Many fulfilled it, and still do, but the Boston Globe in 2003 revealed the extent to which church leaders allowed the abuse of the weak and needy, and then covered it up.

It was a decades-long story; it only became famous in the '00s. But it was in its way the most harmful forgetting of a mission of all, for it is the church that has historically given a first home to America's immigrants, and made them Americans. Its reputation, its high standing, mattered to our country. Its loss of reputation damaged it. And it happened in part because priests and bishops forgot they were servants of a great institution, and came to think the great church existed to meet their needs.