Please join us November 2nd for the Maritain Theology Forum! This week Jason L.A. West (Philosophy, Newman Theological College) will present on "Maritain on the Person and Holiness of the Church."
Each meeting consists of a presentation on a project in theology or an adjacent discipline, followed by a period of comments/questions from other participants. The workshop is designed to give contributors the opportunity to develop ideas and receive helpful feedback on projects/papers in a friendly and low stakes environment.
Lunch is provided for registered attendees.
Abstract: This paper examines Jacques Maritain’s doctrine of the "person of the Church" in response to the critique of Fr. Joseph Komonchak. Komonchak argues that Maritain's view hypostasizes the Church, creating a fictitious subject to safeguard its holiness from the faults of its members. In contrast, I argue that for Maritain (and by extension, Charles Journet), the personality of the Church is the essential framework ensuring the authenticity of her teaching and the efficacy of the sacraments. Maritain accounts for the Church's holiness not by postulating a supernatural entity detached from human activity, but by defining the Church in the strict sense as acting specifically through these core sacramental and magisterial functions. In all other cases, references to “the Church” apply only in a broad sense that is to be understood in terms of her personnel. Accordingly, the supernatural person of the Church is not a catch-all category used to insulate the actual membership from criticism, but a precise explanatory device to account for those limited instances where a purely sociological account of ecclesial action is inherently insufficient.