Lumen Gentium 37

Following the revelation that at the highest level Catholic Church leaders can behave unjustly, even towards children, the Church’s teaching on holiness cannot be considered complete with the Vatican II document Lumen Gentium (1964). That document never refers to the psychological problem of the wearing of masks – called out by Jesus as hypocrisy – so prevalent in the hiding by church leadership of clerical sexual abuse of children. Nor does Lumen Gentium identify the principle of integrity, so essential now for the protection of children, as an essential aspect of holiness. This shortfall in the church’s textual teaching on holiness needs fixing – to honour Jesus’ prophetic risk-taking in calling out the hypocrisies of the religious culture of his own time.

This also has implications for the understanding of Christian obedience, for Canon Law, for the structure of the church, for the Theology of the Cross and for our understanding of the Atonement.

This article was first published in The Furrow in May 2025.

“… all the faithful, whatever their condition or state, are called by the Lord, each in his own way, to that perfect holiness whereby the Father Himself is perfect.”
(Vatican II, Lumen Gentium 11)

That all in the church are called to personal holiness by Vatican II (1962-65) was clear enough to those who took any interest in the council, even if, in Ireland, there was then a dearth of discussion of what that might mean.

Far less known is that the final wording and structure of the document that announced this call – Lumen Gentium – was arrived at only after a contentious debate between different interest groups of bishops at the council. It will probably be news to most that the document overall may therefore be less than limpid – and even potentially confusing and discouraging – on the precise nature of the holiness to which all are called. This is the argument presented by a monumental study of the history of that holiness debate, published by an Irish theologian in 2021: ‘The Charismatic Structure of the Church’¹

To summarise, the work – by Michael McGuckian SJ – provides copious historical evidence that there has never been complete unanimity among Christians as to how best to answer Jesus’ call to ‘follow me’. St Paul’s strong recommendation of the unmarried state – probably because ‘end times’ were then thought likely to be imminent – makes that point straight away. That advice was obviously not followed by everyone – including, thankfully, the mother of St Augustine of Hippo, St Monica, in the fourth century – and the church has owed its continuity to the celibate and non-celibate alike ever since.

The ‘Evangelical Counsels’

In the third century the preference of some for a ‘coenobitic’ or monastic life, and, later still, the emergence of the mendicant and preaching orders, added further layers of complexity. The elevation of the ‘evangelical counsels’ of poverty, celibacy and obedience by St Thomas Aquinas (c. 1256) raised immediately a question that was to dog Vatican II many centuries later: could those who did not follow this way – including secular bishops and clergy as well as lay people – truly hope to rise to the same perfection of life – the ‘holiness’ – that was claimed for the following of those counsels?

McGuckian’s study establishes that those who debated this at the council could not agree. The body of bishops that called for the universal possibility of, and calling to, holiness achieved, in Chapter 5, the statement at the head of this article – that everyone is called to ‘perfect holiness’. They failed, however, to persuade the opposing body of bishops (those aligned with the religious orders) to abandon the claim for the superiority of the evangelical counsels as a mode of life.

And so, in Chapter 6 of Lumen Gentium we find the statements that the evangelical counsels of poverty, celibacy and obedience ‘are based upon the words and examples of the Lord‘ and that this ‘religious state, whose purpose is to free its members from earthly cares, more fully manifests to all believers the presence of heavenly goods already possessed here below‘ (LG 44).

The author argues that these assertions make it far from clear that the holiness to which all are called in Chapter Five of Lumen Gentium is the same holiness achievable by those who follow the evangelical counsels – and therefore that perfection of life is truly considered equally possible for those who do not follow those. The lobby for Chapter Six could not agree to the inclusion of that phrase ‘same holiness’ in the document – and subsequent papal statements do not clarify the matter, in the author’s view.

A Layman’s ‘Take’

As a lay person faced with the challenge of the church scandals that have happened since Vatican II – and especially the challenge to understand the creedal affirmation of the holiness of the church – this book is a welcome contribution to Pope Francis’ bid to make the church energetically synodal at all levels. To me it is uncanny that the disagreement among the apostles as to which of them was the greatest (e.g. Luke 9:46-48) could in its essence be echoed and re-echoed down the centuries – and could become especially vigorous between those who have received the sacrament of ordination. Furthermore, given Pope Francis’ insistence upon the importance of the ‘domestic church’ there is an obvious need for clarity on how that Vatican II ‘universal’ call to holiness is to be answered now – and can be? – by those with family and civic responsibility.

Seeking clarity, is it naïve to suggest that the word ‘holy’ is applied regularly – even in Lumen Gentium – to very different phenomena, with very different shades of meaning, and therefore that the distinguishing of these could be a necessary preliminary to a reading of Lumen Gentium aimed at resolving any perceived contradiction?

For example, sacraments are ‘holy’ but the church has been clear since the early fifth century that the sacrament of ordination does not make those who receive it personally virtuous. Again, the office of bishop is a sacred or holy office, but the very fact that bishops can be, and are, dismissed by the pope for serious moral failure makes clear that the ordination of a bishop does not confer personal holiness either.

Must not a similar distinction be made for a chosen way of life, whatever degree of asceticism it may arguably ‘manifest’? Richard Rohr, the Franciscan teacher of the contemplative ‘way’, insists that in his experience of his own order ‘the young ego is often left unformed and unchallenged, and there have been many human and spiritual casualties as a result’² That one might choose the ‘manifestation’ of poverty, celibacy and obedience to prove one’s own superiority – without fully grasping the higher calling to humility and unselfish love – is surely a danger that spiritual directors in the religious orders will warn against – recalling especially Jesus’ warning about the wearing of masks.

A further consideration is that the poverty and obedience required of someone within a religious institution are substantially different from the poverty and obedience of Jesus – who was never a member of such an institution and answered to God directly. His poverty was a feature of a three-year mission, which was also, in its level of risk, in its brevity and in its tragic conclusion a sufficient explanation of his unmarried state. Is a professed commitment to a whole lifetime of celibacy therefore necessarily a decisive ‘manifestation’ of the ‘following’ that Jesus called for – especially in the wake of revelations that widespread non-observance of the celibacy rule has been tolerated by the clerical church?

And more than half-a-century after Lumen Gentium can we now be convinced that the discipline required of members of any religious institution necessarily ‘manifests’ in one central aspect the very particular, and solitary, poverty and obedience of Jesus?

Holiness and Integrity – and ‘Whistle Blowing’

“I accept that, from the time I became an auxiliary bishop, I should have challenged the prevailing culture.” This was a key sentence in the resignation statement of Bishop Jim Moriarty of Kildare Leighlin in November 2009, in the wake of the Murphy report³. The culture referred to was that of the administration of the archdiocese of Dublin in the period before 1994, in which Bishop Moriarty had served as an auxiliary. In early December 2009 the Irish bishops named that culture as one of ‘cover up’ – in which ‘the avoidance of scandal, the preservation of the reputations of individuals and of the Church, took precedence over the safety and welfare of children.’⁴

That this particular sequence of events should mirror so closely repeated accounts of victimisation and concealment in scripture – also to preserve the reputations of individuals (e.g. the brothers of Joseph, King David and the Herods) – and that Jesus by contrast risked his own reputation and his life by lambasting the shortcomings of the religious establishment of his own time and place – must surely clarify a key aspect of Christian holiness in the wake of ongoing and global church scandal: the holiness of Jesus is inseparable from what is called integrity, and from the role of what contemporary culture calls the ‘whistle blower’ who calls out any significant abuse of office or power.

Does the Catholic church even yet clearly acknowledge this obligation of integrity, and therefore the limitations of the obligation of obedience to fallible designated authority, even in the context of the church itself?

My own strong impression is that the connection of holiness to integrity of that kind has not yet been explicitly made by the episcopal magisterium, despite four decades of scandal – and that its own authority therefore continues to suffer. That the clerical institution can become secretive, unaccountable and abusive has been amply demonstrated in our time. Moreover, inherited models of holiness that elevated obedience to authority above the call to integrity in Ireland have left the lay church supine and unobservant of one obvious response to the call to ‘take up your cross’ (Matt 15:24-26): to do that by questioning 20^th century church-run institutions that shamed the poorest and weakest.

Even yet in 2025 we have never yet in Ireland had an open, honest and thorough discussion of the Ryan report of 2009, which indicted the habit of deference to clergy that led Irish civil servants to impose no real accountability for the use of public funds upon the religious orders that ran those institutions.⁵ The ‘multi-disciplinary study’ initially called for by Bishop Noel Treanor, to establish conclusively the causes of that disaster, never happened – and this too remains unexplained⁶.

Integrity in the Secular Sphere

As Lumen Gentium also calls the church – and especially lay people – to ‘consecrate the world to God’ (LG 34) – and Ireland has suffered multiple examples of civil institutional corruption in recent decades – this inability of clergy at all levels to speak of Jesus as history’s outstanding ‘whistle blower’ is surely an ongoing disability in the task of synodal ‘mission’ in Ireland.

A single example will suffice to make the point: that of the Third Report of the Tribunal of Inquiry established by the Irish Government into ‘protected disclosures’ (i.e. disclosures by ‘whistle blowers’) related to alleged abuses within Ireland’s policing service, the Garda, in 2017. The ‘Afterword’ to that report ends with the following:

“The question has to be asked as to why what is best, what demands hard work, is not the calling of every single person who takes on the job of service to Ireland. Worse still is the question of how it is that decent people, of whom Maurice McCabe emerges as a paradigm, are so shamefully treated when rightly they demand that we do better.”⁷

That Maurice McCabe, a Garda whistleblower, had to suffer a vile campaign of innuendo at the hands not only of colleagues but of superiors – a campaign that took him by his own account close to suicide⁸ – is now well known. We cannot know what private reflections prevented auxiliary bishops in Dublin from blowing any whistle on the cover up of clerical abuse in Dublin in the period before 1994 – but is it unreasonable to suggest that the lack of anything like a ‘Protected Disclosures Act’ (or ‘whistle-blowers charter’) in the church’s own canon law – inspired by the example of Jesus himself – was one of them? Or that a confused understanding of Christian obedience, as something owed always and above all to ecclesiastical superiors, may have been another?

whistle-blowing in the secular sphere — If businesses encourage whistle-blowing for their own sake, why doesn’t the church – in memory of Him?

The Gethsemane of the Whistle-Blower

The patterns of fear of loss of reputation in all ‘covering up’ – and of deliberate assault upon the reputation of those who do stand up for what is right – suggest yet another pressure upon anyone challenged to do that: the frailty of all human self-esteem, dependent as that is upon some degree of approval from a peer group. Our intense need to belong will transmute quickly into an intense fear of being cast out if we are faced with the challenge of standing utterly alone in calling out any corrupted ‘prevailing culture’. None of us should throw stones at others who fail in that situation, before we have been there ourselves.

And yet wasn’t that – hugely amplified – precisely the challenge met, faced and overcome by Jesus in Jerusalem, in his ‘conquering’ of ‘the world’ (John 16:33)?

Holiness, Integrity and the Meaning of the Cross

Here yet again we encounter the inadequacy of a theology of atonement and redemption that explains Jesus’ acceptance of the cross in terms of the Father’s need for ‘satisfaction’ for sin. If the Trinity are not always in solidarity with anyone faced, like Maurice McCabe and the Australian St Mary McKillop, with an ultimate test of integrity – assuring us too of vindication and resurrection – we are indeed utterly alone then. If St Mary McKillop could become a patron saint of victims of abuse in Australia, for holding firm in the calling out of clerical abuse, despite excommunication in 1870⁹, what prevents the Catholic magisterium from teaching that divine solidarity with whistle-blowers – to help anyone to stand firm in any such crisis of conscience – is also the message, and calling, of the Cross?

The answer lies surely in the historical legacy of Christendom, which aligned the clerical institution always with the secular establishment, biasing theology toward the encouragement of submission to state and ecclesial authority. A God who needs satisfaction for sin is a celestial paradigm of the worldly king who demands and merits fealty and subordination – while any view of Jesus as a divine whistle-blower against injustice – and especially any injustice within the church – could encourage sedition and disorder. Christendom was always a discouraging climate for prophets, and Christian theology became complicit in that discouragement. That God could ever support any conscience that disagreed with the hierarchical church was obviously unthinkable.

Holiness and the Domestic Church

That the Trinity cannot be as close to and as supportive of the family as to those who follow the evangelical counsels is obviously a mistake – and so therefore must be any denial of the holiness of committed and loving sexual relationships. That family life could not ‘manifest heavenly goods’ as plainly as the friary or the monastery – an inference too easily drawn from Lumen Gentium 44 – is mistaken also, and patently so. Maurice McCabe’s own story is testament to the role of family in forming and strengthening character for the crises of conscience that could fall on anyone in service today.

This is not to deny that the family can also be a location of abuse and addiction and broken relationships, and therefore of ‘sin’ – or that family life is not seriously challenged by an economy in cruel flux. Yet Jesus was never just a ‘coenobite’, confined to life within a male community separated from ‘the world’. His sole reference to the option of celibacy (Matt 19:12) made it preferable to the option of divorce, not the circumstance of marriage – and there is no reason to believe that his own celibacy was a necessary condition of the instruction to ‘be perfect’.

Surely it is significant that Jesus’ call to holiness – to be ‘perfect’ (Matt 5:48) – occurs as part of the call to love – and to love even one’s enemies? Michael McGuckian is persuasive¹⁰ that it is to the two Great Commandments (Mark 12:30-33) we must all look for the decisive test of holiness – and that we are always equally and solemnly challenged in that regard. To want to win an argument over whose way is the holiest is to lose the plot.

Notes

‘The Charismatic Structure of the Church: Priesthood and Religious Life at Vatican II and Beyond’, Michael McGuckian SJ, Xlibris, US 2021
Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi, Richard Rohr, Hodder and Stoughton 2017
Bishop Moriarty statement: ‘I accept that, from the time I became an auxiliary bishop, I should have challenged the prevailing culture’, Irish Times, Thursday Dec 24^th, 2009
Statement following the winter meeting of the Irish Bishops Conference, 9th December 2009
Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (The Ryan Report) Vol. 4, Chapter 6: Conclusions
RTE Interview of Bishop Noel Treanor by Tommy O’Gorman, May 24th, 2009.
“I believe simply that as a church within society we have to recognise honestly that these things have happened. We cannot in any way at any level within the church be indifferent. I don’t think anybody is. We can’t wash our hands of it. We can’t deny it. We simply have to see the evil and the crimes that were perpetrated straight in the face, and that means we have to examine why they happened. That will require if I may say so an inter‑disciplinary discussion with people who are members of the church ‑ involving victims, those who were abused and indeed going beyond the borders of our church, so that we have the best anthropological and scientific analysis available to try and understand why this happened.”
Third Interim Report of the Disclosures Tribunal, under the Protected Disclosures Act 2014 (2017)
A Force for Justice: The Maurice McCabe Story, Michael Clifford, Hachette Books Ireland 2017
Mary MacKillop: Patron Saint of Sexual Abuse Victims?, James Martin SJ, America, Sep 29, 2010
‘Holier than thou’ Michael McGuckian SJ: Interview by Pat Coyle