YOU ARE EITHER CATHOLIC, OR YOU ARE NOT!
By Dr. JAMES LIKOUDIS
I vividly recall attending a parish catechetical program featuring a De-Sales Program film on the Creeds of the Church. Together with various historical inaccuracies, the film dealt poorly with the teaching of the Apostles Creed (c. 200), which stated:
“I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church”
and that of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (A.D. 381),
“We believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.”
The film went on to explain that all Christians were members of this “catholic church.” In reply to a question raised at the end of the film about the meaning of “catholic church,” two members of the parish team conducting adult education expressed their agreement with the film’s presentation of catholic doctrine and assured the audience that the “Roman catholic church” is a part, perhaps the largest part, but only a part of the “catholic church” of which all Christians in their denominations were members. The “catholic church” noted in the Creeds was wider than what is popularly known as the “Roman catholic church” and not to be identified with it. Proof for that was also seen in the use of lower case “catholic” instead of higher case “Roman Catholic.”
In short, the Church founded by Christ was not to be identified in this ecumenical age with the Catholic Church described by Vatican II as diffused throughout the world in full communion with the See of Peter.
Such false Protestant doctrine concerning the identification of the Church and presented in a parish catechetical program was not unique since popular catechetical series in the 1970s and 1980s similarly betrayed a serious “dumbing down” of the empirical “institutional Church” and its hierarchical, juridical, and legal aspects. The dogmatic teaching of Vatican I concerning the visible and hierarchical nature of the Catholic Church that was to be reaffirmed in Vatican II as well as in The Catechism of the Catholic Church suffered being ignored in favor of not offending Protestants and separated Easterners and injuring ecumenism.
This same reluctance to affirm the unique identity of the Catholic Church as the one true Church of Jesus Christ has also been present in recent controversies over the meaning of “subsistit” found in Vatican II’s magisterial document Lumen Gentium. There it was stated that the Church of Christ “constituted and organized in the world as a society, subsists (subsistit) in the Catholic Church” (n. 8). This was mistakenly taken to mean by some theologians and writers that the Catholic Church was not the whole Church and that other churches had an equal claim to be parts of Christ’s Church.
This poisonous error became so widespread that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) issued the document “Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church” (June 29, 2007). It asserted once again that the Catholic Church is the One True Church of Jesus Christ, even if certain elements of truth can be found in the separated Eastern Churches and Protestant communities. Only in the Catholic Church “governed by the Successor of Peter and the bishops in communion with him” is the Church of Christ “concretely found on this earth.”
It further explained that the use of the metaphysical term “subsists” actually strengthened the exclusive nature of the Catholic Church to be the One Church of Christ and had the important purpose of not excluding separated Christians from possessing “many elements of sanctification and truth.” But “the word ‘subsists’ can only be attributed to the Catholic Church alone precisely because it refers to the mark of Unity that we profess in the symbols of the Faith (I believe . . . in the ‘One’ Church); and this ‘One’ Church subsists in the Catholic Church.“
It puts the truth simply and as clearly as possible, that the one visible Church of Christ exists, here and now, in and only, in the Catholic Church.
It should also be observed that nowhere in the 16 decrees and declarations of Vatican II (1962-1965) is the Church described as the “Roman Catholic Church.” The same is true of the Dogmatic Constitutions on Catholic Faith and the Church of Christ issued by Vatican I (1870) where the English bishops insisted that the term “Roman Catholic Church” be avoided as not to imply any “branch theory” of the Church whose separate parts had an equal title to the name “Catholic.”
They were also mindful of the many Eastern Rite Catholics who are as Catholic as any Roman or Latin Rite Catholics. The pages of The Catechism of the Catholic Church (cf. nn. 811-822; 830-838) know only One Church which possesses the visible Unity which Christ bestowed:
“This Unity, we believe, subsists in the Catholic Church as something she can never lose”.
(n. 820)
Though the term “Roman Catholic” has an acceptable meaning as referring to the “real Catholics,” the fact remains that because the term can be abused to imply there can be other kinds of Catholics (Anglo Catholics; Greek Catholics; Roman Catholics; Protestant Catholics; note, too, the number of sects that try to include the terms “apostolic” and “Catholic” in their title), Catholics should avoid the term.
As mentioned, the term should also be avoided because the term “Roman Catholic” causes additional confusion. The millions of Eastern Rite Catholics in communion with the Catholic Church are not “Roman Catholics,” that is, Catholics of the Roman (Latin) Liturgical Rite.
Two thousand years of Church history evidence that the proper name of the Church the God-man founded has always been the “Catholic Church” — a name historically considered exclusive to the body of Christians in both East and West ruled by the Bishop of Rome and the bishops in communion with him.
The term Catholic always meant the opposite of belonging to a heretical or schismatic body. In the Acts of the Martyrs can be read the questioning of Pionius by his persecutors:
— “What is your religion?”
He replied,
— “A Christian.”
When further questioned,
— “To what Church do you belong?”
he answered:
— “To the Catholic Church.”
What he answered in AD 250 is as applicable today amidst the confusion of churches and sects.
Thus remain serious misconceptions concerning the meaning of “catholic” on the part of both Protestants and Eastern Orthodox who attempt to give new meanings to the word in order to apply it to themselves.
In the volume “Islam: What Catholics Need to Know” (2006) published by the National Catholic Education Association, the author, Fr. Elias D. Mallon, Ph.D., observes correctly:
“Eastern Orthodox Christians and many Protestants see themselves as ‘catholic’ in the sense that the word is used in the Nicene Creed: We believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.”
He fails to note that such claims are foreign to the meaning of those words intended by the Fathers of the Second Ecumenical Council (AD 381). Those Protestants claiming to be part of the “catholic church,” moreover, ignore a fact of history: that the Church founded by Christ is a visible society with visible rulers in an apostolic succession of bishops.
Eastern Orthodox sometimes use the title of “Orthodox Catholic Church” but the word “Catholic” needs no such qualifier to clearly identify those belonging to the true Church of Christ. Throughout the patristic period of the first eight centuries and before the tragedy of the medieval Byzantine Schism, all orthodox Christians, in fact, called themselves simply “Catholics.” For them, it was the Catholic Church which alone taught the orthodox faith.
Everyone in this modern world (who has no theological ax to grind) knows who the Catholics are, and a seeker of truth has only to examine Eastern Orthodox polemical literature to see the absurdity of the claim by separated Easterners to be “the Catholic Church”. There he will read ample condemnations of the Catholic Church and its “heresies.”
St. Augustine noted that it was the very name “Catholic” that kept him within the fold of the true Church:
“Although all heretics would like to be called Catholics, not one of them would dare to point out his own conventicle or house to a stranger who asked where the Catholic assembly was held.”
It is therefore important for doctrinal clarity that Catholics refrain from any catechetical or other use of the term “Roman Catholic” to define themselves. It should be recalled, moreover, that the term “Roman Catholic” is historically of Protestant origin, and the word “Roman” used to restrict a proper understanding of the catholicity of the Church and to propagandize a fixed hostility to the Bishop of Rome.
Interestingly, in the above volume on Islam intended for the nation’s Catholic religious educators, the author everywhere makes reference to “Roman Catholics” and the “Roman Catholic Church.” The latter term is extremely rare in the Church’s official documents. It does appear once in Pius XII’s Humanae Generis, n. 27:
“Some say they are not bound by the doctrine, explained in our encyclical letter (Mystici Corporis) of a few years ago, and based on the sources of Revelation, which teaches that the Mystical Body of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church are one and the same thing.”
But there the Latin for “Roman Catholic Church” (Ecclesiam Catholicam Romanam) might better be translated as “the Church, Catholic and Roman.” Certainly, for Pius XII, to be Catholic required full communion with the See of Rome and he never intended to particularize the Catholic Church as the “Roman branch” of a larger Catholic Church.
The truth is what Pope Paul VI once stated:
“You are either Catholic, or you are not!”
About Dr. James Likoudis
James Likoudis was an expert in Catholic apologetics. He is the author of several books dealing with Catholic-Eastern Orthodox relations, including “The Divine Primacy of the Bishop of Rome and Modern Eastern Orthodoxy: Letters to a Greek Orthodox on the Unity of the Church.” He has written many articles published by various religious papers and magazines.
The above article appeared in the September 27, 2012 issue of The Wanderer.
