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C l a s s i c A p o l o g e t i c s
I Believe in the Holy Catholic Church
By Msgr. Ronald Knox
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This Rock
Volume 18, Number 9
 November 2007 
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When you say, "I believe in the holy Catholic Church," you’ve said a mouthful. If you believe in the holy Catholic Church, then it follows that you believe in all the rest of the Credo; it would be silly to believe in the Church and not believe in what the Church tells you.
If you look up the word Church in a really large dictionary, it will tell you several things about it; such as that there are really twenty different ways of spelling it, which is good news for those of us who aren’t very handy at dictation, and that it is connected by derivation with various words in other languages, for instance with the Old Slavonic word criky. But what nobody seems to know is what it is derived from. However, that doesn’t matter much, because it is used to translate the Greek word, which is also a Latin word, ecclesia. And ecclesia means a collection of people specially appointed for a purpose. In ancient Athens, for example, they called their House of Commons the ecclesia, the national assembly. And when Almighty God brought the children of Israel out of Egypt, he called them his ecclesia, his assembly. They were to be his representatives, in a world which had gone idolatrous. He had called them out (that is the root meaning of the word) from Egypt, from a land given up to the most extraordinary superstitions, a land where people used to worship crocodiles and cats. He had called them out into the desert of Sinai, where there were no crocodiles or cats to worship. They were to be his chosen people, his assembly, his picked lot. And that was the word which our Lord took over, that was the idea which our Lord took over when he came to earth and founded what we call .his Church. When he said to St. Peter, "You are my rock, and
I am going to build my church on this rock," he was setting out to do the same thing which God had done when he called his people out of Egypt. Moses had started a church, the church of Israel; now our Lord was going to start a Church of his own—that is what he meant by "my Church." He, too, was going to have a picked lot of people to serve him and to represent him, and that picked lot was you and me.
Fellowship of the King
Part of the fun of being a Christian is belonging to a Church. It gives you a sort of cozy feeling, doesn’t it, to be one of a picked lot. You know what it’s like, when you’re playing some game in which it’s necessary to pick sides; there you all are in a crowd, perhaps twenty of you, and then the captain of one side says, " I’ll have you, and you, and you," and all at once you begin to have a friendly sort of feeling for the other people on your side, even if you only know them quite slightly; they are your comrades now, although they were only comparative strangers to you two minutes ago. That feeling of comradeship, of belonging to the same crowd, is for some reason one of the delights of the human mind . . . It’s a natural human instinct to get together and form associations like that.
For Christian people, and for us Catholics especially, this feeling of comradeship forms part of the stuff of our religion. It gives us a curious lightening of the heart, difficult rather to explain, when we find out suddenly that the policeman who stands on duty at the street corner or the girl who does our hair or the man who comes in to wind up the clocks is a Catholic, too. You’ll find something of the same kind, I think, about visiting Catholic countries. You get an added enjoyment out of it from the mere feeling that all these strange people, talking a quite unintelligible language and dressing in rather bad taste and driving their cars on the wrong side of the road, are, nevertheless, Catholics—there is a bond, after all, between you and them. When our Lord Jesus Christ came down to earth he became man, he understood, and he allowed for, all our human instincts, even our quite unreasonable human instincts. And he allowed for this human instinct of comradeship by founding a Church. He went round, like the captain of a side, saying, " I’ll have you and you and you"; and all at once we, the people on whom his choice fell, became friendly with one another; we all belong to the same crowd, a very big crowd and a very mixed crowd, but all of us vaguely united in our sympathies because we all belong to him.
It’s true, he didn’t often talk about his Church. Not, I mean, under that name; usually he called it the kingdom of God, or the kingdom of heaven. Nine times out of ten when our Lord uses either of those phrases he is really talking about his Church. But we needn’t stop just now to consider why he did that. The person who really put the word "church" on the map was St. Paul. I think if you count up you will find that the word "church" occurs about sixty times in his writings, which aren’t after all very long. It’s true that he sometimes confuses us by talking about the church at Ephesus or the church at Philippi as if they were two quite different things, like the Church of England and the Church of Scotland. But . . . to him it was all one thing; one great, glorious association, called out, and called together, by the word of Jesus Christ.
But, of course, it isn’t just an association. The Church is a supernatural association, which is meant to get us to heaven. It isn’t merely something which unites us together, you and me, it is the thing which unites us to Jesus Christ. And that, I think you can say, is the main difference between the Protestant and the Catholic idea of salvation. The Protestant hopes to be saved just by faith in Jesus Christ; the Catholic hopes to be saved by living and dying as a member of the Church which Jesus Christ founded. . . .
Bride, Building, and Body
St. Paul has three favorite metaphors by which he tries to give us some idea of what the Church is and what it ought to mean to us. He is always referring to it either as the bride of Christ, or as the temple of Christ, or as the body of Christ.
You all know how, in the fairy-stories, the prince is never allowed to marry the princess until he has killed at least one dragon and an assortment of giants, and probably fetched a jug of water from the well at the world’s end, or done something energetic like that. He has to work hard, has the prince, to win his princess. And although things aren’t quite like that in real life, they are rather like that in real life. A man can’t reasonably expect a woman to marry him until he has got a job, so as to be able to support her. And, while I shouldn’t advise you to marry anybody for his money, I shouldn’t advise you, either, to get engaged to a man who hopes that if he practices a bit more he may get taken on as a saxophone in a dance-band—you’ll find your father will kick like a mule if you do that, and quite rightly. A man has got to win his bride, and so St. Paul thinks of our Lord as coming to earth to work and to win a bride for himself, and that bride is the Church. So that the love of Christ for his Church, the love of the Church for Christ, is something as strong, as lasting, as unselfish, as consuming, as the love of a man for a woman, of a woman for a man.
He can’t talk about husbands and wives without going off into a long digression about Christ and his Church—that was the way St. Paul saw it. You and I, then, if we want to win the love of Christ, have got to be loyal first and foremost to his Church; it is as part of that Church that he sees your soul and mine, as part of that Church that he wants to win it for himself. And then, suddenly switching off, St. Paul will begin talking about the Church as a great building, about you and me as stones set in that building. "You are fellow-citizens of the saints," he tells us, "built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone. Each of us is fitted in, wedged in, into his proper place in this building, and the whole of it rests, ultimately, on Jesus Christ." And that is meant to show how important unity is in the Church, and how we all depend on one another. You know how sometimes people tell you that such and such a thing isn’t very edifying. If I were to come in to Mass every morning five minutes late and tying up the strings of the chasuble as I went, people would say it wasn’t very edifying. What does that word mean, edifying? Why, simply building up. You and I are building up one another’s faith all the time, like stones in a building wedged together so that one stone keeps another in place. And that’s what the Church is like; we are all supporting one another, depending on one another; and your faith, however unimportant a Catholic you are, is valuable to Jesus Christ because it is helping, in its small way, to shore up that vast edifice, his Church.
But after all stones are dead things, and buildings are dead things; so St. Paul likes to be even more daring than that. Instead of telling us that we are a building of which Christ is the corner stone, he will tell us that we are a body, of which Christ is the head. If you cut off a person’s head, that person dies; the brain is the center of that nerve-system by which we live. So Christ, as our Head, gives life to his Church; it is from him that the graces which we need flow into every part of the body, flow into you and me. When you have a pain in your big toe, you don’t really feel it in your big toe, you feel it in your brain. So closely is the whole system of the human body knit together; and you and I as members of Christ, as limbs of Christ, are bound together as closely, as really with him as a human body is bound together, and bound up with its head.
Born the son of an Anglican bishop, Msgr. Ronald Knox converted to Catholicism in 1917. Among other works he translated the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome and the Imitation of Christ into English and was the author of numerous essays, spiritual works, and mystery novels. This selection is from The Creed in Slow Motion, based on a series of sermons he delivered at Oxford.
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