The Church and the City of Man

It profits a man nothing to sit in the halls of power if he should lose his soul

In a 1969 German radio broadcast, Fr. Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, predicted what he believed the future of the Church would be. Ratzinger envisioned that the Church of future generations would lose political power and social acceptance. He said:

“From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges.”

Since the French Revolution, the Church has undergone a profound loss of political, cultural, and material prosperity in the West. Rarely is the Church welcomed into the halls of power like it was during Christendom. And that’s a good thing.

In a recent address to Catholic legislators, Pope Leo XIV referenced St. Augustine’s work, The City of God. “Within human history, two ‘cities’ are intertwined: the City of Man and the City of God,” Pope Leo said. These “cities” represent spiritual reality, “orientations of the human heart” and “of human civilization.” The City of Man “is marked by the pursuit of power, prestige and pleasure” whereas the City of God “is characterized by justice, charity and humility.”

It becomes clear that the mission of Christendom and the mission of the Church are very different. The former has the disposition of the City of Man, seeking to occupy spaces of power and influence over others. It grasps at social privileges while living with a tremendous fear of losing power. Having this mindset means viewing every loss of space in the public square as “persecution.”

But the Second Vatican Council taught that the Church’s mission is to proclaim the “Gospel to every creature” and “bring to all men that light of Christ which shines out visibly from the Church” (Lumen Gentium 1). In other words, the Church’s mission is identified with the City of God.

If the goal is power, then the mission ultimately rests on coercion. But if the goal is proclamation of the Gospel, then the mission rests on the credibility of the Church’s witness, a witness shaped by justice, charity and humility.

If the mission of the Church is something different from Christendom, then staying in the halls of power isn’t as important as many seem to believe. This is why ressourcement, the Second Vatican Council’s desire to look to the early Church as a model for today, is crucial.

In the first centuries of Christianity the Church existed in an unbaptized world where the halls of power and the prevalent social mores were often hostile to the faith. Yet Christianity spread throughout the world at that time. Why? Because Christians were credible. The pagans saw when Christians chose torture and death over having a respectable place in society. The pagans saw that the Christians took care of the poor and marginalized, believers or not. It was the credibility of their witness that won over non-believers. By authentically living out the Gospel, the early Church earned the attention and trust of others.

This is God’s method throughout all of Scripture. God gathered together a people and formed a special relationship with them. Then he commanded them to live out their faith and be a witness to the nations. Then when others saw them, they would be captivated and ask what it was that God’s people had that they didn’t. God assembled a people to become a shining city on a hill, so that through them the entire world would be saved. This witness rested on faithfulness to God, not on earthly power.

Pope Francis’s expression, “time is greater than space,” articulates the tension in the Church around the desire for Christendom. In Evangelii Gaudium, Francis explicitly criticized a mentality that’s “obsessed with immediate results” and madly attempts “to keep everything together in the present, trying to possess all the spaces of power and of self-assertion.” Instead, the late pope said the Church must give “priority to time,” that is, “being concerned about initiating processes rather than possessing spaces” (EG 223).

When we get this wrong, when we attempt to advance God’s Kingdom with the tactics of the City of man, we inevitably take the name of God in vain and violate human dignity and freedom. During his 2022 Apostolic Journey to Canada, Pope Francis said:

“Indeed, it may seem easier to force God on people, rather than letting them draw near to God. This is contradictory and never works, because that is not how the Lord operates. He does not force us, he does not suppress or overwhelm; instead, he loves, he liberates, he leaves us free…One cannot proclaim God in a way contrary to God himself. And yet, how many times has this happened in history! While God presents himself simply and quietly, we always have the temptation to impose him, and to impose ourselves in his name.”

How much of the history of Christendom has God’s name been used to seek political, cultural, or material power?

As much as the first centuries of Christianity can serve as a model for the Church today, the present age isn’t pre-Christian, it’s post-Christian. Or more specifically, post-Christendom. This means the Christian witness is undermined by all the baggage of Christendom’s failures, all the times Catholics abused the halls of power when they occupied them. All of the times the Church acted like the City of Man.

But instead of fighting for the trust of those with whom we inhabit this world, many Catholics are fighting to keep the spaces of power they’ve carved out for themselves and are squandering their credibility in the process. This mentality is present when clerics care more about protecting institutions than children. Or when Christians hitch their wagon to political parties and compromise with evil for a space in the halls of power. These actions profoundly damage the Church’s witness and undermine her mission.

A illustrative example of this City of Man mentality came from a professor at a Catholic university who, shortly after January 6th, 2021, defended the president and his administration on a public Facebook post, saying, “to be welcomed in the halls of power and protected by the people in them is something I will forever be grateful for, not repent of.”

At the time, a friend and I wrote:

“What the world saw on display this past week in the mob at the U.S. Capitol building was a clear example of Christians not recognizing anything as definitive in order to serve their egos and desires. This was an example of Christians allowing themselves to be transformed by their political party—to the point of denying truth and reality…”

The Church cannot afford to squander her credibility by desperately grasping at spaces of power. Instead, Christians are called to root themselves deeply in a living relationship with the Holy Spirit, to be made holy. To act as the City of God.

Fr. Ratzinger, in that 1969 radio broadcast, went on to say that the post-Christendom Church “will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right.” Losing these spaces of power, “will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek.” But it’s precisely in her lowliness, not her strength, that the Church will be a witness. Ratzinger says:

“Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.”

This doesn’t mean Christians should abandon all engagement with the world. In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis is clear that the Church “‘cannot and must not remain on the sidelines’ in the building of a better world, or fail to ‘reawaken the spiritual energy’ that can contribute to the betterment of society’” (FT 276). This involvement isn’t in competition with earthly powers, but works alongside them. Francis says, “we want to be a Church that serves, that leaves home and goes forth from its places of worship, goes forth from its sacristies, in order to accompany life, to sustain hope, to be the sign of unity… to build bridges, to break down walls, to sow seeds of reconciliation” (FT 276).

Or as Pope Leo XIV said in that same speech, Christians are called “to infuse the earthly society with the values of God’s Kingdom, thereby directing history toward its ultimate fulfilment in God, while also allowing for authentic human flourishing in this life.”

In other words, the Church must become the moral heart of politics and society by tirelessly and consistently advocating for the infinite dignity of every human person.

The Christian mission is one of justice, charity and humility, not power and privilege. Do we have the courage to risk losing political, cultural, and material prosperity for the sake of the Gospel?