The Person Of The Church And Her Personnel
By JUDE P. DOUGHERTY At a time when the Church is accused of clerical malfeasance on both sides of the Atlantic, Maritain’s treatise on the Church and her personnel is worth revisiting. To speak of the “person” of the Church is to recognize a certain transcendence in time of a body that remains essentially the same. Just as a human being is not to be identified with the personality it manifests on a given day or at a given period in life, the visible Church cannot be identified with one council or one papacy. Maritain’s reflections on the subject are to be found in his last complete book, On the Church of Christ: The Person of the Church and Her…Continue Reading