The topic of this Editorial is ecclesial integrity and its role in forming the identity, in the sense of the public persona, of the church.1 The critical relevance of the virtue of integrity to the church at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century can hardly be exaggerated. The erosion of integrity through sexual and spiritual abuse and the subsequent dereliction of duty with regard to safeguarding by some in senior positions of responsibility, has critically impacted the identity and the authority of the major churches in Western society. It has severely tarnished the public image of the church – namely how the church is perceived by those both within and without. It has generated widespread scepticism about the value of the church within civil society and about the relevance of its message and teaching to human well-being. It has rendered the church generally, and the parish clergy and the episcopate particularly, objects of suspicion and distrust to an unprecedented extent. It has undermined the moral authority that the church expects to exercise on behalf of the gospel of Christ.
If many people of goodwill have lost respect for the church and its public representatives and so have ceased to trust it as an institution, what is the point of our being the church? All the tedious rhetoric by bishops and synods about ‘mission’ seems like empty words, and all the misplaced redesigning of ecclesiastical structures, at great expense (as we have seen in the Church of England), nothing but a futile sideshow. Distance and anonymity are equally lethal for pastoral effectiveness because trust cannot be generated remotely and impersonally. What is essential for Christian mission is to know and be known; to abide in place; to operate in accord with relationships that have been built up over time and remain grounded in communal experience. In parish, locality or neighbourhood, ministry and mission are effective when they are person to person. Heart still speaks to heart, as J. H. Newman knew.
Good-Enough Clergy, Good Enough Church
We do not want the clergy to be put on a pedestal, idealised as paragons of virtue, as saints who bless the very earth they tread on. There is probably less chance of that kind of delusion in our contemporary sceptical and cynical culture than in the past, though the risk of calamitous misperception is always lurking in the shadows; and clergy who have encouraged it tend eventually to hit the headlines when they fall or are exposed. What we truly need is clergy who know that they are flawed and fallible and sometimes make mistakes in word or deed, but are not ashamed to admit it and to apologise when that is appropriate and to make amends as far as possible. Clergy have to keep many plates spinning and the occasional one tends to drop. To have integrity and maintain it does not mean that a person is morally perfect or will be entirely consistent. As the Epistle of James puts it, ‘All of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check [as] with a bridle …’ (Jas 3.2).We ask for and expect ‘good-enough’ clergy and bishops and the church will be only as good as they (we) are.
The pervasive phenomena of deference to authority and hierarchy and emotional dependence on those who help and support us are not sufficiently discouraged by the clergy, who often seem blissfully unaware of these toxic psycho-dynamics that are going on around them. But they are not compatible with justice as fairness and love as agape towards all equally. Combined as they often are, deference and dependence can blind us to how far wrong the church can go in sin and crime. But the church that does much harm is not other than Christ’s church. It is not merely the earthly shadow of the real heavenly church, nor is it simply the visible tip of an invisible iceberg (as in some high and low ecclesiologies respectively). Neither is it the ecclesial mirror-image of the social Trinity (as in some communio ecclesiology). The Church is not a politically uncontaminated mystical body, but is political through and through, inescapably involved with issues of power and oppression, justice and injustice. The fallible, sinful church that we see is the church. The only church that exists is a sinful church. But such ecclesiological realism does not evacuate the church’s potential to be an instrument of the mission of God, a channel of God’s redeeming love. The two aspects exist in juxtaposition, tension and mortal conflict. As Radner puts it (p. 2), the fact that ‘disordered failure and redemptive capacity’ coincide in the church’s life is ‘one of the most anguished centres’ of Christian experience.
A Multi-Faceted Virtue Forged Over Time
The concept of integrity is notoriously tricky to pin down, to define, and it would not be appropriate to attempt that here. We know what we mean by it. In brief, I see integrity as a multi-faceted virtue – a kind of collective noun for a whole constellation of constituent virtues. The idea of integrity in common discourse embraces such excellencies of character as: wholeness and completeness; honesty, consistency and transparency; moral probity and trustworthiness; humility before God and others; coherent agency (activity that holds together purposively); shouldering responsibility and accepting accountability; and openness to advice and criticism. These virtuous dispositions are not only moral, but also cognitive and aesthetic, thus encompassing the ultimate goods of beauty, truth and goodness. They should be allowed to motivate, guide and energise our attitudes and actions individually and collectively, to inspire and shape the way that we live our lives and do our work. These virtuous dispositions also help to constitute and colour our individual identity, and by the same token, when corporately embodied, the identity of an institution such as the church. The presence or absence of these virtues marks an individual or an institution for good or ill. At present, it seems that people both inside and outside (invidious terms, I know) the church struggle to see them displayed in its public profile.
Integrity is the moral, intellectual and aesthetic complexion of the identity of a person or an institution. Moral identity has a narrative structure as it is nurtured and developed over time. You cannot jump straight into a state of integrity; it needs to be forged through many circumstances, challenges, setbacks and achievements. That is why a church that has ceased to care about its history and traditions soon becomes a hollow shell. Modern personalist philosophers, notably Alasdair McIntyre, Charles Taylor, Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas, have construed the making of identity, and with it integrity, in terms of the progressive construction of a moral life-narrative. This approach is well-taken and highly serviceable, provided we do not slip into the delusion that we alone make the narrative and are the sole subject of it, so supposedly manufacturing our own identity and integrity. The disastrous delusion of self-creation is endemic in our culture. Rather than manufacturing our narrative identity solo, we are called to own it as given, to take responsibility for it, while acknowledging that many significant others and the traditions of thought and practice that they represent or embody also have the making and sustaining of our identity and its moral complexion as integrity.
Personal and Institutional Responsibility
It is the overt, public, identity of an institution in relation to its social context, the big wide world, which makes possible that institution’s accountability in terms of its manifest integrity or lack thereof. Within the framework of the Judaeo-Christian revelation, every single person and every community, institution or organisation is morally obliged to another. The shifty, shameless denial of accountability is one of the first sins to be condemned in the Bible: Cain has murdered his brother Abel, but when God asks Cain where his brother is (as though God would not know!), he shrugs off the question, answering God: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ (Gen. 4.9). It is though Cain does not need his brother; he is self-sufficient, autonomous; he feels no obligation to his close kin. But in truth, no person exists without another person; we have our being in inter-personhood and this brings ties of obligation. The biblical narrative of the beginnings of structured community life lays down the principle of accountability, that is to say our inescapable subjection to ‘external’ moral judgement.
There is a built-in connection to the concept of identity here, for without identity there can be no accountability. A person who is not known, not publicly identifiable, cannot effectively be held responsible – though they remain, like all of us, accountable to their Creator, for ‘before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account’ (Hebs 4.13). By the same token, the more invisible the church becomes within society, the less mutual interaction, engagement, rapport, dialogue – and with it accountability – there is in play and then the church is patently failing in its mission.
Integrity includes commitment to a morally worthy cause or good (which may include professional expertise or skills) and steadfastness in pursuing it. A person of integrity shoulders responsibility for their actions as they put their moral purposes into practice. For Christians the first call of God in the life of discipleship is to accept responsibility – and with it accountability – to God, to oneself, to the other, to the church and to the wider public. Integrity is not so fragile that it crumbles at the first challenge. It is robust and durable because it involves everything being held together (‘integrated’); in a word, it coheres. In the same way, an institution or organisation that has corporate integrity shows consistency of moral purpose; it accepts that its actions are subject to ethical criteria. When challenged on any point of its practice, it does not throw up a smoke-screen of defensive, evasive and self justifying but patently hollow rhetoric (which is what we have come to expect in public life, whether from most politicians or from some church leaders). It does not put its reputation – that is to say its self-interest – first. Its first duty is to those to whom it is accountable – those it serves and those who serve them. No collective body is perfect, just as no individual is a paragon. So when an institution makes a misstep, it will seek to correct it, not bluster through it shamelessly, until inescapably exposed. The logic (which is not always strictly sequential) of sin and forgiveness of sin is: repentance (metanoia), confession, amendment of life, restitution, absolution. In the light of the logic of forgiveness, some of the public sins and errors of the church, especially with regard to abuse, remain unabsolved.
Power, Authority and Leadership
The challenge of ecclesial integrity impinges closely on a cluster of interconnected topics that are never far from the surface in the church: the exercise of power, authority and leadership. ‘Integrity lies at the very heart of what leadership is’ (Badarocco and Elsworth, p. 98). Power, authority and leadership are not to be sucked greedily into oneself and treated as some kind of personal privilege and caché, but instead to be intentionally and consistently given away, transplanted into others in order to flourish on new soil. In charity (caritas, agape) the church’s ministry is marked by self-giving and self-emptying. This kenosis is not the giving away of its identity with its values and purposes, but the refusal of power and privilege. Within this therapeutic and kenotic framework these three potent concepts take on a different hue. Power is given to some solely for the purpose of empowering others to take responsibility in their own spheres. Authority is given to some solely for the nurture and flourishing of the gifts of others as we seek to ‘author’ it in them. Leadership is given to some solely to enable others to give a lead in their own walk of life. Power, authority and leadership are meant to be shared and ultimately to be given away to the extent that we make ourselves superfluous. Our dearest wish is that the project should crest the waves under full sail without us because the project does not belong to us. How many supposed leaders, authority figures and those with power in the church work and pray for that end and goal, I wonder.
The Social and Ethical Context of Integrity
Individual and collective forms of integrity interact and are interdependent; they wax or wane together. It would not make sense to think of the integrity of any individual in abstraction from their familial, social, church and work relationships. Similarly, it would not work to consider collective, corporate or community integrity (as in the case of the church) without reference to the individual members who make up and form that body, even though the whole is greater than its parts. So it helps to consider personal and collective integrity together, as far as possible.
An individual of integrity listens to their conscience as to the voice of God and engages in heart-searching about their life. They will lie awake at night, like the Psalmist, seeking God’s face for forgiveness, amendment of life and the means of reparation where possible. They seek to amend their faults and to grow in virtuous intention and virtuous action. They learn from their mistakes of word or deed. With the aid of the liturgy, they habitually rehearse metanoia. Personal integrity is built on reflexivity, learning from experience (especially one’s mistakes and faults) and personal growth and development. These are the hall-marks of the responsible self. Only the aware, humble, reflective and morally-educated self can have integrity.
The same pattern of behaviour is typical of a collective body that aims to practise integrity. To maintain integrity, an institution or organisation must adopt a probative, reflexive attitude to itself, testing and learning and so developing in salutary ways. Critical, reparative feedback must be systemically built-in. The defensive, evasive and hypocritical tactics, that we now perforce associate with many politicians and some church leaders, are the enemy of the corporate integrity that can only be attained by open dialogue, free feedback and public self-examination. But, given those practices, the same habitus of integrity can be created over time in both individual and collective life. This point brings ethics to the forefront of personal and institutional integrity. Without ethical leadership there is no trust which is the essential foundation of any enterprise (so Ciulla). As some (e.g. Scherkoske) have argued, ethics may not be the whole of integrity, but one cannot have integrity without ethics. Geach shows the centrality of the cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, temperance and courage) and the theological virtues (faith, hope and charity) to the flourishing of any human enterprise (pp. 16ff). Integrity has a moral backbone; it is constituted by the virtues. Identity that has integrity presupposes a searching ethical reflexivity and humility. Do we find that spirit steadily and pervasively at work in our lives and in our churches?
In formulating these reflections I have been particularly, but not exclusively, indebted to Simon Robinson, Exploring Integrity in the Christian Church (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature/Palgrave Macmillan, 2024 [reviewed by me in this issue]); John Fitzmaurice, Virtue Ecclesiology: An Exploration in The Good Church (London and New York: Routledge, 2016); Marvin T. Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Greg Scherkoske, Integrity and the Virtues of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Ephraim Radner, A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church (Waco: TX: Baylor University Press, 2012); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edition (London: Duckworth, 1985); Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univerity Press, 1989); Robert Spaemann, Happiness and Benevolence, trans. Jeremiah Alberg, S.J. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000); P. T. Geach, The Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Joseph Badarocco, Jr and Richard R. Elsworth, Leadership and the Quest for Integrity (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1989); Joanne B. Ciulla (ed.), Ethics, the Heart of Leadership, 2nd edition (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004).
