Tag Archives: history

The Historical Church

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Tonight was the second week of RCIA. There are about thirty inquirers, I would say — I first started trying to jot down their names, then at least count them, and finally stopped at “a lot.” We went around the room and introduced ourselves. The lesson tonight was on “Religion vs. Spirituality,” the difference between the two, the world’s definition and view of religion, and the Catholic answer to it. I spoke up several times to contribute to the discussion or to answer questions; but often I feel that my comments may appear to others that I’m trying to show off my knowledge, and I end up kicking myself.

We were asked to explain what was drawing us to the Catholic Church. I named about three things (though I’m afraid I rambled a bit): the Church’s continuity and connection to history and tradition; the unity and authority of the Church; and the order of Catholic doctrine and liturgy, and the peace that it brings. Several other people mentioned being drawn by the Church’s history and the conviction that it is the true and original Church. And that brings me back to where I was a few nights ago, before my train of thought was wrecked: the premises on which I’m undertaking this journey.

After interrogation and reflection, I’m going to revise the first one:

Premise #1: Everyone who calls on the name of Christ, and subscribes to historical, ecumenical creeds of the Church, is a Christian. God, in His mercy and grace, works through many different churches. But not all churches are the same.

I maintain that spiritually, we are all part of Body of Christ — even if one arm, and other various appendages, have gone and hacked themselves off. The Roman Catholic Church, I’ve come to believe, embodies the true Church that Christ founded through His Apostles, in which His Real Presence subsists and ministers.

Second — and I’ve been trying to write this for days:

Premise #2: The Roman Catholic Church represents an unbroken continuity of history and tradition from Jesus Christ and His Apostles to the present.

The Church’s history, more than anything else, is what has drawn me to the Church; what has lit my way to its threshold. I’ve been fascinated and compelled by it since the very first time I encountered it as a teenager. In college, as a history major, the history of the Church and its saints captured my heart more than almost anything else.

Christianity, the Bible tells us, was founded by Jesus Christ and His Apostles in Jerusalem, in Judaea, ca. A.D. 33. According to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus entrusted His Church to the Apostle Peter: “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:18). St. Peter, both Catholic and Protestant scholars widely agree, journeyed to Rome and was the first bishop of the Christian church there. Over a period of several centuries, the primacy of the bishops of Rome — their authority over all other bishops — came to be accepted by the rest of Christendom. Today, the bishop of Rome is better known by another title: pope (from Latin papa, a child’s word for “father,” as per English “papa”).

For 1500 years, the Roman Catholic Church was the Church in the West (the Eastern Orthodox Church formally split from Rome in the Great Schism of 1054). Across those years shine innumerable saints and heroes of the faith who have captured my love and admiration and inspired my faith. In the Church have been handed down the traditions and beliefs of the Early Church, and of countless believers over the centuries. When Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other leaders of the Protestant Reformation brought about their split from the Catholic Church, they discarded wholesale many, if not most, of these traditions and beliefs. The Reformers went far beyond their original grievances, finally cutting away everything but the Bible itself, leaving sola scriptura (Scripture alone). In so many ways, I feel they threw out the baby with the bathwater — which, it can’t be denied, was befouled and muddied. The Church needed to be reformed. What it didn’t need was to be shattered.

Since the Reformation, with no single, recognized authority, Protestant churches have continued to fragment into literally thousands of separate sects and denominations. Anyone with a complaint or grievance simply breaks away and forms a new church or denomination. Every division and schism marks a further degradation of the Historical Church — a further generation departed from the history and traditions of the Apostles. With each generation, more and more tradition is discarded as irrelevant (though some churches have attempted to reclaim parts of it). My church upbringing marked tradition’s total loss: there was no sense of tradition at all; no sense that anyone or anything had preceded us; no instruction in belief, practice, theology, or doctrine that had been handed down; no mention that we as Christians had any history at all, aside from a few references to Azusa Street, barely expounded upon. I pined for it. I longed for it, before I even knew what I was longing for.

In the Roman Catholic Church, I feel I’ve finally found what I’ve been longing for all my life: a connection to the past, to the continuous, unbroken history and tradition of Christ’s Church on Earth; a connection, always felt but never fully, to all the saints of all the ages. The wealth of tradition, of devotion, of belief, that I’ve been missing all these years, was not lost, but was all right here. I am coming home to that glorious city.

Bridging the Gap

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I realized what it is I’ve been trying to do, through my constant, ecumenical assertions that “all who call on Christ’s name are Christians.” I truly believe — I have to believe — that Jesus saves those on both sides of this divide, if they faithfully follow Him and serve Him. I do not believe that He would abandon those who have fallen away from the Church and its sacraments, just as He didn’t abandon the Samaritans (John 4). I have no doubt whatsoever that my grandparents are among the saints, along with many other dearly beloved kin and ancestors. And I don’t want to abandon my heritage, the milieu I’ve been steeped in and that has shaped me. My homeland, my people, are so closely and so inextricably tied to Protestantism — and I don’t want to let go of that. I’ve been trying to bridge the gap between the two, between Catholicism and Protestantism; that by denying any difference between the two, by affirming their sameness, I can somehow remain both.

And I’m not sure I can do it. This recent, hostile conflict has caused me to reconsider some things. I think I am always going to maintain an ecumenical perspective and hope — a belief that in His infinite mercy, Christ saves all who call on His name, even those sheep who have wandered away with misguided shepherds — but I cannot insist that all churches are exactly the same. The faults in my own logic became glaringly clear as I wrote that last entry, and more and more so the more times I read it. My argument wore the thinnest, I think, in my suggestion that Protestant ministers, just by their virtue of having read the Bible, are just as much the successors of the Apostles as the Catholic bishops, whom the Apostles willfully and thoughtfully appointed.

Pope Benedict XVI has commented that Protestant churches are “not true churches” — a widely-quoted statement that deeply bothered me, and in fact turned me off from Catholicism for several years. But I hadn’t actually (and I guess, still haven’t, since this is only a news brief) read the full context of the statement until tonight:

Noting that churches and ecclesial communities not yet fully in communion with the Catholic Church “suffer from defects,” the doctrinal congregation acknowledged that “elements of sanctification and truth” may be present in them.

“It follows that these separated churches and communities … are deprived neither of significance nor importance in the mystery of salvation,” the congregation said. “In fact, the spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as instruments of salvation, whose value from that fullness of grace and of truth which has been entrusted to the Catholic Church.”

…

Yet, Christian communities “born out of the Reformation” do not share that union as they “do not enjoy apostolic succession in the sacrament of orders,” the Vatican congregation said.

“These ecclesial communities which, specifically because of the absence of the sacramental priesthood, have not preserved the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic mystery cannot, according to Catholic doctrine, be called churches in the proper sense,” it said.

I agree with these comments, and find them much more caring than I believed them to have been — though I think the “not proper churches” phrase was a bit careless and probably ill-advised. (The moral of the story: read more than Wikipedia when you’re examining something of such import.)

It’s history, as much as anything, that has brought me to this point. And even if my American ancestors and the people I study were by and large Protestants, in rejecting that faith for myself, I in no way want to reject theirs, or reject them. There are, without a doubt, many strands and elements of Protestant Christianity, in fact some that I’ve grown up with, that I do not hesitate to distance and dissociate myself from. I can’t, and don’t want to, hold on to everything.

It’s the core message of the Gospel, the love of God, that is universal; it’s the divine mercy of God that saves, not anything that any of us do by our own power. Even if I let go of Protestantism, I will maintain that Protestants are Christians and that many are held by God’s saving grace. I will continue to strive to bridge the gap: not by being on both sides of it, but by teaching my Protestant brethren about the Catholic faith, dispelling their misconceptions, and encouraging acceptance and reconciliation in whatever way I can.