What about the question of varieties of worship? Could it not be urged that the multiplicity of styles to be found across the Christian spectrum is itself the very sign of vigor? Surely this riotous fructifying of fashions in public worship suggests something deeply significant about the gospel, namely, that it is a seed of such glorious vitality that, when it is planted anywhere among us mortals, it will sprout, burgeon, and bear good fruit? And more: in the colorful heaps displayed in this harvest we find the rich and particular genius of each tribe and people, redeemed, purified, raised, and touched with eternity itself. What you find in Spain and Latin America differs greatly from what you find in the Netherlands or Norway. Sicilians do not order their worship as do the Watutsi; nor does Irish Catholicism yield just the look given things by the Filipinos.

What can one do but assent to all of this, and even applaud it. Who will carp? Who will be so parsimonious as to begrudge the human race such a splendid panoply? By all means let Philadelphia Quakers guard the stillness and austerity of their venerable meeting houses. Let the rococo flower among the Bavarians and Austrians. Who will deny to the Pentecostalists their ebullience, and to the Presbyterians the rectitude and sobriety coming to them from Scotland, and to the Russians their gold and incense? Come.

Yes. One is inclined to echo Gerard Manley Hopkins here: “. . . all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. / All things counter, original, spare, strange;/ . . . He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: / Praise him.”

In gazing on this variety exhibited in the forms of Christian worship we find ourselves drawn past the question of mere taste to matters of thicker substance. The faithful from every one of the sectors that together constitute the variety presenting itself to us would wish us to understand that the “shape” of their worship is very far from having been arrived at simply in answer to questions of taste. To be sure, the Quakers no doubt do, in fact, “like” the shape their worship has taken on, as do the Bavarians, the Scots, and the African American Baptists. But they would all justly demur if an observer chalked up what he saw among them as mere taste. Not altogether, they would all wish to impress upon him: what you observe among us is the purest and fullest rendering that can be given to the Christian gospel in all its richness.

That is, the Calvinists do not run to long sermons simply because Swiss, Dutch, and Scottish tastes run along such lines: you have opened up an immense theological matter when you note this about their worship. The preaching of the Word: this is the central and characteristic activity of the Church, and it is under this mode that God is pleased to instruct and bless his people. Our worship evinces this towering consideration, in all the details of the shape we have given to our practice in this connection, they would tell us. Or again, the Pentecostalists among American black communities would urge upon us the crucial place that vital, felt, and spontaneous experience must hold in true Christian worship. The Spirit is free and sets us free, they would tell us: do not clamp us into the stocks and manacles of ritual. How shall we truly praise the Redeemer under those gaunt restraints? And yet again George Fox, father of the Quakers, would want his followers to maintain that stillness which must guard the soul’s opening of itself to the Inner Light and that openness to the Spirit that alone authenticates the Christian soul’s approach to God.

The “shape”, then, that public Christian worship takes on exhibits two things: first, the particular genius of the group in question (whether this is ethnic, socioeconomic, or geographical) and, second, the substance of the faith as that group apprehends it.

How, then, can the Roman Catholic Church insist that the shape that Christian public worship must take, always and everywhere, is found in the Mass? Surely this is a highhanded attitude?

It would seem so, if worship were an abstraction afloat in the ether around us, so to speak, to be distilled by any of us and wrought into a shape that pleases us. On that accounting the great thing would be for us all to come at the matter perennially, tapping and tinkering, and ever and anon coming up with yet new shapes. Our tribal or cultural genius would be given wide scope, and our spirits would be perpetually regaled by novel and unpredicted challenges and thereby kept on their toes. A vastly appealing case can be (and is) made in behalf of this approach.

But worship is scarcely such an abstraction. It is far, far more than the expression of our spiritual aspirations or of the Godward proclivities of our spirits. To be sure, these aspirations and proclivities are caught up, channeled, and energized in our acts of worship: but these are not the primal matter of worship. These are only properties in us that answer to the primal matter that is God.

All religions testify to this. Hinduism does not leave it to the Hindu faithful to cobble up infinite varieties for Hindu worship: whether you are a Tamil from South India or a man from Assam, you must do so-and-so if you wish to present yourself to the gods in our temples. Islam does not leave it to the Sudanese or the Persians to consult their own inclinations and thus fashion their cult of Allah. The Jews would also testify to this.

It would seem, then, that there is a source other than ourselves from which proceed the form and content of worship. The question for the believer from any religion is not, first of all, “How do I feel about this?” but, rather, “What am I to do when I come to the Holy of Holies?”

That is the question that reaches deeper than my ethnic or cultural or historical identity. I may be a young, well-off American of Swedish ancestry living in the suburban colossus around Chicago, and it may greatly appeal to me to drive my family to an immense “seeker-friendly” emporium as my weekly religious exercise. There is much to be said for it. But does it address the question that comes to me from the immensities of the creation, the fall, and redemption, namely, what am I to do when I come to the Holy of Holies? How am I to dispose myself here, mortal that I am?

Or again, I am bubbling with joy over my status as one of the saved, and it comes naturally to my sort of people to shake out our joy by dancing, waving our arms, and calling out with bursts of adoration to the holy Name of Jesus. There is a very great deal to be said for this. Let it attend our worship, by all means. Let it find its expression in the midst of the assembly of the faithful. But does it exhaust the whole matter that looms upon us when we mortals come to the Upper Room, Golgotha, the Tomb, and the Sapphire Throne? Is the whole of our action here ordered to the whole of the mystery?

And yet once again: there is much to be said for spareness and stillness as the particular note of public worship. But we must ask: Does the aggregate of meditations and aspirations rising to heaven from the hearts of the gathered faithful compass the matter? Are our bodies drawn into the mystery so that by standing, sitting, kneeling, and bowing, we address that which we know in our hearts to be fitting for us mortals in these precincts?

To speak of physical postures is to open a question that touches closely upon this matter of public Christian worship. It might be put this way: Since God seeks those who will worship him in spirit and truth (rather than upon this mountain or that), is there any requirement at all for public worship other than that the faithful raise their hearts to the Most High? Surely such raising, which must be the final test of whether worship is occurring at all, can be achieved sitting, standing, kneeling, or, in the case of the infirm, supine, not to mention by the hiker in the mountains as he strides along with the song of the winter wren in his ears, offering his acts of praise to heaven.

Yes. The locale of true worship is the heart of man, and worship can ascend from the foxhole, the anvil, or St. Lawrence’s very griddle, if it comes to that.

But we are speaking of the public ordering of the worship of the Christian faithful, day by day, week by week, century after century, for all tribes and cultures, in a shape such that all that ought to present itself to them is presented, so that they will be drawn, body, soul, and spirit, into the totality of the mystery that worship approaches.

If these considerations are taken seriously, we begin to see that much more is at stake than tends to be available to mere taste or inclination—even if that taste and inclination arise most poignantly from a given people. “We like to sing these songs” may be volunteered in this connection; and “We like our ministers to be affable, and even colloquial”, or “The whole point for us is the preaching of the Word”, or “Spontaneity is the crucial thing for us.”

All of that, to be sure. But it is to be remembered by us all that the discussion of these nettlesome topics has not been left to the perennial open forum, with delegations from all concerned groups striving to lodge their special priorities in the agenda.

Christian worship did not simply proliferate randomly. There was a shape given to it in the beginning. Actually, it took this shape: it is not as though the apostolic community cast about for ingredients that might be appealing to local Jewish converts, or to Greeks, or to Scythians, Romans, Egyptians, or Parthians, least of all to that ubiquitous figure, “contemporary man”. No market research was brought into play. No caucuses—of youth, or of senior citizens, or of the affluent or the indigent, or of women, or men, or of anyone else—were heard from. No theologians or reformers or charismatic leaders or prophets dictated the shape of things.

The particular act that was understood by the apostolic and patristic Church to constitute worship for the new cult (soon enough labeled “Christian” at Antioch) had been received from the hands of Jesus Christ himself. And it was a particular act. What he had done on the night before his betrayal in the Upper Room was received by the apostles as his ordering of the act of Christian worship. He took, blessed, broke, and gave bread to them, and he blessed the cup of wine; and by his word he inaugurated this strange quasi meal as the act that would “make present” (his word*—anamnesis)* for them, until history ended, the entire mystery of his redeeming self-oblation to the Father, that is to say, the entirety of revelation. The whole of the Law and the Prophets and of the history of Israel, and of his own coming into the world, passing through it (it is pasch—passing), and returning to the Father is opened up in this rite. It can never be exhausted or wholly comprehended. It will never run dry, for as long as Christian people gather for worship.

The Roman Catholic Church (and, it may be remembered here, the Orthodox) offers no other apologia for the shape of her regular public act of worship. She has no warrant—no warrant at all, she would stress—to alter things in the interest of some doctrinal point (the Inner Light, or the importance of the Bible, or spontaneity), and least of all of some lesser notion, such as “We like informality”, or “Our tradition is four hundred years old and comes to us from the Old Country.”

It is often put forward in this connection that Catholic worship cannot possibly be of one piece with the spare and humble simplicity that obtained in the Upper Room, and among the apostles, the believing women, and the others who gathered after the Ascension. Look at the sumptuousness and complexity of the Mass. My word—brocaded vestments and bowing and mumbling and bric-a-brac: How can Rome possibly maintain that that is to be understood as “primitive”?

Many Christian denominations make the claim that theirs is nothing more than New Testament worship. “We just go back to the Book of Acts for our pattern”, it is said.

The difficulty here is that the Book of Acts scarcely hints at what the believers actually did when they gathered. We all know Acts 2:42: “And they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.” Certainly this touches on the content of their gatherings.

But what did they actually do in these gatherings? We find presently, in the writings that we have from the Church, written, often, by men who had themselves known and been taught by Peter and John and Paul, that indeed the “bishop” expounded the Scripture to the gathered faithful in a homily that followed certain readings from Scripture. The sermon, in all Christian churches, can trace its taproot straight back to this custom.

And what shape did “fellowship” take? Newly composed hymnody? Testimonials? Sharing? Extempore prayers? All of these items form staple ingredients in many of the groups that seek to remain close to the simplicity glimpsed in the Book of Acts. But of course Acts does not spell out any of this. We Christians, late in time, have to guess here. No one can claim that such activities have undoubted biblical pedigree.

But “the breaking of bread”. Here we are on firmer ground. We do, in fact, know something more about this aspect of the apostolic Church’s worship. The Book of Acts, of course, tells us nothing about the actual pattern. Did they use little squares of leavened bread? Little thimble-cups with a drop of grape juice in each? Did they look on the matter as strictly a memorial of the Lord’s death? We can say nothing to the purpose here as long as we rummage only in the pages of Acts or of the “pastoral epistles”. If we wish to stick close to what the believers did in this connection, we must consult the writings of Ignatius, Justin, Irenaeus, and other early writings. These texts are not Scripture, to be sure: but they are first- and second-century reports, and they are “Church”, so to speak. If we wish to dismiss these reports with, “Oh, the Church very early strayed from ‘the simplicity that is in Christ’ ”, then we are left to our fancies, that is, to how we, fifteen hundred or two thousand years after the fact, are pleased to imagine things. (How it is that such late notions are to be taken with a confidence we deny to Clement and Ignatius and Justin is a question to set the most fervent sectarian to wondering.)

And in these reports from that very early Church, we find “the shape of the liturgy”, to borrow the phrase from the Anglican scholar Dom Gregory Dix. Greetings, readings from Scripture, homily, and prayers formed the first part of the Christians’ gathering (the so-called synaxis, which means gathering); then any visitors and inquirers, and even not-yet-baptized believers, were sent out, and the believers embarked upon the anaphora (the offering). In the very earliest records we have of what was said by the “president” (the bishop or, later, one of his presbyters), we find the Mass; or, if we wish to put the matter less controversially, we may say that we find the phraseology and the sequence that may still be heard in the Mass.

None of this is controversial matter, actually. Anyone can read and find all of this for himself. Scholars from all sectors of Christendom agree that, yes, certainly this is how things were as the Church moved out from the morning of Pentecost into the long haul of history. The record is there. We have only one precedent, if we wish to tailor our public worship according to the early pattern.

We are free to jettison this pattern and to design a wholly alternative scheme for Christian gathering. This is what has been done in many of the Protestant churches. They themselves would say stoutly that a clean sweep was necessary, given the havoc in the late mediaeval Church, and that all apostolic, patristic, and historic precedent must be overridden in the interest of locating the preaching of the Word as the piece de resistance of worship. Yes, it is a novel pattern, they will tell us: but it was necessary at the time to make this purge, and now, five hundred years later, we see no reason to reconsider the matter.

In one sense all discussion halts at this point, since it is impossible to find a common footing upon which to proceed. Non-Catholic Christians do not wish to be obliged to test things with these “apostolic” and “patristic” and “catholic” touchstones that govern the teaching and practice of the Catholic Church. Sola Scriptura, they urge. The great difficulty here for Catholics is that Scripture itself is silent on this sola point, for a start, and, further, no one had heard of this stricture until a millennium and a half had gone by after Pentecost. St. Paul called the Church “the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Tim 3:15). How can this be set on one side, Catholics might ask. What Church is that? Well, the only one there is, St. Paul might reply.

But this last is a remark almost incomprehensible to non-Catholics in these late years of history. The only Church there is? Fie! Here, let us fetch the directory of churches: let’s see, starting with A . . .

We all know the list of denominations. And no one, of course, can dismiss in a cavalier way the agonies, sunderings, debates, and even wars from which that very long list of “churches” derives. Alas. All of us read the Lord’s “high-priestly” prayer recorded in John 17 and wonder wistfully how his petition for unity might be recovered in our own epoch. Some Christians, of course, will venture that we do, as it happens, already enjoy that oneness for which Jesus Christ prayed: all true believers in Jesus, scattered as they are, constitute the “invisible church”, which is united by that common belief in a profound fashion that no ecumenical synods can ever hope to achieve. Hence, unity is not something for which we need pray. We have it, not visibly or organizationally, to be sure, but nonetheless truly. Jesus Christ’s true followers know each other and, when the test comes, will stand forth in a solid phalanx that no foe foresees. Meanwhile, the variety in Christendom is healthy. Let a hundred flowers bloom, they might say, giving Chairman Mao’s words a meaning he cannot have imagined.

This is an appealing picture. It has the cachet about it of diversity, which in turn suggests good health.

The difficulty here is that, whatever accolades we may wish to accord to such a picture, it is not, in any sense ever imagined by our forefathers in the faith, most notably the apostles and the believers who gathered about them in the early decades after Pentecost—it is not “the Church”. It may be a praiseworthy and admirable aggregate of assemblies or of task forces or even denominations: but it is not “the Church”, again as that term was understood by our forerunners. This brave array of ecclesial groupings may exhibit zeal and fidelity, energy and resourcefulness, and even enormous success in preaching the gospel and winning converts to Christian belief. Nevertheless, it is not the Church. Or at least, to spare ourselves shouts of dismay and ire, it is not the thing called “the Church” by the men to whom we all owe this ancient faith.

For them, “church” did not refer to a scattered aggregate of individuals, each of whom had professed faith in Jesus. There certainly was such an aggregate, if one wanted to count believing noses, so to speak, in Smyrna and Philadelphia and Sardis and Ephesus. But “church” was a word that referred to an entity—a mystery, really—with a specific content and with an embodied visibility. It was, on one level, the Body of Christ, or the New Israel of God, or the Bride of Christ. All these terms pointed to the mystery, hidden in God from former ages and now disclosed, of a new people, “born again” by the Spirit of God, citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven even while still here in history. But on the level of the (literally) mundane, this mystery could be seen in Smyrna or Sardis. Where? How?

One found “it”, not by canvassing the shops for believing shopkeepers and their families or hunting through the legions for believing soldiers or inquiring at the academy for believing pedagogues and then tallying the list. This technique would, of course, have yielded a noble list and, to that extent, what might be called, loosely, a directory to an “invisible” church.

But the believers themselves would not have wanted you to identify your list with the Church. You can find “her”, they would have told you, by finding our bishop and by observing us at our worship, that is, at the liturgy. There we may be found gathered around our bishop, obedient to him, recognizing him as bearing apostolic authority, and, in some sense, embodying in his person the unity that we—believers usually scattered out across the city but now, precisely, gathered—constitute. We are all one in the Lord, they would tell us, not merely in the abstract sense of agreeing with each other that we share a common faith, but rather insofar as we attest to that unity by our unity with the bishop. For us here in Smyrna, it is Polycarp, the disciple of John.

Yes. Very good, we might begin. Now could you show us to the other denominations here in Smyrna?

Blank. Silence. Presently, out of politeness, one of them asks us what it was, again, that we had requested.

The other churches.

But this is the Church. We are the Church. This is the Church in Smyrna.

And we would find, if we pursued things far enough, that various companies had from time to time hived off but that there was a distinction, clear enough for Christians and pagans alike to grasp, between the believers here in Smyrna under Polycarp and those in Antioch under Ignatius and those in Jerusalem under their bishop—between these, on the one hand, who are known as “the Church”—and the others who had sundered themselves from that unity in the interest of following someone who had come along with a fascinating variation on the gospel of Jesus and who had busily collected about himself his own cadre. They were called heretics in those brisk days.

That sounds harsh to us, two thousand years later. We believe in being good neighbors, religiously as well as on the street where we live. Christendom has diversified itself, we admit, and, since we are all undoubtedly united by a common faith in Christ Jesus, we will, despite superficial (or profound) differences, agree to live in amiable proximity to each other, hoping for the day when a way will be found for us to enter once again into that unity that was so visible in the early centuries of the Church.

This attitude is far more to be extolled than warfare, to which Christian believers have resorted from time to time over the unhappy history of the Church. We might say that hatred, strife, and war are the ditch on the one side of the road: but this, of course, sets up a picture that makes us all want to know what the ditch on the other side might turn out to be.

Certainly that ditch must in some sense imply the opposite of the zeal that takes up arms against fellow Christians. We should all have an amiable attitude toward our fellow believers.

But is there such a thing as a culpable amiability? Is there such a thing as a blameworthy ignoring of distinctions?

No one has the luxury of taking up a highhanded attitude here. Everyone is under the most somber obligation to look to his own knitting, so to speak. The Mennonites do not break bread with the Lutherans, nor the Cumberland Presbyterians with the Campbellites, nor the Moravians with the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connection. What is wrong?

Who is guilty? Who will insist that he has it right? On the other hand, we are no longer marching out against each other with swords and staves.

But alas. There is a sense in which everyone does, in fact, insist that he has it right, although politesse ordinarily inhibits us from trumpeting it too loudly at each other. But, in the bosom of our own assembly, there presides the rock-solid conviction that indeed, indeed, we do have it right. Let the others come as supplicants to us. We will gladly receive you, if you repent, mend your ways, acknowledge your errors, and submit to our teaching and discipline.

No one actually talks this way. Scarcely anyone spells things out quite so starkly even in his own heart. Nevertheless, we would all probably have to admit to some such posture, if we were ruthlessly candid with ourselves.

The Roman Catholic Church seems to hold herself aloof from all such questions. It often looks as though she waits, serene and patient, for the vendors in the stalls and kiosks of the fair to pull themselves together, close up shop, and come to her door. Then she will, with lavish condescension, open her arms to receive these supplicants.

Such a picture puts us all off. Nevertheless, it is a picture many suppose to be a true one. Certainly it is not a picture likely to move many to join the petitioners at Rome’s doors.

How are we to speak of the matter, so perilous and delicate, so laced with passion, in any helpful way?

There is one sense in which nothing new can be said. Undergirding the sturdy convictions, partisanship, and even jingoism that many bring to this matter of what the Church is, there lie, as we all know, not only half a millennium of bale and woe, but also whole theological systems that were not erected in a day and that will not be dismantled in a day, or in a century.

For Catholics, of course, it seems difficult to think about the matter at all without laying their own souls open to superior, and even inquisitorial, attitudes. After all, we say, we are the Church founded by Jesus Christ himself. We don’t know who these other church founders are; but we offer no apology for our own pedigree.

At this point we find ourselves facing the question of attitude, for which we are responsible and for which we will be judged. How is one to be at one and the same time intransigent and meek? It comes to that, really. Intransigence, although it is not a sympathetic word, has eventually to be brought into play by anyone when it comes to matters of truth. But how is a good man to do so? Is it not better to be pliable and irenic?

Irenic, yes. Pliable, no—at least where truth is at stake. The martyrs, peaceable as most of them wished to be, finally found themselves at the point where they had to say, No: we cannot agree. We wish most fervently to live harmlessly and unobtrusively here in Rome and to be at peace with all men. But we cannot offer incense to Decius or Diocletian. Their warrant for this behavior was, of course, the Lord himself, who could not modify what he said in the interest of bonhomie all round in Jerusalem.

The belief of Catholics is that the Church issued from the wounded side of Christ at Calvary and that the coming of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost ratified and vivified this mystery, galvanizing the apostles and the others into a company that quickly took on a shape discernible by all and sundry, pagan or Christian.

It was a body under authority, for one thing, not a democracy. The apostles, having had authority bestowed on them by the Lord to teach and rule in the Church, were in charge. They taught doctrine, and they governed the assemblies that began to sprout, first in Jerusalem, then in all Judaea, then in Samaria, and finally unto the uttermost part of the earth. When the time came for a man to be raised up in a given locale to bear apostolic authority for his region, hands were laid on him. His was the office of “bishop” (episkopos).

The Catholic Church believes that this office of bishop was (and is) a particular one, derived solely from the original fountainhead of the apostles, and unavailable in any way other than the apostolic laying-on of hands. Most Christian churches recognize some such office, and most practice the laying-on of hands for various ministries. In the Catholic Church, the belief is that this “episcopal” lineage, originating from the Savior’s own choosing and anointing of the Twelve, and passing thence, from that Twelve, on to the next generation, and the next, has continued unbroken until our own day and will continue uninterrupted until the Second Coming.

The history of the early Church makes clear that they all accepted this picture and that these bishops, all around the Mediterranean as the gospel advanced, recognized each other as sharing in the unique apostolic ministry. The Church was “one” under them, scattered as the churches were, inasmuch as teaching and discipline had to be agreed upon by these bishops in council. No one had to linger marooned in doubt as to which men were the true bishops and which were interlopers, mountebanks, and heretics. Confusions arose early enough: but when a teacher like Marcion or Apollinarius arose, or when someone started up his own “church” without this apostolic pedigree, the matter was settled sooner or later, so that what one found as the Church moved out into history was common knowledge as to who constituted the Church and who were schismatic.

Church history is not a smooth-surfaced road. Pebbles, rocks, potholes, cave-ins, and collapses of all sorts mar things.

But the road is there, or so Catholics believe. Or, to put the matter in a different way: any one of us, Baptist, Catholic, Orthodox, or independent, will discover the same record if he will read about the early Church. Polycarp became bishop in Smyrna in the first century. Ignatius was bishop in Antioch. Clement was bishop in Rome. They and everyone else understood their office as having derived directly and organically from the apostles. So all of us discover an “episcopal” Church there. For good or ill, that is what took shape.

Some non-Catholic Christians urge that the whole Church went off the rails by about A.D. 95, and hence that “Church history” is really the record of an immense botch. These Christians would urge that the Church of Jesus Christ, made up as she is exclusively of true believers, pursued its humble and obscure way in little assemblies here and remote groupings there, quite apart from the brontosaurian imposter that, early on, took unto herself the name of The Catholic Church.

The difficulty of maintaining this view arises from the nature of the topic itself. The Christian believers who were under the authority of the apostles and then under the bishops appointed by them understood this episcopal entity to be the Church. All the writings we have from the first and second century attest to this. If we will read the letters, sermons, and tracts of Ignatius and Clement and Justin and Irenaeus, we will find a church that, if she is not the Church, is certainly the only one anyone had any knowledge of. If we wish to forego any connection with this lineage, then we find ourselves obliged either to link ourselves with the Montanists, the Marcionites, or the Nicolaitans or to postulate some fugitive network of assemblies of which there is no record. That is, we must identify either with heresy or with a lacuna in the record.

In this sense, Roman Catholics at times find themselves thought to be arrogant in their claim to such ancient lineage, whereas in their own imagination it is a matter for plain humility. We are merely the heirs to that noble lineage, they would say. No merit or glory attaches to us for what the apostles and Fathers did. We cannot “claim” them, if by that we mean that they are ours in some proprietary way. They are ours only in the sense that our great-grandparents are ours.

Catholics find themselves at a loss when a fellow Christian identifies himself as a follower of a man from the sixteenth or seventeenth century. No Catholic makes any such claim. There are in the Catholic Church, to be sure, Benedictines and Augustinians and Franciscans: but the names of the men in these titles simply specify the orders in the Church to which men and women identifying themselves thereby belong. These names do not refer to the kind of Christian our Benedictine or Franciscan is. For that, there is only one category: “catholic”.

This word came into play within the first hundred years of the Church, precisely to point to the nature of the Church, namely, that she is the only “church” there is in the whole world and that she is discernibly and organically linked with the bishops who have been consecrated by the apostles. If I say that I am a Marcionite or an Arian or a Lutheran, to that extent I seem to distinguish myself, for whatever reasons, from the immense and plain category in which apostolic Christians see themselves.

To be Catholic, then, is, in a sense, to make a claim that can readily be interpreted as a barefaced attempt to “trump” all others in the discussion about what the Church is: “Well, I don’t know about the rest of you; but I simply belong to the Church founded by Jesus Christ. I am in the Ark, so to speak, and the rest of you in your small craft may climb aboard whenever you are ready.” It is an attitude of which Catholics are not altogether innocent; and it is certainly an attitude that understandably vexes non-Catholic Christians.

Two matters call for clarifying at this point. First, every non-Catholic group in Christendom sees itself as a simple, even obvious, return to “New Testament Christianity”. Very few groups claim to offer something new. Insofar as they do, they find themselves regarded by the rest of Christendom as heretical or, at best, sectarian: Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses would be the most well-known groups here. But Lutherans, Calvinists, Mennonites, Wesleyans, and all the other bodies to which a man’s name is attached will tell us, “We didn’t take up that name. We are simply New Testament Christians. Outsiders designated us with that name, and if it helps to identify the particular biblical emphasis that our group brought into the historical jumble, then we accept the name.” In some cases, as with the Plymouth Brethren or the Christian Church, known respectively by outsiders as Darbyites and Campbellites, the believers themselves demur over any title, strongly emphasizing that what you see among them really is nothing at all but simple New Testament practice. And all Baptists hold that they have no special historic axe to grind: look into the New Testament, and you will find the Baptist Church, they tell us.

This brings us to the second matter, namely, the title “Roman” for the Catholic Church. Is not this the most unabashed admission of some late-arriving loyalty or identity, wholly unknown to the disciples, the first women, and the early converts?

What needs to be brought into play with respect to both of these matters—the claim of many non-Catholic groups to be simply the Church as the Bible anticipates her and the odd Roman identity that attaches to the Catholic Church—is the distinction between the effort, on the one hand, to hark back strictly to the text of the New Testament for a pattern thought to be visible there and, on the other, the view that sees the first decades in the apostolic Church, in all her rudimentary simplicity, as very much like an acorn from which an immense oak eventually rises (or, to reach for the Gospel image, a mustard seed).

That is, the thing (say Catholics) that was inaugurated, or planted, by Jesus Christ was a healthy organism, and like all healthy organisms she developed and grew. To find out what she looked like as she began to grow, we have to consult the record that follows immediately from the New Testament itself, namely, the writings of the men who had been disciples of the apostles and into whose charge the Church had been committed by the apostles. In the matter of the Christians’ worship, for example, we have already noted that the Book of Acts and the pastoral epistles barely glimpse what actually occurred: similarly, a Catholic would remark, the whole matter of the government, or “polity”, of the Church, barely glimpsed in the New Testament, emerges organically within a few decades as the “episcopal” church of Ignatius, Polycarp, and Clement, who, it is to be recalled always, were themselves taught by John and Peter and Paul. In their writings we will find, as we have already noted, both episcopal discipline and eucharistic worship. We will also find, fiercely insisted upon, the notion that the Church is one and that no one may start something afresh, any more than an Old Testament Hebrew might start Israel afresh, even if Israel herself were whoring away most brazenly.

Briefly, to be Catholic is to see the Church’s early itinerary as looking like this—or actually, we might say, to be any sort of inquirer at all is to observe such an itinerary: the Church formed herself, in response to apostolic preaching, in city after city around the Mediterranean as the decades passed, and in each city that company of Christian believers, or church, was visibly, organically, obediently in fellowship with, and under, the bishop. Antioch, Smyrna, Alexandria, Carthage, Lyons—in every place you could find the Christian Church, and where you found the Church, you found the bishop. (Actually, it was often expressed the other way around: “Where the bishop is, there is the Church.”) The people who followed and formed themselves under Marcion, Mani, or Montanus were not catholic Christians: the term “catholic” was the term that distinguished the Christians who saw themselves as linked to Jesus Christ via the apostolic link he had forged.

The bishops were in touch with each other and met in council intermittently, as the apostles had done, to decide matters of teaching. or discipline (we may all recall here the first such council, under James in Jerusalem, where they decided what to teach converts, Jewish and Gentile, about the law). When the council met, and then spoke, the topic in question was concluded, so to speak. Debate did not go on and on and on.

At the same time, everyone took quite soberly the singular words spoken by Jesus Christ to Simon Peter: “Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my church”, and “I will give you the keys of the kingdom”, and “Feed my sheep.” These texts have long since been raked raw in the attempt to find a “non-Catholic” construction to put upon them: but it must be acknowledged by all of us that the “Petrine” nature of the Church came into view early. The office of Peter was seen to be the pledge (or the “sacrament”), so to speak, of the Church’s visible unity, here in this world, for as long as history lasts. Jesus Christ is, of course, the chief Cornerstone.

Other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid in Christ Jesus: all Christians must acknowledge this. But the Roman Catholic Church believes that those peculiar charges given to Peter were what they seem to be. This has been her understanding from the beginning. Peter is, in some sense, that visible “sacrament” on earth, for as long as history goes on, of the unity that binds the Church together and to Jesus Christ her Head.

But this leaves the question of Rome still unanswered.

Why Rome?

Peter went to Rome, as we know, and the Church has, from early on, understood his apostolic ministry to have constituted the first episcopal ministry there. There is no such claim made by anyone for St. Paul’s preaching and teaching role at Rome.

This Petrine presence in Rome, coupled with the strange fact that, before long, the bishops around the Mediterranean found themselves looking to Rome as if it in some sense represented a “chief” see (bishop’s seat), is what lies at the root of the Catholic Church’s teaching on the papacy. This sketch of the matter is only that, a sketch, included here, not by way of convincing non-Catholic Christians in the matter, but rather simply to put forward enough bare data so that both Catholics and non-Catholics may at least agree on what exactly it is that Rome thinks about Peter, and hence why this church is called the Roman Catholic Church. It is not a church other than the church of Jerusalem and Antioch: it is how that church grew.

In this connection, it is not without significance that the phrase Roma locuta est (Rome has spoken) began very early to be heard, in matters involving the sort of question taken up by the bishops in their councils. The bishops in Rome—Linus, Anacletus, Clement, and so on—were believed to be the successors to Peter and, thereby, to have inherited the particular office that was his, to teach and rule in the Church. They sat in Peter’s seat (see), in this view. In them the Church pointed to the unity that was more than a fantasy and that is dissipated, or violated, every time a man starts the church anew, as it were (again, the precedent of the undoubted unity of Israel, bad as she was, is always in view here). For the apostolic and patristic Church, there was no such thing as any “invisible church”, except in the sense that God alone knows who is truly regenerate among catholic Christians in the only Church there is, namely, the visible one. Catholics have always accepted the melancholy fact that there are “unsaved” people in the Church. The Lord’s frightening words about the angels burning the sheaves (Mt 13) are always there, judging Roman Catholic ecclesiology.

The notion of a loose network, or aggregate, of assemblies and task forces across the world linked solely by common affirmations about Jesus Christ would have been incomprehensible to them. There was no such thing as an independent Christian, much less an independent assembly of Christians. If you were the believers in Antioch, you were under Ignatius, visibly, organically, and obediently: or else you were schismatics or heretics.

That is ferocious language, not appealing to our ears now. But this sort of terminology seems to have supplied the vocabulary of the discourse, as the Church made her way out into the long haul of history.

It will have long since been clear that another supposition is at work in all of the foregoing. You are speaking, it may be pointed out, as though the Church herself were some sort of source and authority for things. But we in our group hold fast to a principle that, if lost, casts all into confusion. It is the principle sola Scriptura. The Bible alone.

At this point stirrups are checked, lances leveled, banners hoisted, bugles blown. Charge!

It is not, of course, a question to be either trivialized or laid to rest with a colorful metaphor. It is a very high peak in the watershed between the Catholics and the Orthodox, on the one hand, and Protestantism, on the other. Blood as well as ink has flowed in this connection.

St. Augustine has condensed the matter as well as can be done in a very brief rendering. For him, Christians were to look to the Church for authority. Those who accepted “the authority of the Scriptures as preeminent” must, says Augustine, also recognize “that authority which from the time of the [earthly] presence of Christ, through the dispensation of the apostles and through a regular succession of bishops in their seats, has been preserved to our own day throughout the world”. This authority, “inaugurated by miracles, nourished by hope, enlarged by charity, established by antiquity”, was so powerful as even to validate the authority of the Bible. “For my part, I should not believe the gospel except as moved by the authority of the catholic Church.” [1]

Augustine’s words echo St. Paul’s view of the Church as “the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Tim 3:15).

Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians are bemused by the oddity that sola Scriptura is itself a non-scriptural notion. It is not taught in the Bible. No one had heard of it in the early Church.

To be Catholic is to be conscious of the immense weight to be attached to the teaching office of the Church, known as the Magisterium. There has never been a wedge driven between the Bible and the Church’s Magisterium. On the one hand, there was no Bible as we know it—certainly no New Testament—in those early years of the Church. The Gospels and letters were being written; but the believers were instructed by the apostles’ teaching. St. Paul keeps adjuring them to hold fast to what they have heard from him and the other apostles. This state of affairs is understood by the Church to be the origin of the authority to teach found in the Church: it is apostolic, and was never abandoned or canceled.

On the other hand, there is the Bible. The Church had the whole of the Law and the Prophets and Psalms and other literature from its Jewish root; and new texts, from Paul, Peter, Luke, John, Matthew, and others, began to be received and read in the Church—at the liturgy, actually: this seems to have been the earliest use to which such writings were put. The Bible, as it came later to be known, was primarily the Church’s book. It was not thought of as a bound volume whose principal use would be by the individual believer. Scripture was to be read in the Church; or, to put it somewhat differently, Scripture comes peculiarly into its own when it is read at the liturgy. This is its native context, so to speak. Here it is heard in all of its authority and plenitude. “Faith cometh by hearing”, our Lord said. It has, from time to time in some sectors of Christendom, seemed as though this ought to be annotated to read “Faith cometh by reading.”

To be Catholic is to be acutely conscious of the harmony that obtains between Scripture and the Magisterium. It is not, however, simply to be conscious of this harmony: it is to be deeply grateful for it.

Catholics see the tumult that rises from the contradictory readings of Scripture offered by rival groups in Christendom and wonder what the faithful are supposed to believe when there is no final voice or forum that has power to say, “This is what is to be believed, and that is heresy.” It is, of course, widely imagined that we are now in an epoch that disallows any vocabulary as peremptory as “heresy”, since to trot out such a word is to inflame things, for a start, to be “judgmental”, and to roil the ecumenical waters. Nevertheless, however we may all wish to soften things, it remains true that not everything can be true. It cannot, for example, be the case that God is at the same time immutable and “in process”. Nor can it be true simultaneously that the bread at Communion is only bread, to be used as an aid to memory, and that it is the Body of Christ in a fully sacramental sense. Either there is a hell or there is not. If John Calvin is correct about who may be saved, then John Wesley is wrong. If Christian believers are to be whisked away from danger at the end of time in a “secret rapture”, then everyone who supposes that the Church will go through unexampled tribulation as the end approaches is mistaken. Not everything can be true.

The Church ran into questions, not only like these, but, more seriously, over the matter of just exactly who, or what, Jesus Christ was to be believed to be. An excellent man? A prophet filled with the Holy Ghost? A phantom? A creature begotten by God at some remote “point” in past eternity but not eternal as the Father is? These were the questions that vexed the early Church, and Scripture was adduced by all sides. The New Testament supplied everyone, heretic or orthodox, his ammunition. It took the Church in her councils of bishops to settle forever (they believed) such questions. We today believe what we believe about the Son of God because of the Councils at Nicaea, Chalcedon, Ephesus, and Constantinople. We are not left forever leafing back and forth through the New Testament, shoring up our various points of view.

To be Catholic is to appeal to this. When Catholics recite the Creed, for example, it is not as though here were an item to be located either ahead of or behind Scripture. What is being articulated is “the Faith”, and this is authoritatively attested by Scripture and by the Church’s apostolic teaching authority, and that authority is present, as it has been from the beginning, in the Roman Catholic Church.