¹ Thea Bowman, Address to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, June 1989. Her address can be viewed in full at https://www.usccb.org/media/303.

² This event was John Paul II's Day of Pardon liturgy, which took place on March 12, 2000, on the first Sunday of Lent during the year of Jubilee. Relevant documents from this mass can be found at https://www.vatican.va/jubilee_2000/jubilevents/events_day_pardon_en.htm.

³ These moments are carefully documented by Luigi Accattoli in part 2 of his book Quando il Papa Chiede Perdono (Milan: Mondadori, 1997).

⁴ For example, see Augustine Civitas Dei, XV.27.

⁵ Augustine, On Baptism, IV.10.

⁶ For an excellent treatment of the principle of ex opere operato and its evolution, see Alonso, Antonio Eduardo, Commodified Communion: Eucharist, Consumer Culture, and the Practice of Everyday Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021), 101–06Google Scholar.

⁷ Definitions of sin and holiness have a long and varied tradition and do not always function in such an antithetical manner. For example, biblical notions of holiness (kadosh) as “set apart” from the quotidian world or distinguishing between the divine and the created may be consistent with or even include versions of this holiness/sinfulness distinction, but they encompass and give rise to other logics of separation as well. The purpose of this article is not to analyze and interrogate the adequacy of such definitions and distinctions, but rather to attend to the different ways these function within particular ecclesiological logics of sin and sanctity. For a thorough discussion of these terms, see especially Flanagan, Brian, Stumbling in Holiness: Sin and Sanctity in the Church (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018), 42–71Google Scholar.

⁸ Hinze, Bradford E., “Ecclesial Repentance and the Demands of Dialogue,” Theological Studies 61 (2000), 228CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Rahner, Karl, “The Sinful Church in the Decrees of Vatican II,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 6 (Baltimore: Helicon Publishing, 1969), 270–94Google Scholar at 277.

¹⁰ For a thorough explication of Rahner's ecclesiology, see Lennan, Richard, The Ecclesiology of Karl Rahner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Rahner, Karl, “The Church of Sinners,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 6 (Baltimore, MD: Helicon Publishing, 1969), 253–69Google Scholar at 257. Regarding the scandal of sinners in the church, also see Chauvet, Louis-Marie, Symbol and Sacrament (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 187Google Scholar.

¹² Rahner, “The Church of Sinners,” 265.

¹³ For further discussion see Lennan, The Ecclesiology of Karl Rahner, 28–31.

¹⁴ More recently, Jeanmarie Gribaudo has advanced an argument that separates the holy church from its sinful members (including the hierarchy) by distinguishing between operative definitions of the church as either human or Christological in her book A Holy, Yet Sinful Church (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2015). Although proceeding in a manner different from Rahner, Gribaudo's book is yet another example of a theology that works to diminish the gap between “church” and “members” that results in triumphal and idealized ecclesiologies, while still relying on a logic of separation that works to isolate the holy church from its sinful members.

¹⁵ Rahner, “The Church of Sinners,” 267.

¹⁶ Rahner, “The Church of Sinners,” 264.

¹⁷ Rahner, “The Church of Sinners,” 264.

¹⁸ Rahner, “The Church of Sinners,” 267–69.

¹⁹ Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium), November 21, 1964, §9–17, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html. For a substantive discussion of the plurality of ecclesial images and theologies expressed in the documents of Vatican II, see Gaillardetz, Richard, The Church in the Making: Lumen Gentium, Christus Dominus, Orientalium Ecclesiarum (New York: Paulist Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

²⁰ This conciliar image resonates strongly with an argument Rahner made just prior to the opening of the council, which located the source of the church's sinfulness in its rejection of the Spirit's promptings and its refusal to change. See Lennan, The Ecclesiology of Karl Rahner, 29–30.

²¹ Lumen Gentium, §48.

²² Lumen Gentium, §48–49.

²³ Laszlo, Stephen, “Sin in the Holy Church of God,” in Council Speeches of Vatican II, ed. Küng, Hans, Congar, Yves, and O'Hanlon, Daniel (Glen Rock: Paulist Press, 1964), 44–48Google Scholar, at 44–45.

²⁴ Laszlo points to both Augustine and Thomas to support this move, but also to the liturgical collect of the fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, which prays, “May your church be constantly cleansed and protected by your unfailing mercy, Lord.” In Laszlo, “Sin in the Holy Church of God,” 47.

²⁵ See Accattoli, Quando il Papa Chiede Perdono.

²⁶ Alternatively, Brian Flanagan has noted that the structure of John Paul II's prayer during the Day of Pardon liturgy more closely resembles the eucharistic liturgy's universal prayers rather than its penitential rite. Flanagan, Brian, “Ecclesial Holiness and Guilt,” in Contritio: Annäherungen an Schuld, Scham und Reue, ed. Exxing, Julia and Peetz, Katharina, with Wojtczak, Dorothea (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2017), 259–65Google Scholar.

²⁷ International Theological Commission, “Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past” (1999).

²⁸ For more discussion of this doctrinal development, see David N. Power, “Sinful Church, Divine Pardon,” New Theology Review (February 2004): 57–69; Hinze, “Ecclesial Repentance and the Demands of Dialogue,” 207–38; Flanagan, Stumbling in Holiness, 147–65.

²⁹ Gaillardetz, The Church in the Making, 101–02.

³⁰ Flanagan, Stumbling in Holiness, 102–37.

³¹ Flanagan, Stumbling in Holiness, 131.

³² Kavanagh, Aidan, On Liturgical Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992), 75Google Scholar; quoted in Flanagan, Stumbling in Holiness, 13. The beginning of Vatican II's Constitution on the Liturgy makes essentially the same claim. “For the liturgy, through which the work of our redemption is accomplished … is the outstanding means whereby the faithful may express in their lives, and manifest to others, the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true Church.” Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium), December 4, 1963, §2, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19631204_sacrosanctum-concilium_en.html.

³³ Flanagan, Stumbling in Holiness, 132.

³⁴ Flanagan, Stumbling in Holiness, 17–25.

³⁵ Flanagan, Stumbling in Holiness, 18.

³⁶ Both Kathryn Tanner and Teresa Berger have identified “unrealistic assumptions about Christian practices to which academic theologians are inclined by the intellectual investments of their own enterprises.” Tanner, Kathryn, “Theological Reflection and Christian Practices,” in Practicing Theology, ed. Volt, Miroslav and Bass, Dorothy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2002), 228–29Google Scholar. See also Berger, Teresa, “Breaking Bread in a Broken World,” Studia Liturgica 36 (2006): 80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ For further discussion of this pattern, see especially chapter 1 in Antonio A. Alonso's Commodified Communion.

³⁸ Hovda, Robert, “Liturgy Forming Us in the Christian Life,” in Liturgy and Spirituality in Context: Perspectives on Prayer and Culture, ed. Bernstein, Eleanor (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1990), 139Google Scholar.

³⁹ Flanagan, Stumbling in Holiness, 13.

⁴⁰ Hoffman, Lawrence, Beyond the Text (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 6Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Hoffman, Beyond the Text, 19. On page 16, Flanagan is attentive to this critique and closely follows Hoffman's method of attending not only to the words of the liturgy, but also the ritual context in which they are spoken, drawing substantively on the liturgical rubrics as well as the scripted texts.

⁴² Garrigan, Siobhan, Beyond Ritual (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), 29Google Scholar.

⁴³ Flanagan, Stumbling in Holiness, 9–41, 100–01, 177–79.

⁴⁴ Alonso, Commodified Communion; Winner, Lauren, The Dangers of Christian Practice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁵ Flanagan, Stumbling in Holiness, 131–33.

⁴⁶ Flanagan, Stumbling in Holiness, 13.

⁴⁷ Flanagan, Stumbling in Holiness, 107.

⁴⁸ Rahner, Karl, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 124Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Rahner's anthropology starts from a view of the human person as an existential unity of body and spirit, of the historical and the transcendental. Rahner refers to these two dimensions of the human person as the transcendent and categorical poles. See especially Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 75–82, 129, 171–75.

⁵⁰ Rahner lays out his fullest explication of the concept of the symbol as the fundamental structure of Christian reality in his essay “Zur Theologie des Symbols,” published in 1959 and later translated as “The Theology of the Symbol.” He plays out this idea of the symbol in his 1961 book The Church and the Sacraments and 1979 essay On the Theology of Worship. The notion of symbol plays a more subtle role in his essay “The Church of the Saints” (1955), which I read as an important development of his theology of symbol.

⁵¹ Rahner, Karl, “The Theology of the Symbol,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 4 (New York: Crossroad, 1973), 221–51Google Scholar at 224–25.

⁵² Rahner, “The Theology of the Symbol,” 236–41. Richard Lennan describes the connection between Rahner's theology of revelation and his theology of symbol this way: “The physical object which could be experienced immediately—the ‘categorical’—was to be understood as the symbol of a deeper reality—the ‘transcendental’”; Lennan, The Ecclesiology of Karl Rahner, 20.

⁵³ Rahner, “The Theology of the Symbol,” 237. For a discussion of symbol in Rahner's Christology, see especially Wong, Joseph H. P., Logos-Symbol in the Christology of Karl Rahner (Rome: Libreria Ateneo Salesiano, 1984), 113–84Google Scholar; Callahan, Annice, Karl Rahner's Spiritualiy of the Pierced Heart: A Reinterpretation of Devotion of the Sacred Heart (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985), 32–53Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Rahner, “The Theology of the Symbol,” 239.

⁵⁵ For further discussion of the relationship between Rahner's theological anthropology and his theology of symbol, see Little, Brent, “Anthropology and Art in the Theology of Karl Rahner,” Heythrup Journal 52, no. 6 (November 2011): 939–44Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Rahner, “The Theology of the Symbol,” 245–52.

⁵⁷ Rahner, The Church and the Sacraments (Freiburg: Herder, 1963), 18.

⁵⁸ Rahner, The Church and the Sacraments, 14, 18.

⁵⁹ Grimes, Katie, “Breaking the Body of Christ: The Sacraments of Initiation in a Habitat of White Supremacy,” Political Theology 18, no. 1 (February 2017): 22–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Matovina, Timothy, “Latino Catholics in the Southwest,” in Roman Catholicism in the United States: A Thematic History, ed. McGuiness, Margaret M. and Fisher, James T. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 43–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁰ Flanagan, Stumbling in Holiness, 131-133.

⁶¹ This analogy reaches its limit when placed within a sacramental framework of ex opere operato in which the validity of the sacrament does not depend on the holiness of the minister, but rather the holiness of God. In the case of the scholar, the cases mentioned here are often but not always enough to disqualify the validity of the scholarly work and therefore the manifestation of the scholar as scholar. And yet the limits of this analogy do not undermine the larger point here, which does not suggest that the sacraments celebrated in the liturgy are invalid. Instead, the principle of ex opere operato may well be extended here not just to the individual minister of the sacrament, but also to the church as a whole. The sacramental work that may be disqualified or invalidated by the sinful actions of the church is validated precisely by the holiness of God.

⁶² Rahner, “The Theology of the Symbol,” 235.

⁶³ Rahner, “The Theology of the Symbol,” 241.

⁶⁴ For Rahner, this nonidentity between symbol and symbolized is not necessarily a negative qualification, always and only expressed in the dialectic of sin and holiness between the divine and human or Christ and the church, but rather a consequence of subjective plurality. Nonidentity does not always refer to finiteness or failure. Rahner makes this very point in his discourse on the symbolic nature of the Trinity: “We know, on the contrary, from the mystery of the Trinity … that there is a true and real—even though ‘only’ relative—distinction of ‘persons’ in the supreme simplicity of God, and hence a plurality, at least in this sense.” This is not to deny the essential unity of God: “The original unity, which also forms the unity which unites the plural, maintains itself while resolving itself and ‘dis-closing’ itself into a plurality in order to find itself precisely there. For Rahner, the mystery of the Incarnation itself is essentially Trinitarian—that the divine discloses Godself precisely in that which is not God—humanity—while at the same time maintaining an essential unity with the divine. Rahner, “The Theology of the Symbol,” 226–230, on 226.

⁶⁵ For further discussion, see Lennan, The Ecclesiology of Karl Rahner, 18–21, 24–28.

⁶⁶ Flanagan, Stumbling in Holiness, 105–08.