The Second Sunday
of Advent (C)
Dear
brothers and sisters,
This
past week, the United States of America observed the obsequies for her
forty-first President. Before laying him to rest in College Station, Texas,
funeral ceremonies were celebrated for George Herbert Walker Bush in Washington,
D.C. in the so-called National Cathedral, part of the Anglican Communion first
begun by King Henry VIII of England.
Watching
the ceremonies out of a patriotic virtue and with a desire to prayer for the
repose of his soul, a number of people sent questions to me via Facebook asking
something along these lines: “I’m watching the funeral for George Bush and they
have recited the Apostles Creed both days, including ‘Holy Catholic Church’.
What’s the relationship between the Episcopal and Catholic Church?” Given the
number of these questions I received, I thought I might address it this morning,
supposing some of you had the same question.
The
first mention of the Apostles’ Creed comes to us from a letter of Saint Ambrose
of Milan, the great preacher who taught and baptized Saint Augustine of Hippo.
In his letter, Saint Ambrose said, “Let them give
credit to the Creed of the Apostles, which the Roman Church has always kept and
preserved undefiled.”[1] He wrote
this letter around the year 390, indicating that the Apostles’ Creed was
already then well known. Already by the third century, this “rule of faith” was
considered to be part of apostolic tradition and those seeking the grace of
Baptism were required to accept it, as remains the same today. The Apostles’
Creed is, at were, a summary of the Christian faith, that which must be
believed in order to receive Baptism and thus become a Christian.
When
we speak of the “holy catholic Church,” we use a term first used – so far as we
know - by Saint Ignatius of Antioch. The word “Catholic” comes from two Greek
words: Kata, meaning “according to,”
and holos, meaning “the whole.”
Catholic then means “according to the whole,” or, put more simply, “universal.”
Around the year A.D. 110, Saint Ignatius said,
Let
no man do anything connected with the Church without the bishop. Let that be
deemed a proper Eucharist, which is administered either by the bishop, or by
one to whom he has entrusted it. Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let
the multitude of the people also be; even as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is
the Catholic Church.[2]
Jesus
Christ is present in the Catholic Church both because it is he who established the
Church and because it is in the Catholic Church that the Sacrament of his Body
and Blood is found.
Now,
if a group of Christians does not have the Eucharist, if they have – like the
members of the Anglican Communion - taken authority upon themselves and not
received it from the Bishop, they are not part of the Catholic Church, despite what they say. Saint
Augustine put it this way:
The consent of
peoples and nations keeps me in the Church; so does her authority, inaugurated
by miracles, nourished by hope, enlarged by love, established by age. The
succession of priests keeps me, beginning from the very seat of the apostle
Peter, to whom the Lord, after his Resurrection, gave it in charge to feed his
sheep, down to the present episcopate. And so, lastly, does the name itself of
Catholic, which, not without reason, amid so many heresies, the Church has thus
retained; so that; though all heretics wish to be called Catholics, yet when a
stranger asks where the Catholic Church meets, no heretic will venture to point
to his own chapel or house.[3]
How,
then, does one, in this age of so much confusion, determine where the holy
catholic Church is to be found? The answer is found in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan
Creed in which we profess “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.” Where
each of these four marks are found together, there is the Catholic Church.
First, the Church is
one because Christ did not establish a series of Churches, but one, gathered
around Saint Peter and his successors, with whom the members of the Catholic
Church maintain a spiritual communion.
Second, the Church is
holy because she was established by Christ and because she is his Mystical
Body. While the Church herself is holy, her members are sinners called to
holiness, every one of us. This is why J.R.R. Tolkien spoke of the Church as “the temple of the
Holy Spirit dying but living, corrupt but holy, self-reforming and rearising.”[4]
To help her members
become saints, the Church has been entrusted with everything necessary for
salvation; within the Church, nothing is lacking. What are these means to
salvation? The Scriptures; prayer; the Sacraments, especially the valid
Eucharist; the apostolic succession; union with the Bishop of Rome, the Pope,
who shepherds the Church in the name of Christ. Some of these are present
outside of the Catholic Church, but they are not all found together outside of
her.
Third, the Church is
universal, present throughout the world and not confined to any particular
people or geographic location.
Fourth, the Church is
apostolic because Christ Jesus founded it on the Apostle Peter with the rest of
the Twelve. This foundation upon the Apostles is essential to the nature of the
Church for it is through the apostolic succession that the mandate of
missionary activity is handed on through the ages in every place. It is the
through the apostolic succession that the faith of the Church is handed on
through the apostolic tradition in the Church.
This Church constituted and organized in the
world as a society, subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the
successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him, although many
elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside of its visible
structure. These elements, as gifts belonging to the Church of Christ, are
forces impelling toward catholic unity.[5]
Consequently, the
Catholic Church – and no other - is the Church of Christ.
Here, it should be remembered that,
according to Catholic doctrine, [the
Protestant] Communities do not enjoy apostolic succession in the sacrament of
[Holy] Orders, and are, therefore, deprived of a constitutive element of the
Church. These ecclesial Communities which, specifically because of the absence
of the sacramental priesthood, have not preserved the genuine and integral
substance of the Eucharistic Mystery cannot, according to Catholic doctrine, be
called “Churches” in the proper sense.[6]
Because they do not
possess the four marks of the Church, we refer to them not as Churches but as
“ecclesial communities,” as Church-like communities, you might say.
Even so, it is
possible to come to salvation within a Protestant denomination, if one has not
rejected the truth of the Catholic Church:
It follows that these separated churches and
Communities, though we believe they suffer from defects, are deprived neither
of significance nor importance in the mystery of salvation. In fact the Spirit
of Christ has not refrained from using them as instruments of salvation, whose
value derives from that fullness of grace and of truth which has been entrusted
to the Catholic Church.[7]
Whatever graces are
received within the ecclesial communities flows from the pierced side of Christ
through the Catholic Church; they contain some, but not all, of the means of
salvation.
Now, you might be
asking, what does this have to do with Advent? With Saint John the Baptist, the
Catholic Church continually cries out, “Prepare the way of the Lord” (Luke 3:4).
By doing so, she calls all people to “see the salvation of God” (Luke 1:6).
Because she is “confident … that the one who began a good work in [us] will
continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus,” Mother Church calls us
to “go forth weeping” with the tears of sincere repentance into the
confessional, so that, with our sins forgiven, we “shall come back rejoicing,”
“blameless for the day of Christ” (Philippians 1:6; Psalm 126:6; Philippians 1:10). Let us not ignore her call in these Advent days, let us not give in to
the secularizing tendencies of these days, but let us prepare our hearts to be
received by the Lord and to look upon the radiant glory of his Face, when at
last he comes. Amen.
[1] Saint Ambrose of Milan, Letter 42.5, to Pope Siricius, ca. 390.
[2] Saint Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to Smyrnaeans, 8.
[3] Saint Augustine of Hippo, Against the Letter of Mani Called “The
Foundation,” 4.5. In Jimmy Akin, The
Father’s Know Best: Your Essential Guide to the Teachings of the Early Church
(San Diego: Catholic Answers, 2010), 180.
[4] J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 250, To
Michael Tolkien, 1 November 1963. In Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 339.
[5] Lumen gentium, 8.
[6] “Responses
to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church,”
Response to Question Five.
[7] Unitatis redintegratio, 3.4.
