Still more palpable and painful does the conflict between the power of God and the weakness of man become when the in-streaming life of grace and truth is checked by human passions, by sin and vice, when Christ as He is realized in human history is dragged through the dust of the street, through the commonplace and the trivial, and over masses of rubbish. That is the deepest tragedy, the very tragedy of the Divine, when It is dispensed by unworthy hands and received by unworthy lips. An immoral laity, bad priests, bishops and popes—these are the saddest wounds of the Body of the mystical Christ. This is what grieves the earnest Catholic and inspires his sorrowful lamentation, when he sees these wounds and is unable to help. “The Church,” says Cardinal Newman, “is ever ailing, and lingers on in weakness, ‘always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in her body.’”[5] It is an essential property of the Church to be so, because of her vocation to save men. Nowhere else does evil become so visible, because nowhere else is it so keenly fought. “She can never work out of the sphere of evil.”[6] As her Master came not for the whole, but for the sick, so the Church in this world will always have her sick, will always have sores in her members, great and small.

To sum up: the first series of tragic conflicts arises out of the nature of Christianity as a supernatural and revealed religion. When the Absolute expresses itself in time, when God’s eternal decrees take temporal form, it cannot but be that human imperfection should come into inward conflict with divine perfection. In this respect Schopenhauer, and before him Schelling, and later Hartmann have judged correctly. Those philosophers erred only in this that they attributed God’s entrance into time, not to a free and loving act of the personal God, but to a necessity of God’s being. And so they went on to conclude that creation was the Fall of God.

The second source of these conflicts lies, not in the nature of supernatural revelation in general, but in the nature of Catholicism in particular, in that which constitutes the special character of Catholicism.