The Roman Noumenal Church

Jed Paschall said: This is why the matters of Rome’s practice must come into question – would the “church that Christ founded” really handle the repeated and egregious cases of sexual abuse by it’s clergy perpetrated upon the most vulnerable in the communion in such a ham-fisted and clandestine way? Would the “church that Christ founded” have any justification for utilizing a laundering racket…err, bank, that rivals the most powerful on the planet in terms of it’s balance sheet?

Jeremy Tate said: The Catholic Church does not claim to be free from scandal or sin. CtC has never made such an argument. This is a straw man. Individuals are responsible for their sin and sin does not invalidate a divinely established office.

Actually, the Roman Catholic Church does claim a form of perfection in this sense:

Catholic epologists bifurcate The One True Church® into a phenomenal church and a noumenal church. They conveniently relegate all the bad stuff to the phenomenal church. That’s just a shell. A simulacrum.

No matter how bad the church becomes, that can never impinge on the real church. For the real church is an inner, ethereal, indetectible, unfalsifiable quintessence of one true churchliness.

The real church is a suprahistorical entity which requires no historical evidence commensurate with the scope of its historical claims. The real church is impervious to historical counterevidence. The real church is a timeless, spaceless, airtight ideal.

For instance, the True church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. However, under no circumstances should the marks of the True church be confused with concrete, identifiable properties.

It doesn’t matter how much actual disunity you have in the church of Rome. That can never count as evidence against the unity of the church. Rather, any degree of disunity, however, wide and deep, is shunted off to the phenomenal shell of the church. That can never penetrate the essence of what makes the church “one.”

Likewise, it doesn’t matter how unholy the Roman church may be in practice. However corrupt, in time and space, from top to bottom, that only pertains to the outer shell of the church. For the True church remains spotless underneath the accumulated layers of turpitude.

Even though no amount of turpentine will ever be able to peel away the accumulated layers of turpitude to expose the hidden holiness of the church, buried beneath centuries of corruption, the faithful know in their heart of hearts that at the inaccessible core of the church there resides a pristine essence of sanctity.

The True church is indefectible. But not for a minute should that be connected with the actual performance of the church. No matter how error-ridden the Roman church may be in the actual administration of its internal affairs, each and every declension, however large or small, is automatically reassigned to the accidental shell of the church, while the unseen substance of The One True Church® remains intact and inviolate.

The pope is infallible when he speaks ex cathedra. No matter how many mistakes the pope may make in thought, word, and deed, that can never count as evidence against the infallible charism of the pope. Never confound the visible job performance of the pope with his invisible attribute of infallibility.

Roman Catholics like Jeremy have an air-tight excuse for any and every Roman flaw that they refuse to admit to themselves.