Our theme has followed a track indicated by the phrase “To be Catholic is to. . . .” A number of milestones have presented themselves. Where does the track take us, finally? Do we leave things in midjourney, so to speak, or is there some sense in which we may stamp “Arrived” on the itinerary?

No religious man, surely, will ever make the claim to have arrived; or, if he does, the rest of us demur over what looks for all the world like presumption on his part. Perhaps he is a high-level initiate in some arcane Gnostic sect. So be it. But, for the general run of religious people, Jew and Muslim as well as Christian, the sense of being en route is very much to the fore.

It is certainly in the very forefront of the Catholic imagination. To be Catholic is to have, at the far end of one’s picture of things, the Vision of God. The Beatific Vision. The supreme attempt on the part of human imagination to catch even the dimmest and most fugitive glimpse of this Vision will be found in Dante’s Paradiso, where the imagery of light—of dazzle, even—suffuses all. Dante ends his immense saga of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise by pointing us all to “The Love that moves the sun and other stars”. It is that, really, toward which a Catholic sees himself moving.

Every aspect of the Catholic’s religion bids him thence. His baptism: in this event he is taken “into Christ” and stamped with the indelible identity “Christian”, that is, one of those who, by being found in Christ, will one day hear “Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”

All of the sacraments, baptism being the first that the new Christian encounters, stand on the cusp between the seen and the unseen, and mark him as one whose life—including his physical life (we look for the resurrection of the dead)—is destined for eternity and already participates in the eternal.

Prayer: here he finds himself among “the whole family in heaven and earth” (Eph 3:15)—angels, saints, all who have preceded him in death, all who accompany him on this earthly pilgrimage, the Mother of God herself, and our Great High Priest, Jesus Christ, into whose self-oblation we have all been drawn. Prayer locates him in this assembly.

The Church herself, for whom the Lord gave himself up and whom he loves as his Spouse: to be Catholic is to see her as in some sense “sacramental”, in that she is both physical and visible in her membership and in her existence in time as a hierarchical structure, but also spiritual and unseen, insofar as only God knows just who from among her numbers is truly one of the redeemed.

The Church’s Magisterium: to be Catholic is to rely on this exercise, apostolic in its character, of the Church’s identity as “the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Tim 3:15), and to be spared, as it were, the perpetual uncertainty that accompanies the notion of the Church as only invisible, to be found in the hectic clutter of conventicles, sects, denominations, and lately sprung associations, all claiming to be church. This awareness, far from permitting the smugness that says, “We are the One, True Church”, with a sort of pharisaical hauteur, results, as it did for Augustine, who, as a Catholic bishop, strove mightily to recall the Donatists and other schismatics to this one Church, in the modesty that admits that she is very far from being “our” association, much less the creation of a sixteenth-century king or zealot: she is the Lord’s. We have no warrant to take upon ourselves the authority to begin again, much as such a fresh start might recommend itself to us from time to time as we see widespread worldliness, ignorance, sin, and heresy in her ranks. But a Roman Catholic understands the teaching office of the Church to be guaranteed and protected by the Lord’s promise that the gates of hell (in the form of heresy, falsehood, apostasy, or error) will not, for as long as time lasts, prevail against this Church. And he sees the Petrine See in Rome as bearing the authority that the Lord asked the apostles to exercise in his Church, and most especially that given to Peter. Peter, and the See that bears his name, is, for the Catholic, the “sacrament” of the Church’s unity, again, for as long as time lasts.

And the Mass. The Mass draws the Catholic, day by day, up to the precincts at the summit of which, as it were, the seraphim cry “Holy!” around the Sapphire Throne. Down here on this earth, things may present themselves to his eye as a huddle of unlettered peasants in a plastered hovel of a church, all flaked and peeling, or as a knot of anxious soldiers tossing in a landing craft, or as the throng filling Chartres. But whatever the immediate look of the thing, to be Catholic is to find oneself gazing through the veil of contingency and temporality at the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, so profoundly hinted at in van Eyck’s great Adoration of the Mystic Lamb in Ghent. It is to find oneself bidden to “assist at” this great Sacrifice, which finds its origin in the counsels of the Holy Trinity before the world was, its pattern in the Upper Room, and its completion at Golgotha.

Consummatum est. The Mass does not add to that one Oblation: it makes it uninterruptedly and actually present to the Church until the Lord returns.

To be Catholic is to see one’s entire identity and calling to be nothing other than “configuration to” Christ and union with him, in his humiliation, his self-oblation, his Resurrection, his Ascension, and his intercessory office in behalf of the world. “For the life of the world”: to be Catholic is to see oneself as for, not against, the world. “For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved” (Jn 3:17). Patriarchs, prophets, kings, apostles, fathers, confessors, martyrs, virgins, widows, infants, and all the faithful from the beginning testify to this. To be Catholic is to share in this august identity.

This is the “glad tidings” of which we spoke in the first chapter of this book.

1 Evangelical Is Not Enough (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988); Lead, Kindly Light (Steubenville, Ohio: Franciscan University Press, 1994). Back to text.

1 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 90-91. Back to text.

2 F. X. Durrwell, In the Redeeming Christ (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963), 55, 56. Back to text.

1 Quoted in Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 1, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p.303. Back to text.

1 Ignatius of Antioch (A.D. 35-107): “But consider those who are of a different opinion with respect to the grace of Christ which has come unto us, how opposed they are to the will of God. . . . They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins. . .” (Epistle to the Smyraeans, VI, VII; in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 [Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1979], 89).

Justin Martyr (a.d. 100-165): “For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh” (The First Apology, LXVI; in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 [Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1979], 185).

Irenaeus (a.d. 130-200): “When, therefore, the mingled cup and the manufactured bread receives the Word of God, and the Eucharist of the blood and the body of Christ is made, from which things the substance of our flesh is increased and supported, how can they affirm that the flesh is incapable of receiving the gift of God, which is life eternal, which is nourished from the body and blood of the Lord, and is a member of Him?” (Against Heresies, II; in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 [Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1979], 528). Back to text.

1 What, then, are we to gather from the restlessness, scuffling, crying of babies, and coming and going that mark many a Catholic Mass? Has everyone lost sight utterly of the sacred mysteries that loom here?

No doubt many have done just that. We mortals are a scatterbrained lot, and even when the Messiah is feeding us miraculously by Galilee, we are likely to be found blowing our noses, chasing after our tots, nipping into the bushes to relieve ourselves, or struggling to help our neighbor adjust his coat. We do not do well when it comes to occasions. Unimportant, and even frivolous, matters distract us.

The Most High is aware of this. He made us. Hence he is infinitely patient with our efforts, intermittent and halfhearted though they may be, to present ourselves before him. The reality at work in the occasion remains: the Infant God is still there in the manger, notwithstanding the braying of asses to the contrary. The loaves and fishes are still purveyed. The Mass still goes on.

For the man or woman who wishes most earnestly to remain collected and focused in the presence of the mysteries, things may be trying indeed. But grace, and the self-discipline that cooperates with grace, can assist us here. Probably St. Francis was as happily lost in the liturgy with great tumult and disorder all about as he was in the cool hush when only the brothers were celebrating. Very few of us can even imagine this peaceful state of mind. Distraction, irritation, and even fury beleaguer us. But we are summoned, alas, to answer for ourselves here. If no practical arrangements can be made to alleviate the chaotic situation, and the pastor seems as oblivious to it all as do the other communicants, then indeed one has one’s work cut out, so to speak. The way of Charity opens before us. What does Charity do in such havoc? I myself would have to be a wholly different person to be able to remain collected and devout here, I protest. Ah, that is what I am summoned to: to become a wholly different person, finally. But at this point the writer must take his own place at the very tag end of the pupils queuing up for this most difficult lesson. Back to text.

1 C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 17. Back to text.

1 These collects are taken from Daily Roman Missal (Princeton: Scepter Publishers, 1993), 87, 97, 339. Back to text.

2 Daily Roman Missal, 92. Back to text.

3 Ibid., 95. Back to text.

4 Daily Roman Missal, 23. Back to text.

5 Ibid., 99. Back to text.

6 Daily Roman Missal, 637. Back to text.

1 Charles W. Kennedy, ed., An Anthology of Old English Poetry (New York, 1960), 145. Back to text.