"Holy." The Church is "Holy". This is the second of the four marks of the true Church; the one, holy, catholic, & apostolic Church. Our Church. The Church founded by Jesus Christ on the Rock that is Peter.
Our Church is Holy for one reason: because it (She) is the Bride of Christ, and Jesus Christ is Holy. Period. It cannot be any other way. Jesus Christ, true God and true Man, cannot have an impure spouse. "Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish" (Ephesians 5:25-27).
 
Building on this passage of scripture, our Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) goes on to stress that because Christ "joined her (the Church) to himself as his body and endowed her with the gift of the Holy Spirit for the glory of God" that in this Church, our Church, and only our Church, exists "the fullness of the means of salvation" (CCC 823-824).
 
So, here's the bottom line: Only the Church, in this world, is perfectly holy. It is, as the Catechism says (CCC 823), in her, and only in her, that "by the grace of God we acquire holiness" and thus can attain to "the fullness of salvation" which is Eternal Life with Hirn. Perhaps we need a new bumper sticker: Know Church, Know Jesus! No Church, No Jesus!
 
That doesn't mean that there is not salvation outside the Catholic Church (that’s an issue for a later article.) But it DOES MEAN w hat has already been stated, that "the FULLNESS of the means of salvation can only be found with the bride of Christ. And Christ can only have one bride!”
 
Okay, now let's deal with all these church scandals. That's anything but holy, right? Right! But what's new? There have been worse scandals than the ones our society is currently salivating over. And there will be worse ones to come. Why? Because the evil is alive and well, that's why.
 
Jesus, Himself, told us that there would be good and bad members of the Church: "Did I not choose you twelve? Yet is not one of you a devil?" (John 6:70) He also said that not all the members would go to heaven: "Then I will declare to them solemnly, `I never knew you. Depart from me, you evildoers."' (Matthew 7: 21-23)
 
So how then can the Church be holy when the people who make up the Church obviously aren't? Like many things in life, we should look to the "winners" who "exercised discipline in every way" so as to win "an imperishable crown" as Saint Paul describes in his first letter to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 9:25).
 
The people. we call saints give us an image of the perfected Church that is holy from the beginning and for all time. Were the saints themselves holy from birth'? No, in fact Saint Augustine's Confessions gives a great example that saints don't always start out that way and that "in Jesus you are being built together into a dwelling place of God in the spirit" (Ephesians 2:22).
There is a person who gives us an image of the perfected Church (CCC 967). That person is no one other than Jesus' mother Mary who responded with the gift of love to the gift of the Bridegroom" (CCC 773). There will be many articles in the future discussing the unique role Mary has in the Church, but for now it must suffice to say of the one the angels know as "Full of Grace” (Luke 1:28): "Honor your father and your mother" (Exodus 20:12).