“A house full of glory appears …”. Catholic Self-Images as Reflected in Modern Institutional Theories

Lecture on October 16, 2026

The Catholic hymn from which the title is taken contains a historically rich treasury of images that were invoked throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to locate the Church within the modern world. Between the image of the Church as a “house full of glory” – a sacred, timeless community of divine origin – and the sober observation that the Catholic Church, too, must be administered and organised, there emerges a tension that continues to shape the way the Church speaks about itself today. Moreover, Catholics in this country live in a democratic state governed by the rule of law, an order founded on freedom and organised in ways fundamentally different from the Church, which is an order founded on truth. How, then, are we to navigate experiences of contrast in which a democratic consciousness of freedom collides with the Catholic consciousness of truth – and vice versa?

The lecture explores this tension. It asks which traditional images of itself – the Church as a “holy city”, “built of eternal stone”; “God’s tent on earth”; the “pilgrim People of God” – have shaped Catholic self-understanding to date, and sets them alongside modern theories that describe institutions as social entities governed by their own rules and procedures and subject to demands for justification. Its thesis is that the Church cannot exempt itself from this sober perspective, yet neither can it be fully encompassed by it. Its religious self-understanding points to a dimension that exceeds what modern theories of institutions can fully account for – but this does not replace the need to examine the Church’s actual institutional structure, its offices and its decision-making processes. The lecture argues for an interpretation that takes both perspectives seriously and concludes by showing what this means for current debates such as the Synodal Way.