An  Invitation TAKEN FROM "The Catholic Church Invites You" by James V. Linden, S.J. Imprimatur - Bernard J. Topel, D.D., Bishop of Spokane December 22, 1958 PART ONE Unity, a Mark of the True Church 1. CHRIST ESTABLISHED BUT ONE CHURCH I think all men will agree with me that if there is one true Church established by Jesus Christ, then all men are obliged to belong to that Church in order to save their souls. To determine just what the Church is, it may be well to determine what was in the mind of Christ when He said: "... Thou are Peter and upon this rock I will build My Church" (Matt. 16:18). Did He intend that, in addition to the Church He was establishing upon Peter, other Churches should exist, like the Lutheran Church for instance, or the Baptist Church or the hundred and one other similar non-Catholic denominations? To answer the above question let us go back to the very beginning of religion. Religion began with the creation of man. When God created man the one God created Adam, the one head of the human race. That was God's first revelation to man, one God the Creator of the human race making Adam the one father of the human race. It was not long, however, before man began to lose sight of that first revelation. As the earth began to be populated by the sons of Adam spreading over it and dividing into many tribes and nations, they forgot the one, true God Who had created them. They made for themselves instead gods of their own fashioning, idols of wood and stone, false gods of almost every description. As a just punishment for this God could have left man in his ignorance and misery. God's mercy, however, is above all His works. In His mercy He did not allow the worship of the one true God to perish from the earth. To keep the knowledge and worship of the one true God on earth until such time as the Savior of mankind would appear, God chose one people, the Jews, to be its guardian and protector. Abraham, the first of the great patriarchs of the Old Law, He called to be the father of His chosen people. To Abraham He said: "Go forth out of thy country and from thy kindred ... And I will make of thee a great nation ... and in thee shall all the kindred of the earth be blessed" (Gen. 12:1). It was one people that God chose to preserve the one knowledge and worship of the one true God on earth. And when the years of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were over, God raised up His prophet Moses to reaffirm His promises to mankind, and to strengthen the worship of the one true God. "If therefore you will hear My voice and keep My covenant ... you shall be to me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation" (Exod. 19:5). God then gave the Ten Commandments to Moses, beginning with the most fundamental of all, "I am the Lord thy God ... Thou shalt not have strange Gods before Me" (Exod. 20:2, 3). Later Moses was to repeat this to the twelve tribes he led out of Egypt saying: "... The Lord our God is one God and thou shall love the Lord thy God, with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength" (Mark 12:29, 30). Thus two great pillars of religion are joined, faith and love. To worship God in truth man must give God the testimony of his intellect by believing in the one true God. To this he must add the testimony of his heart, loving God with his whole being. The intensity of love is thus joined to the intensity of faith.   But, did the chosen people always live up to this first commandment? History tells us they did not. Time and again they strayed after false gods. On one occasion, wandering in the desert on the way to the promised land, they made to themselves a golden calf to adore. For such sins God punished them severely, but when they repented of their sins, He took them back under His protection. To keep His worship true and undefiled He kept a watchful eye over them, establishing severe penalties upon anyone who would dare to inject himself in the priesthood without His authority to change, be it ever so little a change, His duly ordained manner of worship. [Emphasis in red added, here and below.] When Saul the King, on one occasion went to the altar offering up the burnt sacrifice---as though being a king he were also a priest---God was angry at this sacrilege and in punishment He took away the kingship out of the house of Saul and transferred the kingship and the dynasty to David. When Korah, Dathan, and Abiron challenged the priesthood of Aaron, the ground opened beneath them swallowing up them and their families besides consuming by fire the two hundred and fifty men who had joined with them. When Nadab and Abiu put strange fire into their censers and offered it to God, fire coming from the Lord destroyed them even though they were priests themselves. This was the strict command given to Moses by God. There was to be but one chosen people just as there was one true God to worship. There was to be one altar, with one form of worship and one anointed priesthood. This was the Old Law given to Moses by God Himself. The Old Law was to be a sign and a figure of the New Law to come under Christ. And so the one altar and the one priesthood and the one form of worship in the Old Law were but a figure of the one altar, and the one priesthood, and the one worship Christ would establish in the Church He would build on Peter. When Christ did come He declared: "Do not think I am come to destroy the law or the prophets. I am not come to destroy but to fulfill" (Matt. 5:17). The whole history of the Old Law pointed to the coming of Christ, when Christ, the Son of God, would establish one Church upon earth into which He would command all men to enter. 2. CHRIST PRAYED THAT HIS CHURCH WOULD REMAIN ONE We have seen how God revealed His will to Moses in the Old Law. It was the will of God Almighty that there should be one altar and one worship just as there was one God. Now the Old Law was but a figure of the New Law to come which was to be the perfection and the completion of the Old. If then there was strict unity of faith in the Old, so much the more should there be strict unity of faith in the New. Jesus Christ certainly did not come to scatter religious confusion and dissension among men. He came to establish the truth among men and for this purpose He established one Church on the one rock He chose to build upon, and that rock was Peter. To that Church He gave the command to teach, and the authority to teach the faithful, teaching them not anything men might devise among themselves, but teaching them to observe whatsoever things He Himself had commanded them. In order that His Apostles under Peter would never stray from the truth, He promised them His assistance. "And I say to thee," He said, "that thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it" (Matt. 16:18). And again: "All power is given to Me in Heaven and in earth. Going, therefore, teach ye all nations; Baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world" (Matt. 28:18-20). It was the command of Christ and the prayer of Christ that His followers should remain firmly united in the faith He gave them. It was the prayer of His Apostles likewise and the insistence of His Apostles that the Church entrusted to them should suffer no dissension among its members. Time and time again Peter and Paul beseeched the brethren to keep united in the bond of faith. Time and time again they warned the faithful against dissension in their ranks. The night before He died Jesus made this fervent plea to His Father in Heaven. "Holy Father, keep them in Thy name whom Thou hast given me; that they may be one, as We also are" (John: 17:11). No more powerful comparison could be made of the unity that should exist among the members of His Church than to compare that unity with the perfect union of God the Father and God the Son. And so again Christ says: "That they all may be one, as Thou, Father in Me, and I in Thee; that they also may be one in Us; that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me" (John 17:21). The truth of His mission, the very proof of His divinity, He rests upon the fact that His followers will remain one with one another. To keep that unity of faith Christ warned His followers to be on their guard. "And Jesus answering, said to them: Take heed that no man seduce you; for many will come in My name saying, I am Christ: and they will seduce many" (Matt. 24:4,5). "And many false prophets shall rise and shall seduce many" (Ibid. 24:11). In his Epistle to the Galatians, St. Paul exhorts the early Christians to stand steadfast in the faith in the most striking words. "But though we, or an Angel from Heaven, preach a Gospel other than that which you have received, let him be anathema. As we said before, so now I say again: If anyone preach to you a Gospel, besides that which you have received, let him be anathema" (Gal. 1:8, 9). Anathema was one of the most severe condemnations that could be hurled against a member of the Church. In the Acts of the Apostles, on the other hand, St. Paul praises the early Christians because, as he says: "And they were persevering in the doctrine of the Apostles; and in the communication of the breaking of bread, and in prayers" (Acts 2:42). Again he says: "And the multitude of believers had but one heart and one soul ..." (Acts 4:32). In his Epistle to the Romans he declares: "Now I beseech you, brethren, to mark them who make dissensions and offenses contrary to the doctrine which you have learned, and avoid them" (Rom. 16:17). In his Epistle to the Galations he enumerates the works of the flesh such as fornication, uncleanness, envies, murders, drunkenness, saying that those who do these things shall not obtain the kingdom of God. And among these sins of the flesh he places sects. A sect is a part cut off from the original body; it consists of members of the faithful who draw apart, setting up their own doctrines which are contrary to the doctrines the Apostles preached. Christianity is now so divided that more than 400 of such sects can be enumerated. I wonder what St. Paul would say today witnessing such woeful division among Christians. In his own day he warned of this very state. "For there shall be a time, when they will not endure sound doctrine; but, according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears: and will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables" (2 Tim. 4:3, 4). This certainly is far different from that magnificent unity which Christ and the Apostles envisioned. In his Epistle to the Ephesians St. Paul gives us this picture of such union: "I therefore, a prisoner in the Lord, beseech you that you walk worthy of the vocation in which you are called, with all humility and mildness, with patience, supporting one another in charity. Careful to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. One body and one Spirit; as you are called in one hope of your calling. One Lord, one faith, one Baptism. One God and Father of all, Who is above all, and through all, and in us all" (Eph. 4:1-6). 3. THE CATHOLIC CHURCH HAS REMAINED ONE So far in this little book we have seen how the Church in the Old Law established by God was one Church with one altar and one form of worship. This Church was meant to be a figure of what the Christian Church would be. We have seen further that Christ established but one Church upon Peter. We have seen that He prayed that His followers might always remain united in the Church He had established. To this end He commanded the Apostles to preach but one doctrine and He warned the faithful against divisions in the Church. Now, if we look closely at the Catholic Church today, we shall realize that the Catholic Church, and it alone, has preserved the unity among its members prayed for by Christ. It is the one Church now as then founded on Peter, with the successors of Peter as its head. As in the time of the early Christians, so now, it is the congregation of Baptized persons united in the same true faith, partaking of the same Sacraments, worshiping God in the same sacrifice, all its members submitting to the same authority, the same head, the successor of St. Peter in Rome, the Vicar of Christ upon earth. Here in this Church alone we find one faith, one Lord, one Baptism, whether one dwells among white, black, brown, or yellow Catholics; whether one dwells in Asia, Africa, Europe, or America, even to the ends of the earth. As we have already noted, when Christ prayed that His followers "... may be one, as thou, Father, in Me, and I, in Thee ..." (John 17:21), He indicated that the firm unity existing among His followers would be an evident sign that His mission on earth was from God, that He Himself was the Son of God Who had come upon earth to redeem mankind and establish His Church among men. The unity of the Catholic Church today, after twenty centuries, testifies to the divinity of its Divine founder. Moreover, only the presence of Christ in His Church could have preserved that same unity.   This is true in spite of the fact that from the very first there were rebellious groups that broke away from the teaching of the Church. For instance, among the earliest Christians there were some Jews who refused to follow wholeheartedly in the teachings of the Apostles. These Jews, while on the one hand they embraced the Christian faith, were determined on the other to force the rest of the Christian body to adopt some of the practices of the Old Law. For one thing, they attempted to force all Christians to be circumcised. They refused to believe as Peter and Paul told them that no longer were men to be saved by the observance of the Old Law but by the New Law of faith and good works founded upon Jesus Christ. Such Judaeo-Christians may be said to represent the first Christian sect. They were recognized as such by the early Church. They existed for the most part in and around Jerusalem. In not too many years they ceased to exist.   From that day to this the Church never ceased to exert a zealous vigilance to keep the faith pure and entire, exerting the authority given to it by Christ to preserve the unity of Christendom. In the fourth century the heresy of Arianism arose. A heresy is a doctrine differing from the doctrine taught by Christ and the Church. Arius, like many other founders of false Christian sects, was a Catholic priest. He began to preach the doctrine that Jesus Christ was not a Divine Person equal to the Father. In other words he denied the divinity of Christ. Now the divinity of Christ is the very cornerstone of the Christian religion. If Christ be not God then all our hope in Christianity is in vain. Encouraged by some worldly rulers the heresy of Arius spread. It flourished for one hundred years. Who was it that withstood the arguments of the heretics and preserved faith in the divinity of Christ? The Catholic Church.   Before Arius there had been heretics and after Arius there were heretics. A large portion of the Catholic Church broke away from Rome in the eleventh century and, while not precisely denying doctrines of the Church, did deny the authority of the pope to rule the Church as the successor of St. Peter. The so-called Orthodox Church of Greece and the so-called Orthodox Church of Russia today are members of this group who have split away from Christian unity cutting themselves off from the mystical body of Christ---the Church however, always remaining the immaculate spouse of Christ. Such a division in Christendom is called a schism which means a splitting away, a separation, or a division resulting from such a separation. A schismatic Church denies the authority of the head of the Church to decide for it matters of faith and morals. A heretic goes further than a schismatic, for in addition to denying the authority of the head of the Church he also denies some or all of its doctrines. Such, according to the position held by the Catholic Church, is a heresy of Protestantism. Martin Luther, like Arius, was a priest of the Catholic Church. Henry the Eighth was a king, the Catholic King of Catholic England. Both separated themselves from the Catholic Church. Both refused to acknowledge the pope as head of the Church. Luther went on to deny many of its doctrines substituting others in their stead. Henry may not have denied the doctrines of the Church, but his action, in separating from the Catholic Church, gave rise to the establishment of the Anglican Church, which, like the Lutheran Church, denies many of the doctrines of the Catholic Church from which it separated. Following the example of Martin Luther and King Henry the Eighth many other separations and divisions sprang up in the Christian religion. At the present time it is difficult to estimate the exact number of such. Certainly the number runs into the hundreds. The Catholic Church regards them as sects cut off from the Church Christ established. In a later chapter I shall treat more fully of the break with the Catholic Church caused by the Protestant Reformation. Suffice it to say at this point that the Catholic Church did not change one particle of its faith because of Martin Luther or Henry the Eighth. The faith it received from Christ is kept the same, then as now. HOME ----------E-MAIL---------CHRIST THE KING www.catholictradition.org/Tradition/invitation-1.htm