Sauvé Report: The Term “Systemic” Facing Theology

1. St. Augustine was, in the fourth century, the doctor aroused by Providence to combat the heresy of Donatism. Which heresy taught that the holiness and effectiveness of the means of grace, and therefore of the Church, depended on the personal holiness of ministers.



To confound this heresy, the holy bishop of Hippo showed that the sacraments are holy in themselves and not through the men who administer them. The Church is made up of sinners and the just, and while there are sinners even among the sacred ministers, nevertheless, the sacraments retain all their powers of sanctification, even if they are administered by unworthy ministers.



And for all that the Church remains holy. Because the holiness of the Church is first and foremost the holiness of the doctrine she preaches, of the sacraments she administers, and of her social organization [1].

2. This holiness of the Church is a dogma of the divine and Catholic faith, and this dogma is inseparable from any other, that of its indefectibility. The dogma of the indefectibility of the Church means that she cannot cease to be holy, in her doctrine and in her means of sanctification. The Church is therefore essentially and necessarily holy.

To repeat the vocabulary currently in vogue among sociologists and scientists, we could say that the holiness of the Church is “systemic,” in the sense that this holiness is institutional.

Because it is first and foremost, fundamentally, the Church as such who is holy, that is, the Church taken as an institution - not isolated individuals in the Church. And this sanctity, so to speak institutional, cannot suffer from failure.

In fact, all that flows from the words of the Gospel of St. Matthew (16:18): “and the gates of hell shall not prevail” against the Church, despite all appearances.

3. In fact, we can very well see, even in the darkest hours of the history of the Church – hours during which human malice had little to envy that of the men of our time – the men of the Church recognized their share of responsibility for the abuses that could provide a pretext for the enemies of Catholicism.

Notably, this was the case in the wake of the Renaissance, when the popes had to defend themselves and the Church against the accusations of the protestant reformers. For example, this is what Pope Adrian VI wrote to Nuncio Chieregati, and sent to the Regensburg diet:

“We freely recognize that God has permitted this persecution of the Church because of the sins of men and particularly of priests and prelates. Holy Scripture tells us that the faults of the people have their source in the faults of the clergy. This is why Our Lord, when He wanted to purify the city of Jerusalem went first to the Temple.”

“We know that even in the Holy See for a number of years many abominations have been committed: abuse of holy things, transgressions of the Commandments of such kind that created a scandal . . . We all, prelates and ecclesiastics, we have turned away from the path of justice[2].”

At the meeting of the Council in Trent to strengthen the Church in her faith and reform her life, high prelates, Cardinal Pole at the very beginning of the Council, in 1546 and a Cardinal of Lorraine at the end of 1562, proclaimed each in their turn a solemn mea culpa: Cardinal Pole recalled: “If salt lose it savor,” he said, “it is good for nothing more than to be cast out and to be trodden underfoot.” (Mt. 5:13)

And he added this profound thought: “Unless indeed these things are well known and seen to, it is useless to enter this Council and useless to call upon the Holy Spirit . . . Therefore unless this Spirit first condemns us before ourselves we cannot profess that He has yet come to us; nor will He come if we refuse to hear about our own sinfulness [3].”

And the cardinal from Lorraine echoed these words in his speech by citing the Epistle of St. Peter (4:17): “judgment should begin at the house of God.” And in 1537, a commission of cardinals and prelates addressed to Pope Paul III a statement on the reform of the Church picked up again the expressions from Scripture to denounce the responsibility of the members of the hierarchy: “It is because of us that the name of Christ is blasphemed among the Nations.”

But we can also see that the same ecclesiastical dignitaries, while acknowledging the sins of the members of the Church, have affirmed the principle of the holiness of the institution and of her hierarchy. Nowhere have they spoken of a prevarication of the Church itself, and they have always refused to impute any institutional failure to the society divinely instituted by Jesus Christ.

For example, in the 18th century, this was the answer that the Cardinal de Noailles, Archbishop of Paris, gave to the objections addressed to him by the Protestant Zinzendorf: “You attribute to this Church, who is the Bride of Jesus Christ always pure, always holy in herself, the faults of her ministers: she groans for them, she chastises them, but she is not guilty of them.”

“Condemn as much as you please the misconduct of the bishops, the cardinals, the popes, even when their actions do not correspond to the sanctity of their character, but respect the Church, who has given them holy rules and is led by the Spirit of holiness and truth.”

4. The popes of the last two centuries have said no less. They did not hesitate to recall the presence of sin in the Church: Pius IX affirmed that many members of the Church are not holy: “It is always true, however, that the Church is composed of men who are often pulvere sordescunt (“stained with dust”).” (Message to Pilgrims, Sept. 15, 1876)

“And though one of her characteristics is that of holiness, because she is holy through her Founder, holy through her doctrine, holy through the holiness of many of her members, nevertheless, she also includes within her midst many members who are not holy and who afflict her, persecute her and ignore her.”

Pope Pius XI affirms: “The Church, whose work lies among men and operates through men, may see her divine mission obscured by a human, too human, combination, persistently growing and developing like the cockle among the wheat of the Kingdom of God” (Mit Brennender Sorge, §19).

And Pius XII recalled this truth on several occasions: “sinners are part of the Church and sin, in some way, unfortunately defiles the members of this Mystical Body;  it projects like shadowy zones among the threads of light.”

But the popes of these last centuries have also made the distinction between the possible failings of the members of the Church and the inalterable holiness the Church, and in explaining that  the Church must not fear any harm if she acknowledges the sin of her members: this sin cannot reach herself.



Here, for example, is what Pius XI recalls in 1923 in the Encyclical Ecclesiam Dei: “To achieve this end, as it is necessary on the one hand for the Schismatic Easterners to lay aside their ancient prejudices and to seek really to know the true life of the Church, not attributing to the Roman Church the faults of mere individuals, faults which she is the first to condemn and seeks as well to correct.”



And again Pius XII in the Encyclical Mystici Corporis: “if at times there appears in the Church something that indicates the weakness of our human nature, it should not be attributed to her juridical constitution, but rather to that regrettable inclination to evil found in each individual, which her Divine Founder permits even at times in the most exalted members of His Mystical Body.”



And in this same passage Pius XII adds that the Church “shines with unblemished radiance” in her faith, in her laws, in her evangelical counsels and in her sacraments: “Certainly the loving Mother is spotless in the Sacraments by which she gives birth to and nourishes her children; in the faith which she has always preserved inviolate; in her sacred laws imposed on all; in the evangelical counsels which she recommends; in those heavenly gifts and extraordinary graces through which with inexhaustible fecundity, she generates hosts of martyrs, virgins, and confessors.”

And it specifies the conditions and the meaning of true and just repentance on the part of the Church: the Church certainly recites the Pater Noster every day and every day she asks God for forgiveness; but she asks forgiveness for the sins of her sons and not for her own sins.

5. These popes of modern times even went further. They said that not only do the sins of men not cast a shadow on the holiness of the Church, but, on the contrary, that these sins contribute to raising her to greater prominence. If we see that the institution perseveres in spite of human failings, it is an argument that favors the divinity of this institution. The Church then constitutes a veritable moral miracle.

Listen, for example, to Leo XIII: “The Church historian will be all the better equipped to bring out her divine origin, … the more loyal he is in naught extenuating of the trials which the faults of her children, and at times even of her ministers, have brought upon the Spouse of Christ…” (Depuis le Jour, encyclical September 8, 1899).

And then especially there is this text of Pope St. Pius X from the encyclical Editae saepe, which is more explicit: “In fact, only a miracle of that divine power could preserve the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, from blemish in the holiness of Her doctrine, law, and end in the midst of the flood of corruption and lapses of her members. Her doctrine, law, and end have produced an abundant harvest” (§8).

St. Pius X said again: “When vice runs wild, when persecution hangs heavy, when error is so cunning that it threatens her destruction by snatching many children from her bosom (and plunges them into the whirlpool of sin and impiety) - then, more than ever, the Church is strengthened from above” (§6).

6. We cannot therefore identify, what the Report of the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (CIASE) submitted to the French Episcopal Conference on October 5, wanted to do (in its no.1091), gathering the incriminating facts about the Church into “a systemic phenomenon.”

For this is to commit the confusion which has always been clearly denounced and condemned in divine Revelation, as the divinely instituted Magisterium has proposed it for more than twenty centuries. The Report presented to the Bishops of France by the President of the said Commission, Mr. Jean-Marc Sauvé, speaks (in his Recommendation No. 24) of  a “systemic responsibility of the Church” and of an “institutional failure.” So many assertions that cannot suffer confrontation with the words of the Gospel of St. Matthew: “Et portae inferi non praevalebunt adversus eam,” (and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it), (Mt. 16:18).

7. After His Britannic Majesty's Government had once used cruel reprisals in India to curb a revolt, a Labor MP, complaining to the Colonial Secretary, asked him what now distinguished his country from Nazi Germany. “My honorable colleague,” replied the Minister, “seems to ignore a fundamental distinction: the Germans apply their principles; we violate our own.”

Suffice to say that the distinction could still - and should have – jumped out in the eyes of Jean-Marc Sauvé and his peers. “That if the Church shows obvious traces of the condition of our human weakness,” as Pius XII already said, “it should not be attributed to her juridical constitution, but rather to that regrettable inclination to evil found in each individual, which her Divine Founder permits even at times in the most exalted members of His Mystical Body.”



An inclination which is the sad privilege not of the members of the Church taken as such, but of humanity in general. And it is precisely to remedy this that God wanted to establish His Church here below as the indefectible means of salvation and holiness.

[1] St. Augustine, Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, treatise 5 and 6 in Migne’s Patralogia Latina, v. XXXV, col. 1414-1437 ; On baptism contre the Donatists, book III, ibidem, t. XLIII, col. 139-152.

[2] Adrian VI, Instructions to nuncio Chieregati (1522) cited by Louis Pastor, Histoire des Papes, t. 9, p. 103 et sq.

[3] Admonition to the Legates to the second session of the Council of Trent, January 7, 1546” in the Acta concilii Tridentini, t. IV, pars prima, p. 550-551.