Bernanos: Truth Telling

Without yet touching on the mysteries that lie at the heart of the Church, wc must at least make preliminary mention here of the irreducible dialectic peculiar to the Church’s existence and resting on her twofold reality: for the Church is both eternal and temporal, infallible and fallible, immaculate in herself and yet sinful in her members. In her first aspect, the Church requires the most childlike obedience and an open love for the truth entrusted to her, a truth she freely dispenses and simply is—in her deepest identity as Bride and Body of Christ, as communion of saints, and as “love”. In her second aspect, the Church requires open judgment, criticism, and even humiliation, things the Christian cannot spare the Church provided he lays claim to his part in the burden of guilt. We must realize, however, that the relationship between both these aspects can never be defined with clean precision for two reasons: first, because the visibility of the Church belongs to the mystery of Christ’s Incarnation and, second, because Christ’s truth can never be subject to exhaustive judgment by the believer. Nevertheless, it would be just as wrong to allow the second aspect (that the Church must be examined, understood, and judged just as she is at a given moment in time) simply to be absorbed into the deeper attitude of faith. Every apologetical approach that seeks to argue away the Church’s aspect of being sinful in her members in fact harms the Church more than it helps her. This is precisely what completes the structure of human reason: its faculty of judging boldly, both by its internal processes and in the public forum. We would be wounding the very heart of reason if, at the last moment, we were to refuse to exercise the duty imposed by a bold freedom, under the pretext of obeying the Church and preserving an ecclesial disposition: “The truth concerning Ethiopia! The truth concerning Spain! The truth concerning the Reds, the Blacks, the Whites, the Blues, the Greens, and the Purples, the truth concerning the Rainbow! But, you say, ‘there are dangerous truths’? Well, then: spell them all out, and they will correct one another. You’re systematic in your support of every manner of prestige. Why, it’s every manner of truth that we should be defending! Every kind of prestige has been created for the truth, and not the truth for the prestige.”111 “Since you’re not willing to go in your lying all the way to mortal sin, let lies be and stop teasing them. Don’t rile up lies for nothing!”