“Who are the Church’s most dangerous enemies?”

The Church's Worst Enemies

By James V. Schall, S. J.

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The Church can surely be said to have “enemies,” those who restrict her in every way, who set up other religious or ideological systems to replace or counteract her.

Many countries in the world, more than we suspect, including our own, have laws or decrees that exclude or restrict the freedom to practice or explain the faith. Such restrictions are quite unjust. They reveal some aspect of the mystery of iniquity, the mystery of the hatred of the good, of God.

Somewhere back in the 1930s, during the Spanish Civil War, and facing other issues in Germany and Italy, Pius XI asked this very question: “Who are the Church’s most dangerous enemies?” 

His answer was as follows:

The Church’s worst persecutors have been her own unfaithful bishops, priests, and religious. Opposition from outside is terrible; it gives us many martyrs. But the Church’s worst enemy is her own traitors.

Why is this, we wonder? The mission of the Church ad extra has much to do with the witness to the truth by Christians themselves, especially those in high places, both clergy and laity.

In an analogous manner, John Paul II remarked to European bishops in 1982 that “the crises of European man and of Europe are crises and temptations of Christianity and of the Church in Europe.” We are wont to think that the drama of the world takes place outside of the redemptive plan of God. It doesn’t.


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