Pelagius and Insight Into Church Corruption

It has been my contention that Paul was the Antichrist and that all Evil in Christianity is traceable to his influences. Now it would almost define myself as remarkably silly if I were the only person to think so, or to have ever thought so. But as it turns out, the Church had once come to that cross-roads where it had occasion to evaluate its position on some of these worst and destructive Doctrines of Paul. Unfortunately the Church made the wrong decisions, and their choices are still playing out.

This doctrinal review I am talking about occurred as an Irish Monk, Pelagius, had visited Rome in the early 5th Century. He had been quite disgusted with Church Corruption, particularly the sordid and immoral behavior of the Clergy, and so he had written several tracts and spoke a great deal on the need to exert one’s will toward rejecting Evil and actively pursuing Righteousness. It was Pelagius’s position that it was not necessary to be a Sinner, and that one could be entirely Righteous simply by exerting one’s Will toward not committing any single sin. He saw no overriding difficulty in controlling one’s behavior, and he saw in Christ’s Teachings and Example the urgings to do just that, to exercise one’s Will toward achieving a Moral Perfection.

But the Church authorities, most famously that mean and arrogant and most morally indulgent of ‘Saints’, Augustine, supposed that this doctrine of Pelagius was not sufficiently Paulist, in that it rejected the all important functions of Grace, denied the reliability of Redemption and Salvation, and despised the established Church’s Doctrine of Original Sin with its corollary that every member of the Church acknowledge a natural and intrinsic status of being a ‘sinner’. Now, we should examine why any Practical Religion would so squarely stand against Righteousness. It seems anti-intuitive. Why would Pelagius have been declared Heretical for asking only for moral and decent behavior?

The answers here are very pragmatic, and they give some insight into the most recent Church Scandals. To understand, we must know in short how the Church works – Bishops hire Priests to do the job of administering the Sacraments in their Dioceses. Well, these Bishops, as the Church evolved, found it easier for themselves to hire cheap labor, men desperate for work, and friends and members of their immediate family, despite their dubious qualifications. Competence would have been expensive. And insisting upon Moral Standards would have forced the Bishops to both more closely monitor their parishes as well as attending to their own behaviors (with the real concern of deciding where ‘enough is enough’). Well, the Bishops bulked at all such demanding and tedious responsibilities. And then the Doctrines of Paul were there to exempt them from all such concerns anyway.

It was thought that Redemption and Salvation by the Blood of Christ would cleanse the Sinner of the guilt of his sins, while also being all that would be required to reform the Sinner in whatever extent God’s Will would find necessary. God’s Grace should count for more than each Man’s Will. For a man to will his own Righteousness was counted to be Pride against God and a rejection of the Sacrificial Gifts of Christ. And then, all of this high sounding Theological Doctrine would allow for the Bishops to continue to hire cheap labor in its Priests and could allow them to work without any bothersome supervision of themselves or their charges. The feeling, then as now, is that the Efficacy of the Sacraments is in the Sacraments themselves, and in no ways dependent upon the Righteousness of the Administering Priests.

So it is that today that when the Bishops were told that their Priests were running amuck raping children, that instead of resorting to Administrative Common Sense and firing such employees, all wisdom was rejected as some ancient traditional inertia lead them back to rationalizations and excuses going back more than 16 Centuries. The Bishops would insist upon their right, even their Obligation by Doctrine, to hire the worst moral delinquents to compose their Priesthood. And it is no wonder that it got the Modern Church into a great deal of trouble… as these Anti-Righteous Doctrines always have. Many of the rebellions the Church has experienced, both the earlier rebellions that had been suppressed, as well as the subsequent Rebellions that finally succeeded, were in great part motivated by the popular resentment toward a corrupt and incompetent Priesthood.

The Church could have been thoroughly corrected had it listened to Pelagius in the 5th Century, but, again, the basic fault is that while the writings of Paul are canonized, all of these Evils are rather unavoidable. While Paul’s writings are considered the Word of God, Evil can ever find a ready Advocate.