Fundamentals of Catholicism by Father Robert Altier Lesson 10: The Church (Part 2)

So the Pope is that point of unity. Since the Church is going to endure until the end of the world and Peter would die like the rest of us, then we must see it as the intention of Christ that Peter would hand his office on to someone else. Since there are thousands of dioceses and bishops throughout the world, the question is: How do you know who is the successor of Peter? As I mentioned earlier, going all the way back to the beginning the tradition is that the Bishop of Rome is the successor of Saint Peter in primacy.

The Pope has full episcopal power over the whole Church in matters of faith and morals, as well as in the government of the Church. Episcopal power means the power of the bishop.

Interestingly, if you translated that directly into Latin or English, it would be “supervisor.” So it is the one who is the overseer.

Fundamentals of Catholicism by Father Robert Altier

Lesson 10: The Church (Part 2)

In the previous lesson, we were talking about Peter, and now we want to move into his successors and look at the primacy of the Pope. The purpose of the papacy is to preserve the unity and the solidarity of the Church for all time. You have to have a head; there has to be a point of unity, otherwise we split up. All you have to do is look at any of the groups that have broken from the Church. Immediately, they start splintering into all kinds of groups. You can find that either on the right or on the left; it does not matter; they all do the exact same thing. So the Pope is that point of unity. Since the Church is going to endure until the end of the world and Peter would die like the rest of us, then we must see it as the intention of Christ that Peter would hand his office on to someone else. Since there are thousands of dioceses and bishops throughout the world, the question is: How do you know who is the successor of Peter? As I mentioned earlier, going all the way back to the beginning the tradition is that the Bishop of Rome is the successor of Saint Peter in primacy.

The Pope has full episcopal power over the whole Church in matters of faith and morals, as well as in the government of the Church. Episcopal power means the power of the bishop. "Episkopos" is the Greek word for bishop. Interestingly, if you translated that directly into Latin or English, it would be “supervisor.” So it is the one who is the overseer. That is the role of the bishop, to oversee the life of the Church. For the Pope, it is for the whole Church and not just a diocese. The Pope’s power is called ordinary, which means it comes directly from the Lord and is something he exercises of his own authority. It is not an extraordinary thing where he needs permission from someone else, but he has it in and of himself. He is not, then, a delegate of a council; he is not a delegate of another group; he is not even a delegate of the cardinals who elect him. Once he is elected, he is the Pope, pure and simple, and he exercises this power of his own right. His power is also immediate, meaning he can deal directly with anyone without having to go through their bishop. If the bishop of one diocese gets upset with something that is going on in another diocese, that bishop must contact the bishop of the diocese where the other person lives to be able to address the situation; he cannot do it directly. The Pope, on the other hand, can. So if the Pope was upset with you, he could call you up himself and deal with the issue without having to go through the archbishop. But any other bishop would have to check with your own bishop first.

We say that the Pope’s power is also supreme, which means there is no jurisdiction in the Church equal to or greater than that of the Holy Father. The power of the Pope exceeds that of individual bishops and of all the bishops collectively. As the supreme lawgiver, the Pope can also change ecclesiastical laws. Those would be laws like fasting and abstinence laws, the use of vernacular in the Mass, things like that. Any of the laws that the Church Herself has put into place can be changed. However, like the rest of us, the Pope is obviously bound by divine law. He cannot change the Ten Commandments. Those are God’s laws and the Pope does not have any authority over those. Any of the laws that the Church has put into place, the Pope has complete authority to change them as he wills, but that stops with Church law.

We have all heard that the Pope is infallible, but what exactly does that mean? Infallibility is the quality of not being able to err or to lead others into error. More specifically, it means immunity or freedom from error in teaching the Universal Church in matters of faith and morals. It is the official dogmatic teaching of the Church that the Holy Father is infallible when he teaches authoritatively and definitively as the head of the entire Church in matters of faith and morals. Now how many times in history has that happened? Two. We hear all about the infallibility of the Pope, and it has happened only twice: once in 1854 when the Pope defined the Immaculate Conception of Mary, and once in 1950 when the Pope defined Our Lady’s Assumption. It is not something that is happening everyday. Pope John Paul II was the pope for nearly 26 years and never once spoke infallibly. One of the problems Catholics have is that we think we do not have to believe something unless it is infallible. That is not true. If it something the Church teaches, we have to believe it, even if it is not an infallible statement. To make something infallible simply means that there is no more discussion; we are not allowed to debate whether or not it is the case any longer.

There are four points we have to understand with regard to this teaching about papal infallibility. Number one, the Pope alone is infallible and not others to whom he might delegate part of his authority. Only the Pope has this ability to speak infallibly. Number two, the object of his infallibility is his teaching on faith and morals. If the Pope is an expert in something else and wants to write a book about it, that is up to him, but it is not infallible. Only with regard to matters of faith and morals can the Pope speak infallibly. Number three, the condition of this infallibility is that he speak ex cathedra. Literally, that means “from the chair.” The cathedral is the building which houses the bishop’s chair, the cathedra, and that is why the building is called the cathedral. What it means basically is that the Pope is speaking as the teacher of all the faithful with the full weight of his apostolic authority. If he is speaking as a theologian, he is not infallible. He must also have the intention of deciding definitively for all the faithful a particular teaching with regard to faith and morals, and it must be made clear beforehand. If the Pope says something next Wednesday at his general audience and thinks to himself, “That was a neat statement. I think we ought to make that infallible,” he would have had to make it clear beforehand that it was his intention to speak to the entire Church on a particular matter of faith or morals.

The idea of the chair is a point that we as 20th century American people would not recognize. But if you read the Bible, in the Gospels it says many times that Jesus sat down and began to teach. You might say, “What difference does that make? Who cares? The important thing is He began to teach.” No, the important thing for a Jew is that He sat down and began to teach because when the rabbi sat down it meant that what was going to follow was an authoritative teaching. If he was standing up, it was his own opinion. If he sat down, it had authority. So when the people would be in the synagogue and the rabbi sat down, everybody went silent because the rabbi was now going to speak something authoritatively. That is why you hear that statement over and over again in the Gospels. When Jesus sat down, that was an authoritative teaching. Ex cathedra, “from the chair,” does not literally mean that the Pope has to be sitting down when he does this, but it means “with the full authority he has been given.”

The fourth point is that the source of the Pope’s authority is the supernatural assistance of the Holy Spirit, Who protects the Pope from error and therefore from leading the faithful into error. Again, this is only with regard to teaching on matters of faith and morals. It does not mean that the Pope acts always in a way which is perfect. The Pope is a sinner like the rest of us. If you look at the history of the papacy, some of them have been horrendous sinners, very ugly characters. Yet in the midst of that, God has protected the teaching. Never once did any of these immoral people who had the office ever teach anything that was in opposition to the Church. Of course, they were so interested in their immorality that they did not teach anything, but nonetheless they did not deny any of the teachings of the Church and they did not teach anything that was wrong. So you see that even though some unfortunate souls have gotten into office, God protected the integrity of the Church’s teaching.

What is a bishop? A bishop is a successor of the apostles who sanctifies, teaches, and rules in a local church. The Pope is a bishop, but he has authority over the whole world. The other bishops have authority in a local area. They have authority only when they are in communion with the See of Peter and in subordination to the Pope. The bishop, however, is not a delegate or a representative of the Pope. He is an independent pastor of the flock entrusted to his care. He has to be under the authority f the Pope and united with him, but he is not the Pope’s delegate or representative to a particular diocese or archdiocese.

Each one of us, living members of the Church, must possess the grace of God and be animated by the Holy Spirit in order to be fully living members of the Church. This grace is the life of the Church, that is, it is the spiritual life of the members who make up the Mystical Person of Christ. We can see, then, that the Church is more than just a union of human persons because the Holy Spirit is involved; therefore, the result of this union is actually greater than the sum of its parts (something for mathematicians to chew on for a while). If you think about it, none of us is Christ, but together we all make up the Mystical Christ. So the result of this union is greater than the sum of its parts. This also means that those who culpably remain outside of the Church cannot share the Holy Spirit or the life of grace communicated by Him. Culpable means they are responsible, that they knew this was the case and they freely chose against it. Those who have never heard of Christ or those who are invincibly ignorant about the Church can receive the Holy Spirit, even outside of the body of the Church. These people, of course, must cooperate with the graces given to them and they must at least implicitly desire to belong to the Church of Jesus Christ. In other words, if they knew this was the truth and they could grasp that, they would want to be part of it. If they cooperate, they will save their souls, but they are in a greatly inferior position to those who belong to the Church and can receive strength from the sacraments.

I always use the following example: It is as if we as Catholics have the entire alphabet. We can make every single word in the unabridged dictionary. Anyone who is not Catholic does not have the fullness of the truth, and there are differing levels. There are some who are very close and some who are quite far away. There is truth in all these different groups. You look at the Orthodox, for instance. They are very close, but there are a few things that are a little off. They have most of the letters of the alphabet in this analogy, but there are some words they cannot make because they are missing a couple of letters. Then you can look at the Anglicans. They are close, a little further away than the Orthodox, so they are missing more letters. Then you can look at the Lutherans and so on; just start going down the line. As you get further and further away, they have less and less of the truth, but they still have some truth. If you go all the way down to the Hindus and the Buddhists, there is some truth there but they do not have a lot of it. They can make some words, they have some of the letters of the alphabet in this analogy, but they do not have all of it. In fact, they only have a few letters, so they are limited in the words they can make.

Here is another way of looking at it. If you think of a cruise ship going across the ocean, you could say that we as Catholics have first-class accommodations. We have the seven sacraments; we have the fullness of truth; we have everything given to us. We have this nice first-class cabin, and everything is provided. Then the further you get away, you have the poor guy in the lifeboat bobbing away. He is tied on to the main boat and he is going to make it, but he is back there opening his cans with a little can opener and getting the waves coming over the boat. He is in a very inferior position. Actually, to some degree, you have to hand it to him. Think of what he is doing. He is toughing it out and he will get there, but, unfortunately, sometimes what we tend to do is take it all for granted. We pay little attention to it. That is the tragedy for Catholics, and we are going to be responsible for that. If we do not embrace the truth that is given to us but instead we get so accustomed to it and take it for granted that we just ignore it or reject it, we will be held responsible.

I always think about the Protestants who do so much work for Christ. They have part of the truth, and look at what they do with the amount of truth they have. I think, “What would these people do if they had the whole truth? They would set the world on fire!” And what do we do with the whole truth that we have? Sit on our dead rear-ends and do nothing with it. Why? Because we just take it for granted. We will be held responsible for that. Jesus gave us everything, and what are we doing with it? That is something we need to think about, and those are some lessons we can learn from the Protestants who are living their faith and bringing it out into the world because in many ways they put us to shame with what they are doing. We need to learn about that real love for Christ. One of the differences between Catholics and Protestants is the whole understanding of the faith. You go back to the point of ecclesiology that we were looking at before. One of the problems for Catholics is that we can get stuck in our heads. The faith can be objective. Here are the things the Church teaches, here are the things we believe, and we say, “Yes, I accept that,” but it is all up in our heads. For Protestants, very little of the faith is up in their heads. It is all that personal thing with Jesus; it is a very subjective kind of faith. They are on fire with love for the Lord, and we are stuck in our heads with knowledge of the Lord. We need to get out of our head and into the heart. We have to accept the fullness of the truth because that is the fullness of Jesus Christ, but we need to get down into the heart and we need to make the faith subjective. We need to learn to live it and love it. That is what we can learn from our Protestant brothers and sisters: how to love the faith and bring it out to others. That is what they are doing. Again, what would they do if they had the fullness of the faith? They would be out setting the world on fire.

There is one woman who was received into the Church about 10 years ago. She was an evangelical Protestant. Since then, she has brought 22 more people into the Catholic Church. How many Catholics are even close to that? Here is one person averaging better than 2 people per year that she has brought into the Church. Here is somebody now with the fullness of the truth who is living it and bringing it to others. That is what we need to learn. That is what we need to do. We have the fullness, and yet we are remaining silent about it. We need to be able to stand up for Christ. As I oftentimes say, do not ever be embarrassed of Jesus. What a tragic thing that we would ever be embarrassed of the Lord! Yet that is what we tend to do. We do not like people to know that we are Christian, let alone Catholic. We go out to a restaurant and we will not pray because what if people saw us making the Sign of the Cross. We will not put up a picture of Mary or Jesus near our desk because it might offend somebody. Too bad! If Jesus offends people, that is their problem, but we do not need to be embarrassed of Jesus Christ. He told us that if we deny Him before men, He will deny us before His heavenly Father. So we need to stand up for Christ. Again, we need to love Jesus. Think about the person you love the most. For most of you, if are married, that is going to be your spouse. Would you be embarrassed of your spouse out in public? I hope not. Then why are we embarrassed of Jesus, Whom we are to love with our whole heart and soul and strength? If we truly love Him, we are never going to be embarrassed of Him. But if we do not love Him, if He is just an objective notion up in our head, well, then we do not say anything; we just keep quiet. No, we need to live our faith and we need to bring it out into the world. That is incumbent upon all of us.

We need to look at the characteristics of the Church. We have seen that this union which the Church has with Christ and the Holy Spirit is what makes the Church the Mystical Person of Christ. Considering that, can the Church ever defect from Christ? Well, if the Church is the Mystical Person of Christ, the answer is obviously “no.” That is the characteristic of indefectibility. This means that the Church is and will remain until the end of the world the only institution of eternal salvation because that is the purpose for which She was established. This also includes the essential immutability of the Church’s teaching and of Her structure.

If the Church is the Mystical Person of Christ, can She err in Her teaching with regard to faith and morals? No. That is the characteristic of infallibility. This is not the infallibility of the Pope; this is the infallibility of the Church. The Church is infallible because Christ promised the apostles and their successors, the bishops, the perpetual assistance of the Holy Spirit. This, and the promise of Jesus to remain with us all days until the end of time, guarantees the absolute truth and integrity of the faith that was taught by the apostles and has been handed on through their successors. Just as was the case with papal infallibility, so too the primary object of the infallibility of the Church is the formally revealed truth concerning faith and morals. That is what the Church is about. This means that in the concrete the Church is the final arbiter of the meaning of revelation that is contained in Scripture and tradition. It is for the Church to make those determinations. Jesus is the ultimate interpreter of Scripture. You see that in Luke 24: On the road to Emmaus, He interpreted for them every single passage in Scripture that referred to Himself. The Church is the Mystical Person of Christ; therefore, the Church now is the authentic interpreter of Scripture.

Another characteristic of the Church is the visible structure. There are churches other than the Latin rite of the Roman Catholic Church which we accept to be valid, but not necessarily in full union, and then there are others that are in full union with the Church. The traits necessary to be in full union are three. The profession of the same faith is the first point. If you go to a Lutheran church, word for word they will recite the Nicene Creed. It is exactly the same creed we pray every Sunday. So too will the Orthodox, the Anglicans, and so on. Number two is the use of the same seven sacraments. Now that cuts out a lot of them because the Orthodox have the same seven sacraments and the Anglicans will claim the same seven sacraments, but we do not necessarily accept them all. And number three is subordination to papal authority. That is where the Orthodox churches do not fit in. There are actually 21 different rites in the Catholic Church. We are the Roman rite of the Catholic Church. That is the largest of the rites, but there are others. In our own city, there is the Maronite rite (the Lebanese people), the Ukrainian rite (the Ukrainian Catholics), and the Ruthenian rite (the people from the other side of the mountain from the Ukrainians). These are all Roman Catholic. If you go to their Mass, you will not recognize it. They do not use the same Order of the Mass as we do, but it is the Mass. It is perfectly valid. They have Confession, Mass, and all the sacraments right there. They follow a different formula for it, but it is all the same. They are just as much Catholic as we are; they are just in a different rite. They use a different language and they use a different rite of the Mass, but it is every bit as Catholic as what we do in our own church here.

Every Sunday in the Creed, we profess our belief in one holy catholic and apostolic church. The Protestants also profess that same belief. These are called the four marks of the Church. What do they mean? They are the visible signs of the true Church of Jesus Christ. Where you find these four things – one holy catholic and apostolic – those are the four things that will designate the fact that this is the true church of Christ. We, of course, maintain that they are only found in the Catholic Church. Oneness means that the Church is undivided in itself. That is, it has both internal and external unity. The internal unity is achieved through the possession of the Holy Spirit in the Church, as well as in the individual members. External unity is attained through unity of doctrine, worship, and government, all of which the Church has.

Holiness means the infinite fullness of divine being, power, and goodness. The Church is holy in her origin because She is founded by Christ, and She is animated by the Holy Spirit. She is holy in Her purpose, which is the glory of God and the salvation of souls. She is also holy in Her fruits. That is, She is known by the holiness of the men and women who put their personal holiness at the disposal of the Church. A great blessing for us who live in this day is that we have two thousand years of saints who have walked before us and have blazed the trail so that we do not have to. All we have to do is get on the path and walk it because it is already there.

The Church is also catholic. As we saw earlier, that means universal. This catholicity is both internal and external. Externally, the Church has to have the intention to spread and in fact is spread throughout the whole world. Internally, the Church of Christ is endowed with all of the supernatural means necessary to effect the salvation of all peoples in all lands in all times. In other words, everything is necessary to bring about the salvation of every single person who chooses to come to Christ.

Apostolicity means that the Church is essentially identical to the Church of the apostles. This apostolicity is manifested in three ways: first, in the Church’s apostolic origin, that is, She is founded on the apostles; second, in her apostolic doctrine, that is, the identity of Her faith with that which was preached by the apostles, that we believe the same thing today as the apostles preached two thousand years ago; third, by Her apostolic succession, that is, the uninterrupted chain of legitimate bishops who linked the Church of the apostles with the Church of today, so every single bishop would be able to trace his lineage back to the apostles.

How does one become a member of the Mystical Person of Christ? Through Baptism. This means that all people who are validly baptized are members of the Church. The Second Vatican Council states, Those who are fully incorporated into the society of the Church who are joined to the Church’s visible structure, that is, through the bonds of the profession of faith, the sacraments, and of the ecclesiastical government and communion. That is the point we were making before about those three things that are necessary. It has to be the profession of faith, the same seven sacraments, and subordination to our Holy Father. Every baptized person is a member of the Church, but we are fully incorporated into the Church only when we have all of those points in place.

It is a solemn teaching that membership in the Church is necessary in order to be saved. In fact, there is a little dictum that goes back to the 3rd century which says, Non salus extra ecclesiam, which means “There is no salvation outside of the Church.” Now what exactly does it mean to say there is no salvation outside of the Church? There are some who thought it meant that one had to be explicitly a Roman Catholic in order to be saved. That is not true. A couple of years ago, the Church put out a document called Dominus Iesus, “The Lord Jesus,” and explained the point very clearly that it is not necessary to be a Roman Catholic in order to go to heaven. What it does mean, however, is that the Church is necessary. The Church is the necessary means for salvation. If someone does not know Christ or does not see that the Catholic Church is the way to salvation, we cannot expect that person is going to be an explicit member of the Church. Just think, if some of these people grow up being taught that the Church is the Antichrist, should we expect they are going to be beating our door down, saying that they want to get in? No. But if they try to be faithful and try to live God’s Will for them to the best of their ability, they will be saved. However, their salvation will be brought about through the Roman Catholic Church because the Church continues to offer the Mass. The Mass is the sacrifice of Calvary, so the Church continues to offer the sacrifice which brings about the forgiveness of sins and the salvation of souls. So anyone who is saved is saved through the Church.

The easiest way to be able to understand this is that no one is saved apart from Jesus Christ. As we read in the Acts of the Apostles, there is no other name given to man by which he will be saved other than that of Jesus. There is no salvation apart from Jesus Christ, and the Church is the Mystical Person of Jesus Christ, so therefore there is no salvation outside of the Church. Anyone who is saved is saved by Christ; anyone who is saved is saved by the Church. In that way, we can say that anyone who is saved is in some measure a member of the Church.

We said earlier that the Church is more than the sum of its parts due to the Holy Spirit which makes us “other christs.” But the Church is Christ, and therefore more than the sum of its parts. We also said that we become members of the Church through Baptism, and it is through Baptism that we become “another christ.” What about people like Lutherans and Baptist and so on? Are they other christs in that way? The answer is “yes” because they are baptized into Christ and there is only one baptism. Anyone who is validly baptized is another christ. This does not mean in the New Age sense that we are God or the Savior of the world or something like that, but rather we become a member of Jesus Christ, we share in His life, and we are to live the life of Christ. Saint Peter says we become partakers of the divine nature. We are elevated to a supernatural level of acting and of being, and so we have the ability to live as sons or daughters of God. That is what we are expected to live.

To be another Christ also means to share in His threefold office. We saw before that Jesus is Priest, Prophet, and King. It is not just enough to have these offices; we have to act upon them. Since we make up the body and the body expresses the person, these offices must also then be expressed in and through the body of the Church. Because the Church is the Mystical Person of Christ, the Church has to have those threefold offices of priest, prophet, and king. These are exercised through the hierarchy. Interestingly, we use that term for lots of things, but the word hierarchy means “priest leaders.” Hieros is the Greek word for priest, and arkhos is the Greek word for leader. That is why an archbishop is the lead bishop. You have bishops and you have archbishops. For example, if somebody is your archenemy or your archrival that means they are the leading one along those lines.

When we look at these three offices within the Church, the deacon activates the kingly office. The word diakonos is the Greek word that means “servant” or “one who serves.” Remember when we talked about the kingly office, we said it was an office of service. Jesus serves us, and if we are going to operate according to that kingly office, we are to serve Him and one another out of love. The priest obviously exercises the priestly office, which is offering sacrifice and mediation, as we have seen. The bishop has all three, but the teaching office is the one that is unique to him. The bishop is the teacher in the diocese. The rest of us who are given the authority to preach and to teach are given that authority by the bishop. He can take it away any time. He could say, “I’m the one who is going to do this. I’m going to teach; you sit down.” If he came in right now, that is what we would have to offer him. He is the chief teacher of the diocese, so he operates all three of those offices. Every priest has to be a deacon before he can be ordained a priest, and every bishop has to be a priest before he can be ordained a bishop. Interestingly, anyone who is male can be the Pope; one does not even have to be a priest or a bishop. It is going to be one of the cardinals, obviously, because they are the ones voting, but the fact is according to Church law that any male can be the Pope. (It could be one of you – you never know – just imagine.)

What we can say then is that the non-Catholics are indeed members of Jesus Christ because they are baptized, but do they have the full expression of Christ? The answer to that is “no” because the full expression of their baptismal grace is not possible since they do not have that threefold hierarchy within their churches. The Church teaches that Jesus willed and established a hierarchical Church, giving Her through Peter and the apostles the offices of bishop, priest, and deacon. You will see those in the New Testament. When Saint Paul established churches, first he would establish a bishop, then deacons, and eventually there were the priests. The Greek word for priest is hieros; the Latin word for priest is sacerdos. So where do we get the word priest in English? It comes from the Greek word presbuteros. The presbyter, when you read it in your translated Bible, they will probably have translated it as “elder” because that is the proper translation of a presbyter. Sometimes they will just say “the presbyters,” but most of the time they will translate that as “the elders.” And so they would establish bishops, presbyters, and deacons; those are the bishops, the priests, and the deacons, that threefold hierarchy which is there. Again, our English word for priest comes from the Greek word presbuteros.

We also believe in the Communion of Saints. What is this Communion of Saints? The Communion of Saints is all of the faithful on earth, in purgatory, and in heaven. It is all of those who are redeemed and sanctified by Christ. We see here that the Church transcends the earthly limits of time and space, and reaches into the nontemporal life of God. The Communion of Saints, then, is the living fellowship of all the redeemed, both on earth and in the next life, which is based on the possession of the divine life of grace. The Communion of Saints is every soul in heaven, every soul in purgatory, and every one who is in the state of grace on earth. They are all united by the same bonds of grace. If we commit a mortal sin and lose sanctifying grace, we have cut ourselves off. If we get to Confession, we are forgiven and we are reunited with the body. For the souls in heaven, of course, they have already made it. For the souls in purgatory, they will make it. They are all saints; they are holy souls. We very often refer to them as the poor souls, but they are holy souls; they are saints. They are people who died in the state of grace and they will get to heaven. Once you get to purgatory, you cannot go backwards because there is no opportunity to sin. So they will get to heaven, it is just a question of how much time it will take before they get there. Then there is the rest of us who are struggling here on earth trying to remain in the state of grace and trying to get ourselves, with God’s help, to heaven.

The souls in heaven and purgatory can pray for us, and we can pray for the souls in purgatory. They need our help. They cannot do anything for themselves other than what they are already doing, but we can. We can pray for them, we can help them, and they can get to heaven faster. You can be guaranteed that they will not forget the people who helped them. So make sure you pray for your relatives who have gone before you, for any of your loved ones, but also pray for the people who have no one to pray for them, those who need the prayers the most, those who are in the lowest rungs of purgatory because they are going to be there the longest. We can help them to move along more quickly. That is a great act of charity on our part. It will help them to get to heaven, and will bring about their prayers and gratitude for what we are doing for them. In that communion, we can help one another.

The thing that we see happening more recently in the Vatican is the whole point of ecumenism, the ecumenical concerns, trying to reach out to non-Catholic groups and bring people back into unity. Prior to the Second Vatican Council, that was a Protestant phenomenon. You did not see much of that going on in the Church; it was always there, but was not really being lived. During the Council, the bishops realized that this division among Christians is indeed a terrible scandal and that positive steps needed to be taken to bring about unity among Christians. For our part, we need to pray for that unity. Humanly speaking, it is going to be impossible to bring it about, but with God all things are possible. It is going to require some kind of divine intervention. There is some that can be done on the human level. For instance, a few years ago in the Catholic and Lutheran dialogue there was agreement between the Catholic Church and the Lutheran Church as to what justification is. The reason the Lutherans originally broke off was over the understanding of justification. We now have agreement about that. There are agreements with the Orthodox on a number of points that were dividing us. So we are moving closer and closer to reunification. In fact, with the Anglican Church, things were getting so close that they decided as their last great act of defiance to ordain women, because they knew we would never accept that. The reason why they did it was because we were going to be united. At that point, they lost about two-thirds of their people. A lot of them became Orthodox and a lot of them became Catholic. But you can see the movement towards unity. When Pope John Paul II went to different places in the East, the people who were primarily Orthodox would gather and start chanting “Unity! Unity! Unity!” because they recognized the need to be united as Christian people. So that is what we need to pray for and we can work towards it. It starts with our own individual union with Christ, and then goes from there.

Now a couple of final points to wrap all of this up. What is required of us with regard to the teaching of the Church? Number one, a religious assent of mind and will. In other words, the Church is the Mystical Person of Jesus Christ; therefore, what the Church is teaching is not an opinion – it is the official teaching. It is not for us to decide whether or not we personally like it any more than it is up to us to decide whether or not we personally like the teaching of Jesus. If we are going to say that we believe in Jesus Christ, then we need to accept all of His teaching. We are to give religious assent of mind and will. The Church, remember, only wants what is best for us. We do not always see it that way, but the only reason the Church teaches what She does is because it is what is truly best for Her children. Those of you who are moms, ask yourself whether your kids always agreed with your rules. How many times did you hear from your teenage kid: “You hate me!” Why? Because you told them they could not go out and do something stupid. So what do people say about the Ten Commandments? “God just wants to keep us under His thumb. He doesn’t want us to have fun. God hates us.” No, God lays out the rules because He loves us. Like any good parent, what He is saying is: “These are the rules because if you don’t follow them you are going to hurt yourself.” Now we all think we know better than God and we go out and commit all kinds of stupid sins, then we get a little older and look back at it and say, “I really messed myself up, didn’t I? I thought I was so smart and I thought I knew better than God, and I really made a mess of myself. I hurt myself terribly when I committed those sins.” That is what we all do. The Church’s teaching is there because it is what is truly the best. Even if we do not understand it, we give religious assent of mind and will to be able to say, “I believe that what the Church wants is the best. Even if I don’t understand why, I will accept it, but then I will try to understand why. I can ask questions. I can look it up.” One of the wonderful things about being Catholic is that it is all written down; all you have to do is look it up. You have to know where, but all you have to do is look it up. You can find out what the Church teaches, and you can find out why She teaches it. It is all there for anybody who wants to look it up.

Number two: There is an obligation to learn what the Church teaches and why before disagreeing. This idea that we can dissent from the teaching of the Church is completely wrong. The Church actually has laid out rules for dissent, and the only ones who can legitimately dissent from the teaching of the Church are experts in the field. If you have a doctorate in a particular field of theology and there is a teaching which is non-infallible, then you can personally dissent from it. There are two other rules that go along with this: number one, you have to put it in writing and send it to the Vatican; number two, you cannot teach it to others. Those are the rules. You have to be an expert, you have to put it in writing to the Vatican as to why you disagree, and you may not teach it to others. You cannot put it in books and you may not teach it in the classroom. If you are an expert, you may personally dissent from the Church in the field in which you are an expert. So if you are a moral theologian, you cannot be dissenting from something which is in dogmatic theology, and vice versa.

There are very clear guidelines that are set up because the teaching of the Church is there for our good, and if we do not understand it, we need to accept it before we say, “Well, I don’t know why the Church teaches this, so I don’t believe it.” We need to do the opposite. We need to be able to say, “I trust that the Church only wants what is the best for me, so I will accept it even if I don’t understand.” There is an old saying: Fides quarens intellectus, which means “Faith seeking understanding.” It is like the man in the Gospel: “I believe, help my unbelief.” We accept and then we try to understand. So ask questions, and do not be afraid to ask questions. But be careful whom you ask. There are people who are trained to be able to answer your questions. If you had a problem with some physical area of your body, would you go to your mother-in-law to ask the question? “What do you think? Do I have an appendicitis problem here or do you think it’s my gall bladder or is it just gas?” No, you go to a doctor because that is what they are trained for. If you have a toothache, you do not ask your mother-in-law if she thinks you need a root canal. You do not ask the person at the next desk either. You go to a dentist because that is what they are trained for. So if you have a question about the faith, why do you ask any Tom, Dick, or Harry along the way? “Hey, what do you think about this?” There are people who are trained to help us with that, and those are the people we can ask. There is nothing wrong with asking your mother-in-law about it, but make sure it is not just an opinion; make sure what you are getting is the truth. Look it up. You can look in the Catechism. The Vatican has a website: www.vatican.va All the Holy Father’s writings, all the dicasteries, all this stuff is out there. You can look it up. Obviously it is not all there because the Vatican has two thousand years’ worth of documents and it is going to take a while to get them all up there, but at least the more modern ones are there. Some of them you will have to know Latin in order to read, but there are translations of all the modern things. You can go to a seminary library and look things up. You have to understand that to go against the teaching of the Church is to deny the teaching of Christ because the Church is Jesus Christ. It is also to go against yourself; it is to live a schizophrenic existence because if you are baptized into Christ, you are a member of Jesus Christ. If you say, “I believe in Jesus Christ and what He teaches, and yet I don’t agree,” how can you do that? You either do or you do not. If you are going to be a member of Christ, you have to accept the fullness of Christ, not just part.

Seeing the Church as the Mystical Person of Christ also solves three problems for us. The first problem is being parts of a body without minds or wills. If we are just the Mystical Body of Christ, we might say, “Wait a minute. I’m not just a body part; I’m a person.” If we see ourselves as members of the Mystical Person of Christ, it takes care of that problem because we are persons united. It also takes care of the question of infallibility because the Church is Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ is God, and what He teaches is obviously infallible. It also answers the question of who acts in the sacraments. In the past, people have asked: Is it the Church? Is it the priest? Or is it Jesus? It is Jesus. The Church is Jesus Christ; the priest is Jesus Christ; therefore, it is the Lord Who is acting in the sacraments. They are not just a human thing and they are not an invention of the Church, but rather they are given to us by the Lord Who is acting in and through the Church’s ministry and in and through the ministry of the priest.

In the next lesson we will talk about Divine Revelation, Sacred Scripture, and Sacred Tradition. The Lord be with you. May the blessing of Almighty God, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, descend upon you and remain with you forever. Amen.

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