WHY NOT JOIN THE REAL THING?

[Denise]

WHY NOT JOIN THE REAL THING?
Choosing a Church

April 1993By Sheldon Vanauken

Sheldon Vanauken is a writer in Virginia and a Con­tributing Editor of the NOR. His books include Gateway to Heaven, Under the Mercy, and the award-winning bestseller A Severe Mercy.

In my account of becoming Catholic in The New Catholics (edited by Dan O'Neill) and in my Under the Mercy, I said, almost as an aside since it seemed obvious: "Choosing a church is not like choosing a suit or a house, a matter of taste and comfort. A little matter of truth."

But it wasn't obvious, even with the remark about truth. A number of readers wrote to me, asking innocently and plaintively, "Why isn't it like choosing a house to live in?" What they were saying or implying was something like this: "If we all believe in the Risen Christ, what difference does it make whether we are Baptists or Episcopalians, Presbyterians or Catholics? Isn't it just a matter of taste and comfort if we're all Christians hoping for Heaven?" What was implicit in all the ques­tions was the idea that the Catholic Church is just one of the multitude of "churches" or, more accurately, sects.

But a sect, the dictionary says, is "in reli­gion: a party dissenting from an established or parent church." The Catholic Church is the original Mother Church -- not a sect. Not "a church," but the Church.

Christ (Mt. 16) spoke of His Church -- not churches. The creeds spoke of one holy catho­lic Church (catholic means universal). But if there is one holy universal Church, there can be no other churches.

So it was for a thousand years, and then -- basically because of a question of authority, not doctrine -- the Orthodox eastern wing of the Church, where bishops and patriarchs were under the direct control of the Byzantine emperor, drew apart from the West -- but still, men in East and West believed in one visible Church and said so in the creeds. (Even today the Pope refers to the Orthodox as "the other lung" of the one Church.)

Five hundred years later -- 1,500 years after Christ -- came the Protestant Revolt. Luther, Calvin, Henry VIII, backed by nobles hungry for Church lands, broke away from the universal Church. They left the Church, really. But (understandably) they were reluctant to admit that they were no longer in the one Church of the creeds. They therefore called their broken-off fragments "churches," as the Lutheran churches or the Church of England. At the same time they indulged in a master­piece of rationalizing: The Church in the singu­lar that Christ spoke of, the one catholic Church of the creeds, was not the 1,500-year-old visible Catholic Church that they had left -- no, no; the Church was an invisible church of all the faithful. This idea was and is ex­tremely comforting to the Protestants who today accept it as gospel. The only trouble with it is that it was never heard of until after the fact of breaking away, and there was al­ready a term for all the faithful: the Kingdom of God. But the makers of the creeds had no such idea; they meant the perfectly visible one holy catholic and apostolic Church on earth. And there is not a particle of evidence that Christ, in saying that He would build his Church upon the Rock that was Peter, meant an invisible Church -- or churches.

In choosing a church one must take the meaning of "Church" into consideration.

The broken-off fragments were sects. I say this, not to give offense, but to be precise. And the three major sects that splintered off from the Catholic Church continued to splinter -- sects of sects -- as, for instance, the Meth­odists broke off from the Anglicans. And the further splintering has gone on so briskly in the four or five centuries since the Protestant Revolt that there are now, according to the Oxford Encyclopedia of World Christianity (1982), more than 28,000 sects of varying degrees of Christianity, some like the Mormons hardly Christian at all. But does that mean that the Catholic Church has been reduced to nothing more than a small sect herself? Not at all. The Mother Church is twice as big as all the 28,000 sects put together.

The questioners I began with who asked if we were not all on the road to Heaven if we believed in the Risen Christ, God Incarnate, were right so to ask. The faithful members of the sects may indeed reach Heaven without being Catholics. It isn't their fault they were brought up Protestant (whether Luther and company sinned or not). Still, the question of the meaning of "Church" may be significant in whether they remain Protestant. And there are other significant considerations.

G.K. Chesterton, who converted from or­thodox Anglicanism to the Catholic Church, compares the Church to a great Gothic Cathedral, like the beautiful cathedrals she raised all over Europe. Round the Cathedral are the innumerable meeting houses or tents of the countless sects. But, he says, the one thing, the only thing, that gives life and vitality to the sects is what they took with them when they left the Cathedral. They took with them the Faith in the Risen Lord that the Church had spelled out. Some of them took the creeds. And they all took the Bible -- what would they be without the New Testament? But not only had the early Church written it, but the Church had selected what was to go into the Testament and what was excluded. That, above all, the Protestants took when they left. And some took her actual churches or copied her architecture and stained glass. Moreover, they took theological ideas that especially appealed to them, sometimes stress­ing them in an unbalanced way, that is, without the balance of other truths -- for instance, long before Calvin, the Church had contemplated the sovereignty of God, but she balanced it with free will. In the "Cathedral" of the Catholic Church, the truth-seeker is more likely to find balance.

There is, though, a further consideration. When our Lord (Mt. 16) said to Peter, "You are Peter, the Rock; and on this rock I will build my Church…," He also said: "I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and what you forbid on earth shall be forbidden in Heaven…." So it was for Peter, the first head of the Church, and so for the successors of Peter (popes). Catholic and Protestant alike be­lieve Christ to be God Incarnate who rose bodily from the dead, but the Catholic, to be truly Catholic, must then believe one thing more: that the universal Church under the Successor to Peter will be infallibly guided as a church, on matters of faith and morals -- and what she forbids is forbidden in Heaven. Sinful popes there were, but none attempted to alter faith and morals.

Nevertheless, it is because the break-away Protestants did take so much from the Mother Church that she calls them separated brethren, really Catholics without knowing it -- but also without knowing the fullness of the Faith. The Catholic Church is not "just another church" -- she is, simply, the Church