Preview: Undset and Benson's "Christ in the Church" on the Son Rise Morning Show

Sigrid Undset read and translated another book by Monsignor Robert H. Benson, Christ in the Church (as Kristus i kirken in 1926) so we will discuss the influence it had on her on the Son Rise Morning Show on Monday, September 28.

Unlike The Friendship of Christ, which could be characterized as work of Catholic spirituality written for Catholics, Christ in the Church is a work of Catholic apologetics written for both Catholics and non-Catholics. Like The Friendship of Christ it is based on sermons Benson gave in both Rome and Kensington, England (plus Boston, Massachusetts). Benson particularly defends the Catholic Church's authority and infallibility and its role in salvation. There is a printed edition available and there is also an online version.

For example of this apologetic tone, Monsignor Benson starts with:

The charge brought most commonly in these days against Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, is that it claims in an unique and exclusive degree to contain the whole of truth. Surely, it is said, considering the religious history of the world - the numerous bodies that have flourished in East and West alike, in all the centuries of man's existence - such a claim is arrogant and impossible. We must find the truth, it is said, in the Least Common Multiple of the religious experiences of all men if we are intellectually democratic; or, if we have aristocratic leanings, in the unanimous conclusions (if any such can be found) of the best independent religious thinkers. Above all, we must be pliant and undogmatic; we must be willing to see the conclusions of this generation overthrown by the next; we must believe in progress even though we are not sure in what direction progress lies. For there is no absolute truth, no final revelation: creeds are no more than forms and symbols of the One Truth as held by various groups of minds and temperaments. [Saint John Henry Newman had called this the spirit of liberalism in religion!*]

No wonder Father Aidan Nichols includes the comment that Benson was among "the more hard-line English Catholic apologists". Remember that Benson was writing well before Pope Pius XII issued Mystici Corporis Christi in 1943, but as Nichols comments, Benson is writing about the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ--that's his model of the Catholic Church, and he concentrates on that image of the Body of Christ and each Catholic being a member of that Body:

But to the Catholic who sees in the Church a human society (often terribly human), but also a Body in which God dwells, an organism composed of countless individual cells, but indwelt by a Divine Personality - a Catholic who believes that this Society is actually redemptive of the human race, as well as the actually Divine Teacher - more than a school of thought, more than the best religious club in existence, more than the Ambassador of God, more than the Bride of Christ - to the Catholic who believes that the Church is not one among ten thousand, but One, unique, singular and final, between whom and other religious bodies there is no more comparison than between the creature and the Creator - to him, membership in that body, the position of a cell in that organism, is the one thing to which no other can be preferred; and the loss of that membership the one supreme catastrophe or crime. Certainly the Catholic holds that it is possible to belong to the Soul of the Church without external membership in the Body; it is possible, where there is no fault on the individual's side, that he may be united inwardly to the Person who inhabits that body; but such is not God's primary intention, and to forsake the Body is to forsake the soul. In any case the individual loses enormously by being forced to stand alone, without that grace and strength of unity which external membership in the external body can alone confer.

In "The Theological Controversialist", chapter 8 of Sigrid Undset: Reader of Hearts, Father Nichols emphasizes another aspect of this Mystical Body of Christ that seems contradictory: its holiness and the sinners within it. As Benson admits, just as it was when Christ was in the world:

we have the same environment - namely, the human nature of the world, human ambitions, interests, virtues, vices, circumstances, strengths and weaknesses, now as then. We should expect to find then, if the Catholic hypothesis is true, the same results now as then. So far as Jesus Christ was accepted or rejected then by the world into which He came, so will He be accepted and rejected now, and by the same kind of people for the same kind of reasons. . . .If, then, we find in the history of the Catholic Church the same psychological situations as those recorded in the Gospels continually reproduced under similar circumstances - if we find, that is, Peters and Judases and Pilates swarming round the Church's progress through the ages - if we find that the same comments are made, the same paradoxes generated, the same accusations leveled, the same criticisms, the same bursts of flame and thunder . . .

we shouldn't be surprised. It's not evidence against the holiness and infallibility of the Church Our Lord founded. Undset, the creator of unfaithful, sinful, and fallen "good" characters--and herself repentant--saw the truth in Benson's argument. The Church is holy because the Church is the Body of Christ and Christ is Holy.

When I attended daily Mass on Friday in the 25th Week of Ordinary Time, Father Hoffman at St. Paul's Catholic Student Center (the Newman Center) at WSU, made clear the contrast between the reading from Ecclesiastes (3:1-11*) about the variability of human life and the Gospel from St. Luke (9:18-22), with St. Peter's declaration is Jesus is "the Christ of God", Someone sure and certain. Then Father pointed out that's what the students coming to OCIA are seeking and seeing in the Catholic Church: that certainty and security in the midst of change and a seeming lack of "gain from the efforts they make" (Eccl 3:9). 

On page 134 in "The Theological Controversialist", Father Nichols cites Undset's Katholsk propaganda in which she wrote "that the Church's inner essence is indefectible, like God's." (Oslo: Some, 1927, p.4). As my best friend often reminds me, there's no comparison, really, between the number of Catholics living on Earth right now and the millions of Catholic souls, purified and purifying, in Heaven and Purgatory. They are the larger and holiest part of the Church: they are the fulfillment of that indefectibility.

* “Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy. Devotion is not necessarily founded on faith. Men may go to Protestant Churches and to Catholic, may get good from both and belong to neither. They may fraternise together in spiritual thoughts and feelings, without having any views at all of doctrine in common, or seeing the need of them. Since, then, religion is so personal a peculiarity and so private a possession, we must of necessity ignore it in the intercourse of man with man. If a man puts on a new religion every morning, what is that to you? It is as impertinent to think about a man’s religion as about his sources of income or his management of his family. Religion is in no sense the bond of society.” Biglietto Speech May 12, 1879

**I'm sure that other people of a certain age were hearing the Byrds singing "Turn, Turn, Turn" in their mind's ear.

Image Source (Public Domain): Albrecht Dürer - Adoration of the Trinity