By RAYMOND DE SOUZA, KM
Part 35
The Church of Jesus Christ is Universal (“Catholic”). She is the “Teach-all-Nations” Church of Jesus Christ. Faithful Catholics the world over want to convert everybody, yes, everybody, every Tom, Dick, and Harriet must be called to the fullness of truth, which is founded in the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church alone.
The Catholic Church can never be satisfied with retaining her own members, and leaving the rest of mankind alone. No. Christ commanded the apostles to evangelize, not to ecumenize. Faithful to the earnest commandment of her divine Founder, the Catholic Church wants to convert everybody, and is already present in virtually every continent, race, language, and culture.
This is a very important aspect of the Catholic Church: She is not confined to any particular race or nationality, i.e., the Anglican Church for the English, the Dutch Reformed Church for the Dutch, the Russian Orthodox Church for the Russians, etc., etc. No, she does not belong to any particular nation, but to the whole world. She counts her members in every station of life, the poor, and the illiterate as well as men and women eminent in every walk of life. In so doing, she imitates Jesus in Bethlehem, who called kings and shepherds, the high and the lowly in society, and He Himself was a Prince of the royal house of David and a humble carpenter.
He placed His Church under the government of the apostles with St. Peter as the chief pastor and ruler. The Acts of the Apostles abounds with citations of Peter being in charge of the whole Church, and the writings of the early Christians in the first one thousand years repeat it constantly.
He promised to be with the apostles “all days, even to the consummation of the world” (cf. Matt. 28:20), thus implying that St. Peter and his brother apostles would continue to rule the Church until the end of time. But anti-Catholic writers claim the idea that the Church of Christ had lost the faith after Constantine gave it freedom (AD 313). It is not only a historical absurdity but it is also an offense to Jesus Christ, as it implies that He did not fulfill His promise to stay with His Church till the consummation of the world.
Jesus’ promise to stay with the apostles could not have meant only in their lifetimes. The apostles could not live for centuries, on and on, but they died, most of them a martyr’s death. Now, since the apostles are dead, how could they still rule the Church counting on Jesus’ assistance? There is only one answer, and a simple one at that: They rule the Church, and will ever continue to rule her, through their lawful successors.
Jesus never intended to give people the Bible and let them rule themselves, as man-made churches, sects, cults, and denominations do today, in the cacophony of religions that goes by the name of “Christianity.”
Now it is an undeniable historical fact that only the Catholic Church has ever claimed that she is ruled by the Successor of St. Peter. She claims that the Popes have succeeded to the office of St. Peter: that the Popes have been the supporting rock of the Church throughout history; that the Popes hold the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, which Jesus gave to St. Peter, the first Pope; that the Popes are the Shepherds of the whole flock of Christ, and that their brother bishops are subordinate to them as the other apostles were to St. Peter.
The Catholic Church’s unique claim to possess the precise form of apostolicity given by Christ to His Church is and must be true, because, if it were false, the Church which Jesus built on the rock of Peter would no longer exist in the world, and — a gross absurdity — Christ would have failed to keep His promise that she would last forever.
This is beautifully summed up in the celebrated phrase of St. Ambrose (d. 397), “Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia; ubi Ecclesia, ibi Christus.” Where Peter is, there the Church is; where the Church is, there Christ is.
Historically speaking, several episcopal sees were founded by the apostles. Antioch and Rome by St. Peter, Alexandria by St. Mark, Jerusalem by St. James, and so on. But it is a historical fact that only Rome remains among the sees founded by apostles. No one disputes that, at the present day, no see in the world but the See of Rome is linked in unbroken succession to an apostle.
Constantinople, called by courtesy “apostolic,” was obviously not founded by an apostle, since the city itself was founded by Constantine in the fourth century. Antioch, St. Peter’s first bishopric, fell away from the Church in the Monophysite heresy of the fifth century. (That is the heresy of Eutyches, condemned at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Eutyches denied the two distinct natures in Christ, saying that His humanity was absorbed in His divinity.) Today Antioch is dominated by Islam.
A similar fate befell Alexandria, founded by St. Mark under the direction of St. Peter. Jerusalem, the See of St. James, had only a brief existence, perishing utterly at the destruction of the city by Titus in AD 70. There are no others.
But suppose that some non-Catholic church could claim to trace its succession step by step back to one of the apostles other than St. Peter: would such a church be apostolic? No, it would not be. And why not? Because it would have lost its apostolicity and catholicity at the precise moment when it severed the vital link of allegiance to the See of Peter, Christ’s Vicar on Earth.
So we can safely establish the basic conclusion: Christ, who is God, founded a Church. One, not many. He promised it would last to the end of time. He is faithful to His promises, as He can neither deceive nor be deceived. Therefore, His Church exists in the world at the present day and will continue to exist until the end of time. Christ imprinted certain marks on His Church so that people could always identify her (One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic). No church, therefore, can be His Church, unless it possesses all those marks. The Catholic Church alone possesses them. Therefore, the Catholic Church is the one and only true Church of Christ. Period.
In the next installment, we shall analyze this controverted teaching: “Outside the Church, there is no salvation.”
+ + +
(Raymond de Souza is an EWTN program host; regional coordinator for Portuguese-speaking countries for Human Life International [HLI]; president of the Sacred Heart Institute, and a member of the Sovereign, Military, and Hospitaller Order of the Knights of Malta. His website is: www.RaymonddeSouza.com.)
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress