What Is a Catholic?
"I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all lowliness and meekness, with patience, forbearing one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all and in all." (Eph. 4:1-6)
In an earlier article I asked, "What is a Protestant?" Now we need the second definition: what is a Catholic?
A Catholic is a baptized member of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church that Jesus Christ founded on the Twelve Apostles and entrusted to the pastoral care of St. Peter and the Apostles' successors, the bishops. A Catholic is united to his local bishop, and that bishop is united to the college of bishops, which is headed by the Bishop of Rome, also called the Pope, the Holy Father, or the Roman Pontiff. Every Catholic bishop can trace his ordination back to the Apostles. The college of bishops is the Magisterium, the official teaching authority of the Catholic Church. The Catechism describes the faithful this way:
"The Christian faithful are those who, inasmuch as they have been incorporated in Christ through Baptism, have been constituted as the people of God; for this reason, since they have become sharers in Christ's priestly, prophetic, and royal office in their own manner, they are called to exercise the mission which God has entrusted to the Church to fulfill in the world, in accord with the condition proper to each one." (CCC 871)
Within the unity of the Catholic Church there is great diversity, "which comes from both the variety of God's gifts and the diversity of those who receive them" (CCC 814). There are many theological and philosophical schools. There are many vocations and states of life: ordained clergy, consecrated religious, and lay men and women, many of them married and some single, virgins, or widows whose lives are uniquely dedicated to the Lord. There is also the diversity of East and West. There are twenty-three Eastern Catholic Churches and one Western Church, known as the Latin or Roman Church, which is the largest. The Eastern Catholic Churches belong to five historic liturgical traditions, and each expresses its own ancient culture, history, and devotion within the Catholic Church.
This diversity never comes at the expense of authentic Christian unity in Spirit and truth. Catholic unity is not a lowest common denominator but a real oneness in Christ, and it has three aspects: a common profession of faith, the apostolic authority of our bishops, and common worship and sacraments. These visible bonds of fellowship allow us to say, "This is what Catholics believe. This is what Catholics do. This is who Catholics are." As St. Peter writes, "Finally, all of you, have unity of spirit, sympathy, love of the brethren, a tender heart and a humble mind" (1 Pet. 3:8).
Is the Church Hidden?
Catholics and Protestants agree that Christ founded his Church on the Apostles. A key difference lies in the Protestant belief that their visible organizations are not the one true Church of Christ but part of a hidden, invisible body of true believers known only to God. Because their visible churches are not fully identified with that hidden Church, Protestant Christians find it easy to switch churches. But if any church is simply more or less helpful for my personal faith, or if after a dispute someone starts a new church down the road, how do we maintain orthodoxy or unity? Church-hopping can end in disillusionment for those who come to see these contradictory claims as a reason to stop believing. The problem is worse in the mission field, where divisions undo the work of conversion and evangelization. St. Paul repeatedly condemns dissension, party spirit, and division among the faithful:
"I appeal to you, brethren, to take note of those who create dissensions and difficulties, in opposition to the doctrine which you have been taught; avoid them" (Rom. 16:17).
"If any one teaches otherwise and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching which accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit, he knows nothing; he has a morbid craving for controversy and for disputes about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, base suspicions, and wrangling among men who are depraved in mind and bereft of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain" (1 Tim. 6:3-5).
This presses the issue. Which church is the right one, or at least less wrong than the others? And is being "less wrong" what Christ intended for his Church?
This is a real problem, because Christianity is a religion of salvation. We proclaim the Gospel: Jesus Christ, the Son of God, saved us from our sins by dying on a cross and rising from the dead. Every Christian should believe that sentence, but as soon as we go deeper than its surface, divisions arise between committed Christians who are trying to interpret the Bible faithfully. Disagreement on nonessential teachings may be a legitimate expression of diversity, but there is widespread disagreement precisely on questions of salvation. Here are a few:
Did Christ die for all, or only for the elect?
Is baptism a sacrament that regenerates or an ordinance that shows one's faith? Is it optional or required?
Should pastors be independent, or under the authority of a bishop?
Within Calvinism, are Presbyterians right to baptize infants, or are Reformed Baptists right to reject infant baptism as unbiblical?
Does Christ's death mean every human person will be saved, or only faithful Christians? Can those who never heard of Christ go to heaven?
Did God create most people to be damned and a minority, the elect, to be irresistibly saved, or does God leave us free to choose him?
Can a Christian have Christ as Savior without having him as Lord over his whole life?
If I am saved by faith alone, what is the role of good works? Must a Christian live a godly life? How many good works show that my faith was living?
Can I lose my salvation if I fall into habitual sin or reject certain teachings?
As you read these questions, I have no doubt you have your own answers. The problem is not that there are no answers but that there are many, some of them contradicting others, and every side claims its interpretation is the Gospel truth. Because of this division, the early Reformers, however reluctantly, were driven to a new doctrine of the true Church as an invisible body of believers, because they had broken away from the visible, earthly society that Catholicism offers.
Why a Visible Society?
Frank Sheed, the Catholic apologist who spent much of his adult life speaking and debating in London's Hyde Park, made the case with Maisie Ward in their Catholic Evidence Training Outlines that Christianity requires the true Church to be a visible society and not only a hidden one. The argument below follows theirs.
Broadly speaking, a society is a visible organization with central authority and a division of roles among its officers. It is organized to accomplish its mission and to carry that mission forward in time. Shakespeare lovers are not a visible body, but the Shakespeare Society is. Common belief is necessary for a society, but it is not sufficient, because a crowd cannot pursue a common mission for very long. The Catholic Church was founded directly by Jesus Christ, and she is the one true Church, both visible and invisible, earthly and heavenly, human and divine. Her visible institution does not exclude the spiritual communion of Christians but embodies and safeguards it, and it carries on the saving mission of her Head, spreading his Kingdom to the ends of the earth until the end of time.
The Apostles were not itinerant philosophers content to scatter ideas around the Roman Empire. They planted churches and established a visible society to spread and guard the faith. Christ invested in twelve men as Apostles and seventy as disciples, and he sent them to preach and teach in his name and with his authority. Within one generation the Kingdom spread to Africa, Asia, and Europe, and these apostolic men required obedience in doctrine and discipline from every believer. The Church of the New Testament was not an invisible body of believers but a visible body gathered under true teachers. The Protestant emphasis falls on the wrong side of the equation, so to speak, because if you find the true teachers, you will find the true Church, and everything else follows. The Church's mission is to proclaim the Gospel so that souls are saved. Does it not make sense that Jesus would preserve the true Gospel by guarding his authorized teachers through the Holy Spirit after his Ascension? That is exactly what we find. Our Lord promises these men his authority:
"He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me, and he who rejects me rejects him who sent me" (Luke 10:16).
"All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age" (Matt. 28:18-20).
"But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you" (John 14:26).
"When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come" (John 16:13).
The visible nature of the Church lets seekers find salvation in it. We are no longer "strangers and sojourners" (Eph. 2:19), because we can know our relationship to this visible society. As a Catholic, I feel myself part of a worldwide, historical, victorious army of the Lord, and I know my standing in relation to the visible bonds of the Church. We can call ourselves practicing or non-practicing because we know what the Church asks of us. I can call myself a faithful Catholic or a lukewarm one because I can know what the Church teaches as essential to the faith. The conditions for visible unity cannot exist as long as churches condemn as heresy the doctrines that other churches hold essential. With no authority to resolve those disputes, division continues. One man's heresy becomes another man's orthodoxy, and the result is "a different gospel" (Gal. 1:6). St. Paul's plea still stands: "I appeal to you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and that there be no dissensions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment" (1 Cor. 1:10).
The Mystical Body of Christ
The Church's visible dimension is not the whole of her, as it is for the Shakespeare Society. Christ did not simply found a visible society with officers ruling in his name. Jesus lives within the Church. She is his Body, and so she is filled with his very life. He is the Word made flesh who dwelt among us. God worked with human hands and feet, spoke a human language, gave supernatural life with his breath, and loved us to the end with a human heart. The humanity that Jesus Christ united to his divine Person, which tradition calls the hypostatic union, makes his divine life visible and tangible. God condescends to dwell with humanity, and as the perfect union of humanity and divinity, Christ is the one mediator between God and man. The risen Christ also fills every part of the Church, his Body, with himself. This is the incarnational principle at the heart of the Catholic doctrine of the Church.
The Incarnation shows that Christ's whole life was saving, not only his death and resurrection, because his whole life was an offering of love to the Father on our behalf, for us men and for our salvation. Good Friday and Easter Sunday were the culmination of a messianic life that began when the Spirit overshadowed the Virgin Mary. Every word and deed glorified God. Even his name proclaims his mission, for "Jesus" means "the Lord saves." The Incarnation also reminds us that being saved from hell is only half of redemption, because being saved from leads to being saved for. We are delivered from sin, death, and hell so that we can be saved for eternal communion with God. Atonement, justification, newness of life, the resurrection of the dead, and adoption in the Spirit all exist for the sake of humanity's union with God in Christ forever. That is salvation, and that is heaven.
To be saved, then, we must belong to Christ and become one with him, so that what Christ is by nature we become by grace. Yet Protestants tend to reduce intimacy with our Lord to a "personal relationship," conceived as a private, individual, interior relationship between me and Jesus. Christ gave us the Church, and the Church gives Christ to the world. The title "Bride of Christ" belongs to the Church herself, not only to individual souls. To miss this is to miss the Gospel reality that Christ is in his Church. To belong to Christ means to be incorporated into the Church. The Church must therefore share in her Lord's saving work, because she communicates his grace and truth to humanity. The incarnational principle leads to the Church. As St. Paul writes, "For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end" (Eph. 2:14-16).
"Catholic" comes from the Greek for "universal," literally "according to the whole," in the sense of totality, wholeness, and fullness. It refers to the fullness of her Lord's presence within her. Jesus lives in and through his Church and joins himself to us as the head is united to the members of the body. The Church therefore lives with his life and not her own. His Holy Spirit is the soul of the Mystical Body, and just as every cell in a body lives with the life of the person whose body it is, every member of the Church lives as a cell and member of Christ's Mystical Body. The Church is not merely a helpful society or organization. She is an organism, at once the Virgin Bride of Christ and the fruitful Mother of Christians. God "has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fulness of him who fills all in all" (Eph. 1:22-23).
We call the Catholic Church the universal sacrament of salvation because she communicates Christ's life to humanity. A sacrament is an outward, visible sign that communicates divine grace. The Church has a visible, earthly dimension and an invisible, hidden, divine dimension, and the visible embodies and safeguards the invisible. St. Paul uses the Greek word mysterion, "mystery," again and again to describe the reality of Christ and the Church: the union of Jews and Gentiles, the union of God and humanity, and the proclamation of the Gospel. In Latin the word was translated as either mysterium or sacramentum. Over time, sacramentum came to name the visible sign, like the water of baptism, and mysterium the hidden reality of grace. God chose to use Christ's body of flesh, offered on the cross by Christ as both victim and high priest, as the cause of our salvation, and the humanity of Christ is the gateway to heaven. The Catechism puts it this way:
"The saving work of his holy and sanctifying humanity is the sacrament of salvation, which is revealed and active in the Church's sacraments (which the Eastern Churches also call 'the holy mysteries'). The seven sacraments are the signs and instruments by which the Holy Spirit spreads the grace of Christ the head throughout the Church which is his Body. The Church, then, both contains and communicates the invisible grace she signifies. It is in this analogical sense, that the Church is called a 'sacrament.'" (CCC 774)