Georges Bernanos: Mediocrity in the Church

"The world of the devout offers us few cases of actual Tartuffes, and maybe not any at all, because Tartuffe isn’t any more native to the mediocrity he exploits than the worm is native to the nut. . . . When the unbeliever comes close up for the first time to examine believers—a category of men he knows poorly—he is only too eager to find them ridiculous. His desire for God, if it exists at all, is still so confused and carnal that, without very much despair, he agrees in finding believers contemptible, quite in keeping with their portrayal by apostates. The actual disappointment is that believers are in fact neither holy nor contemptible but rather mediocre, and this in such a strangely complicated and even—despite the coarse exterior—refined way that their mediocrity calls to mind the hereditary defects of very ancient races: their unconscious perfidy, the cunning and jealous impotency of a class in decay. You need a lot of time, perseverance, and love to come to understand that the Church’s greatest anguish is precisely this fleshless flock, kept together by habit or fear, for which the divine barely amounts any more to anything but an alibi for its laziness, for its horror of all manly struggle, for its sickly relish for undergoing, enduring, and experiencing the force of a master. But, who would take them in if not the Church? The only thing the Church is after is people’s consciences, since the only kingdom she aspires to ruling is an interior realm to which God alone has access. Political parties, by contrast, ask for contributions first and foremost. . . . The Church is nothing less than a pantheon of great men. She is the refuge where, under the eternal raging of the wind and the rain, the most wretched of mortals come day after day, for better or worse, to receive their subsistence from God and his saints, until the dawning of universal forgiveness. Unfortunately, all that is needed is some insidious and covert persecution, such as Catholicism has been enduring in the world for a century or two, and certain bargains begin inevitably to be struck. These risk putting in the limelight—under the heading of “Catholic party” and by a disgusting equivocation—that aspect of Catholicism that is surely the least noble, the least healthy, and the most ready to engage in shady transactions, in the same way that the merest hint of bankruptcy is like a mating call to whole legions of maggoty profiteers."

von Balthazar 'Bernanos: An Ecclesial Existence'