After two restless nights, Susan (as I will call her) decided that God wanted her to protest an article I had written on how to share the Catholic Church with believers who are not Catholics. She chided me for thinking that we ought to help these believers see that they should enter the Catholic Church.
Susan was herself a Catholic, but she did not think God wanted us to treat the Catholic Church as part of the good news. She thought that we should put aside our differences and do only what Jesus wants us to do. She was genuinely afraid of being divided from other believers and thought that Catholics should avoid division by ignoring the differences.
A couple of comments gave her away. She declared that the good news is “really about what Christ did on the cross for us” and did not include any of those matters over which Christians are divided. She praised a Bible study where “everyone shelves what their particular church teaches and instead commits to praying for God’s inspiration. . . . The focus is not on where we attend church but on what God wants us to be as Christians.”
Majoring on the Majors
Every apologetically minded Catholic has heard something like this from other Catholics: You are “majoring on the minors” or being “triumphalistic.” They will treat you like someone who at a dinner party asks the hostess her weight and then recommends a diet plan. Many of these Catholics mean well, but they make two serious mistakes. The first is that we can avoid asking which Christian body is right; the other is that Catholics cannot assert the Church’s unique claims and still live in deep fellowship with other Christians.
I suspect that if Susan had not made the second mistake she would not have made the first. A certain sort of Catholic slips into the denial of doctrine not because he dislikes doctrine but because he cannot stand hurting anyone’s feelings. He does not like to tell a Protestant brother in the Lord that he is, though still deeply loved, an estranged brother, a brother who has left the family.
Let us look at Susan’s first mistake. We have to explain to Catholics like Susan that Christians cannot avoid asking which Church is right, and that her own words prove it. Christian bodies do not disagree only on what might be called optional matters. They disagree on what is required.
For example, the Catholic Church claims, as Lumen Gentium put it, that “the Church, now sojourning on earth as an exile, is necessary for salvation.” The Church claims that “the Gospel” includes membership in a living body, and membership in that body is marked by obedience to its teachings and a commitment to communion with the successors of Peter as its earthly head. The Church says that if you fully accept the gospel, this is what you will do. For the Catholic, this is part of doing, as Jesus said, “all that I have commanded you.”
Susan said that the gospel is really—meaning solely—about what Christ did on the cross for us. The other things are options, personal matters of “where we attend church” but not of “what God wants us to be as Christians.”
If she is right, the Catholic Church is wrong to insist on baptism and the Mass and communion with the Holy See and everything else. In doing this the Church is making radical demands on people’s lives, so it matters very much whether she is right about it, or if Susan is. If Susan is right, her Catholic friends are badly mistaken, and she has to tell them. They are bound by requirements that are not in fact requirements at all, and if they are at all evangelistic, they are trying to impose them on others.
In other words, she has to do the thing for which she was blaming me. Whether she likes it or not, she has to be divisive. I know she meant well, but her letter was itself divisive.
Susan’s Mistake
Let me put it another way. Susan asked me, “Isn’t the ‘good news’ really about what Christ did on the cross for us?” Her answer is yes, by which she means that the Catholic Church’s claims are not part of the Good News. They may be a sort of special members’ benefit, but they are not part of the membership requirement itself.
The Catholic answer to Susan’s question is (as it often is) yes and no. There is no Church without the cross, and Jesus’ death and resurrection is the central fact of human history. So yes, the Good News is really about what Christ did on the cross for us.
But that central fact of human history enacts itself in human history in specific ways and in certain people by the instructions of the man who died on the cross and his authorized spokesmen: the four evangelists and Paul and Peter and James and John and whoever wrote the book of Hebrews. So, no, the good news is not really (meaning solely) about what Christ did for us on the cross. It is also about the life that his work on the cross made possible for us, and particularly about the life in the Church that is his body, until he comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead.
To put it a third way, Susan wrote that in her Bible study “everyone ‘shelves’ what their particular Church says and instead commits to praying for God’s inspiration while doing their study. The focus is not on where we attend Church but on what God wants us to be as Christians.”
But here she begs the question. What if where we attend Church is part of “what God wants us to be as Christians”? What if he doesn’t want people to “shelve” the Church’s instruction and read the Bible “for God’s inspiration” as if they could reliably discover it without the Church’s guidance? If Susan is right that this is the way Christians ought to read the Bible, then the Catholic Church is wrong. She is making claims that she has to assert as dogmatically—and therefore divisively—as the Catholic Church asserts its claims.
The question of truth is always a pastoral question, of course. If the Catholic Church is what she claims to be, Christians outside her membership are deprived of the comforts she offers: the guidance of the magisterium on all the very difficult questions we have to answer, the intimacy she offers with the saints who have gone before us (especially the Mother of our Lord), the great privilege of the Mass in which our Lord actually gives himself to us, and so on. For the believing Catholic, sharing the Catholic faith with other believers isn’t a matter of trying to “win them over so ‘Catholics’ are right” but of having a great gift he wants his friends to have too.
If the Catholic Church is not what she claims to be, then these comforts are just delusions. Some of them may be harmless delusions, but others will endanger human souls. (I have several strongly Evangelical friends who can argue this eloquently.) In either case, the person who cares for others cannot ignore the question of which Church is right. He cannot put his convictions on the shelf.
Deep Fellowship
So, as I said, Susan cannot escape trying to answer the question of which Church is right. She cannot help being divisive.
At some point, even in the most intimate group of faithful Christians, this question will raise its head and demand attention. So what does the Christian do? My correspondent seemed to be arguing that Christians must either treat their differences as irrelevant to “the Gospel” or fight about them, because the Catholic cannot assert the truth of his Church’s unique claims and still live in deep fellowship other Christians. This was her second mistake.
Such people seem to be thinking in an either/or sort of way: Either one Church is right and the others are wrong and the two cannot have anything to do with each other, or all of them are right, and everyone can be friends. Since they believe the second, they believe that we should not insist on the truth of our own Church’s claims against the others. This sort of claim, they think, inevitably leads to needless and indeed sinful division and a corporate failing to do what our Lord wants us to do.
However, generous-minded Christians, Catholic and otherwise, approach each other with a sort of both/and way of thinking. I mean that they believe “My church is right and members of other churches are my brothers and sisters in Christ.” This being so, depending on the situation and the need, sometimes the Catholic will share his faith with his friends and sometimes he will pray or minister with them.
The Catholic mind is more liberal—in the older sense of generous and flexible—than such Catholics as Susan seem to realize. The Catholic can show this liberality because he is a Catholic. He can believe in his Church and at the same time pray and work with believers outside the Church because they love the same Lord he does. They are one with him even across lines so great that they divide the Catholic from the Calvinist or the Baptist.
Lumen Gentium said that “in some real way they [Protestant Christians] are joined with us in the Holy Spirit, for to them too he gives his gifts and graces whereby he is operative among them with his sanctifying power.” Unitatis Redintegratio said that “men who believe in Christ and have been truly baptized are in communion with the Catholic Church even though this communion is imperfect. . . . All who have been justified by faith in baptism are members of Christ’s body and have a right to be called Christian and so are correctly accepted as brothers by the children of the Catholic Church.”
Being Friends
An analogy might explain what I mean. You may have had the experience of meeting someone with whom you strongly disagreed and finding that he was a good friend of one of your good friends. You still disagreed with each other, but the two of you found yourselves friends because you both loved a third friend. Though you had expected to argue with this person, and even worried that you would come to blows, you sat down with him and talked for hours as if you were old friends.
There would come a time when you had to face the disagreement, and facing it would strain your tempers and your nerves and test your new friendship, but the new friendship could hold because you both loved the third friend. Indeed, you may have restrained yourself because you feared upsetting your mutual friend by hurting each other. And when you had faced the disagreement, however you settled it, or did not settle it, you went back to being friends—a little sheepishly and nervously at first but growing in confidence and intimacy as time went on.
This is what happens, or what ought to happen, when a Catholic shares his faith with a Christian who isn’t a Catholic. They will sometimes pray together, and sometimes argue together. The arguments may be difficult and painful, but if they both keep looking to the Lord, their arguments will lead, if not always to conversion, to a deeper understanding of and respect for each other.
The Catholic will love his Protestant friend enough to insist, when the chance to speak arises, that the Church is right, and love him enough to keep quiet when it does not. He will love the Lord enough to love those who also love him, even when the friendship is stressful. Something of this, I suspect, is included in the image of the lion laying down with the lamb.