Christianity 101: Part 3
The Gift of the Catholic Faith
This article is the third of a three-part series explaining the basics of the Creed. Part one explained the fundamental truths everyone needs to know about man, God and creation. Part two explored sin and virtue. In part three, we’ll look at why God gave man the gift of the Catholic Faith.
Jesus Christ Founded a Church
During His lifetime on earth, Jesus established His Church — a visible organisation to continue His work of saving souls until the end of time. He chose the apostles and disciples as the first members of it. And he made a clear hierarchy. The apostles were the first superiors of the Church — to teach, rule and govern — and He gave them the power their office required. This power, he indicated, was to continue in their successors for all time.
The chief of the apostles was Simon Peter, the head of the Church. Christ called him the foundation-stone of the Church (Matthew 16:18), commissioned him to feed His lambs and His sheep, the members of the Church (John 21:17), and said to him: “I will give thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 16:19). Peter was to supervise all the other apostles: “When once thou hast turned again, strengthen thy brethren” (Luke 22:32).
After more than twenty centuries, the Catholic Church remains the Church of Christ — ruled by the Pope, the successor of St. Peter, and by the bishops, the successors of the other apostles. They all have personal imperfections like everyone else does. But they exercise their authority in the name of Christ: “He who hears you hears me” (Luke 10:16). Their power to teach and rule the faithful comes from Our Lord Himself. By showing them respect and obedience, we show respect and obedience to Christ.
The Catholic Church has survived for so long, while empires have crumbled around it, because it is a divine organisation founded by the Son of God and receives its life from the Holy Ghost. Although the human element in the Church often brings corruption and weakness, the divine wellspring never fails. On Pentecost, the Holy Ghost came down upon the apostles, the first bishops, to strengthen them, enlighten them and dwell in the Church as its soul. And He will do so until the end of time.
This is why we obey the teachings of the Church because it is Christ Himself teaching, sanctifying and ruling us through his representatives. In particular, we owe loyalty and obedience to the Pope, the earthly representative of Jesus Christ.
Identifying the True Church of Christ
The Gospels tell us what marks to look for in the Church that Christ established. The most important marks are unity, holiness, universality and apostolicity:
It must not contradict itself, so it must be one in doctrine, worship and authority.
Because its purpose is making men holy, it must show itself holy. Although it will have members, as even the Apostolic Church contained one member, who are unholy, its members devoted to the faith for which it stands will be holy.
Since Christ founded His Church for all nations, it must be universal.
Since Christ founded His Church for all days, it must go back to the Apostles, teach what they taught, be governed by their lineal and lawful successors and be presided over by the successor of St. Peter in the primacy.
No other church possesses all of these. The tens of thousands of Protestant sects, for example, all contradict each other — all disagreeing about what Christ taught and therefore how to follow Him.
Miracles also prove that the Catholic Church is the true Church of Christ. The miraculous cures of sick people at the shrine of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Lourdes in France, for example, were wrought by God as a special favour to His Mother and to the Church that venerates her. God does not grant miracles to false churches, nor does He preserve them throughout persecutions for twenty centuries. Instead, they perish like all other purely human organisations do.
Besides this indefectibility or permanence, the Catholic Church is also infallible in her official teachings. This is logically necessary. Since Christ is truly God, He cannot teach error because He is Truth; otherwise, His Church would be capable of leading souls to hell. Christ therefore preserves his Church from teaching error. By contrast, all Protestant sects admit they can teach error, and no rational man should risk his soul by listening to them.
Through no fault of their own, however, some people don’t realise that the Catholic Church is the one true Church of Jesus Christ. But if they try to serve God faithfully and love Him with their whole heart, they can be saved anyway because they are joined to the Church by implicit desire. Yet they lack the graces that they would receive as members of the true Church.
So while Catholics can show Christian charity to persons who hold false doctrines, we must hate the doctrines themselves because they are bad for the people holding them and offensive to God. Christ prayed that “there should be one fold and one shepherd,” so all men have a duty to join the Catholic Church.
The Communion of Saints
The Catholic doctrine of the communion of saints teaches that we have billions of friends, all joined to us by the supernatural ties of sanctifying grace and divine charity flowing from Jesus Christ, the Head of the Catholic Church. This includes not only those living on earth with us (the Church militant) and still struggling against the world, the flesh and the devil. It also includes the souls in purgatory, still atoning for their debt of temporal punishment (the Church suffering). And it includes the saints in heaven (the Church triumphant).
This communion of saints helps us, especially in our spiritual needs. People on earth, even though we’ve never them, pray for us daily. The saints in heaven, especially those we pray to, also pray for us. We can be absolutely certain that any saint the Church canonises is in heaven because the Church is infallible in canonisations. And the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, the Queen of Saints, prays for us before the throne of Jesus Christ. Because she loves Him so much, she loves every soul for which He died.
Just as the saints in heaven pray for us, we should pray for them saints in heaven. And we should pray for our friends on earth. Perhaps the souls in purgatory also pray for us, but we can certainly pray for them. By taking the communion of saints seriously, we can never be lonely or sad — no matter what challenges the world presents us with.
Our Ultimate Task
Catholics can never thank God enough for the gift of the Catholic Faith because it helps us fulfil our most important task in life: winning heaven. No other Christian church is fully confident in its ability to do this. No other Christian church can even say with certainty that God exists.
Cardinal Manning famously said that he became a Catholic for certainty in matters of faith and morals. As he wrote in ‘Why I became Catholic,’
“The Vatican Council defined the two primary truths of the natural and supernatural order: the one that the existence of God can be certainly known by the things that are made; the other that the Roman Pontiff in defining the faith and law of God by divine assistance is guarded from all error.
These two truths are the two principles of divine certitude.
The one is the infallibility of the light of reason in the natural order. The other is the infallibility of the Church in its Head by a perpetual divine assistance.
The so-called Reformation or intellectual revolt against the divine authority of the Church has borne its fruit; and its fruit is twofold: uncertainty as to the truths of revelation among those who still believe, and scepticism as to the lights and laws of the natural order.
Men now doubt as to the reports of sense and the judgments of reason founded on these reports. This uncertainty is fatal to faith, for where doubt begins faith ends. But worse than this. Scepticism is a palsy of the reason, it denies to men the means of knowledge. We have returned to the scepticism of the ancients, of whom St. Augustine said that they refuted themselves, for they were certain that we cannot be certain of anything.”
Outside the Catholic Church, there is only a spiritual wasteland.