I have been pondering on one response to a blog I wrote recently, the headline of which ended “Few understand this pontificate: but it’s the Church that saves us”. The response began “... Wrong! It is Jesus Christ who saves us”. I naturally assumed that this was written by a Protestant who had come online in order to be critical of Catholic beliefs: a Catholic knows that though, OF COURSE it is Jesus Christ who saves us, the Church he founded is HOW he does it, how he makes himself real and concrete in our daily lives, especially by the gift of the Holy Eucharist and the Church’s penitential system. He went on to say that “The Church is only of any assistance in our salvation as long as she remains faithful to Jesus Christ”, as though the actual behaviour of those often unworthy ministers who administer the sacraments and who are responsible for guarding and propagating His revelation (and administering its organisational structures) somehow constituted what the Church actually IS. That’s certainly what Protestants and the secular world think. It is a fundamental Catholic principle that the unworthiness of the minister cannot effect the validity of the sacraments he celebrates. The disunity and sometimes heretical pronouncements of many of the German bishops do not have any effect on the validity of the priesthood of those they ordain: and the sacraments those priests will administer is what will save those Catholics whose shepherds they will become. So; a Protestant response, then: “The Church is only of any assistance in our salvation as long as she remains faithful to Jesus Christ”. But as I read more of this person’s response, it became clear that he or she was a Catholic. This I found a bit staggering. As another respondent explained to him/her: “Though many among us may be unfaithful, there is no dividing of the Church, Christ's Body, from Christ the Head. I think the line: 'all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body' gets this across pithily. Drawing a distinction between 'the Church' (by which I take you to mean unfaithful teachers in the Church) and Christ can have this unfortunate effect of unwittingly conveying a Protestant ecclesiology.” I don’t need to say any more than that, it does the job very well: but there is, I fear, a lot more ecclesiological confusion among Catholics where that came from. I am disconcerted as I read through what appears beneath Catholic Herald blogs (not just mine), to find how woolly an idea of what the Church actually is seems to pervade a good deal of it. And it’s all so dreary, so much of it: so many Catholics really do seem to have a quasi protestant notion of the Church. Protestants have this idea that the Church is about is the smooth and devious deployment of the bureaucratic skills necessary to run such a vast word-wide organisation (especially in the Vatican itself); and it may also be about dressing up in funny clothes and putting on grand and impressive services (if only they knew, though sometimes they are). So many Catholics don’t seem to know any better. There is no notion emerging from so much Catholic chatter of the sheer wonder of the Church — a wonder by which after 25 years as a Catholic I till find myself so often buoyed up, despite all the Marxes and the Kaspers. Newman felt that sense of wonder after his conversion, until the end of his days: