Against The Grain

It can happen that an individual posseses that objective holiness of mission and authority and yet has no subjective holiness. This is a grave misfortune, dangerously obscuring the Church's mission. But the Church as a whole can never fail to possess both gifts at the same time. This equally applies to the Church in its visible aspect. Consequently it will not do to divide the Catholic Church into two churches, an emperical Church with her authority, and her ascertainable membership, and an invisible Church of the saints, whose number is known only to God.

Augustine saw very clearly that the visible bearer of the power of the keys cannot receive a sinner back into the Communio Sanctorum; without he forgiveness (together with God) of the Church and the saints, which the Song of Songs calls the "one dove." But he does not draw the same conclusion as that Augustinian friar, Luther, namely, that only the Church of the saints with its "priesthood of all believers" has the true power of the keys. In Augustine the tension persists: Christ's Church has objective and subjective holiness, but they coincide, perfectly only in Christ, the Church's head.

- Hans Urs von Balthasar, In the Fullness of Faith: On the Centrality of the Distinctively Catholic.