One of the reasons Simone Weil gives for her refusal of baptism is her fear of the social structure of the Catholic Church. She does not fear it because of a naive desire to purify the Church. She fears it because her
natural disposition is to be very easily influenced, too much influenced, and above all by anything collective. I know that if at this moment I had before me a group of twenty young Germans singing Nazi songs in chorus, a part of my soul would instantly become a Nazi. That is a very great weakness, but that is how I am.
She fears falling into “Church patriotism.” After all, there were saints who approved of the Crusades and the Inquisitions. “If I think that on this point I see more clearly than they did, I who am too far below them, I must admit that in this matter they were blinded by something very powerful. This something was the Church seen as a social structure.”
She cites Satan’s offer of the kingdoms of the world to Jesus as proof that “the social is irremediably the domain of the devil.” And, therefore, insofar as the Church is a social structure
it belongs to the Prince of this World. It is because it is an organ for the preservation and transmission of truth that there is an extreme danger for those who, like me, are excessively open to social influences. For in this way what is purest and what is most defiling look very much the same, and confused under the same words, make an almost undecomposable mixture.
This has some similarity with William Stringfellow’s theology of the powers.
