From the beginning of the Church, people have wondered what it is. A big part of St. Paul’s work, as reflected in his letters to the early churches, is clarifying what the Church is and is not.
To the Galatians, Paul had to explain that belonging to the Church does not require first becoming Jewish. But he also needed to make it clear that there is nothing wrong with coming into Christianity from Judaism! To the Philippians, he explained that the Church is not a place of self-fulfillment, but rather where like-minded sacrifice is required. To the Ephesians, he taught that there is vast, desirable diversity among the unified believers, but that pagan morality is incompatible with the Church’s life. To the Romans, he explained how the Church is in continuity with Israel, and how Jesus is the sinless recapitulation of sinful Adam.
Perhaps most interesting is Paul’s need to clear up several misconceptions among the Corinthians, whose false impressions about what they belonged to may resonate with today’s Christians better than any of the previous examples.
First, some of the Corinthians mistook their local assembly for a cult of personality centered on a man named Apollos. Paul corrected them: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Cor. 3:6). Second, some of the Corinthians believed that their membership in the Church granted them a freedom in Christ that permitted immorality. Responding to the rumor that there was a Corinthian Christian shacking up with his mother-in-law, Paul exclaimed, “You are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you” (5:2).
Finally, Paul corrected the Corinthians on their misunderstanding of individual status among members of the Church. The Church was and remains today one body, with no spare parts. No spiritual gifts exceed any others in importance, and no social class has greater priority in gaining access to the sacraments. Paul explained to his ancient audience, and to us, too, that there was and is an animating principle for unity in the one, inseparable body of Christ, and that principle is the divine virtue of charity. The famous thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians begins, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”
Churchmen Apologize
In the era after Paul’s death, new Christian apologists had to set the record straight about new misperceptions of what the Church was and was not. That’s the job of an apologist—not to beg for forgiveness, but to make the case for something.
In the second century, one such apologist, St. Justin Martyr, also known as Justin the Philosopher, was confronted with the charge that Christians were atheists—that is, because the Catholic Church did not worship the pagan gods of the Roman Empire, its members were thought to have no god. Justin replied, “We are godless with reference to beings like these who are commonly thought of as gods, but not with reference to the most true God.” Justin went even further, noting that the Catholic Church did hold that the pagan gods had power over men, but that Christians called such powers demons and avoided them.
In another example from the second and third centuries, the Catholic Church was accused of being a house of cannibalism. After all, Christians claimed to eat their God, Jesus Christ. In a dialogue called “Octavius,” a Roman rhetorician and Christian apologist named Minucius Felix sought to address many false claims against the Church, including the charge of cannibalism, by use of reason. Octavius, a Christian, explains to his friend Caecilius, a pagan, that not only do Christians not eat human flesh, but “to us it is not lawful either to see or to hear of homicide.”
Examples abound through the centuries, reaching a crisis point among Christians in the Protestant Reformation. Among the many false claims Martin Luther and his successors made about the Catholic Church, perhaps the biggest one is the idea that there was once a true Church, but that at some point in history, the Roman Catholic Church either had ceased to be it or had never really been it in the first place. Sadly, even some Catholics today assume that there was once a purer or better version of the Church than there is today.
But as St. John Henry Newman concluded after many years of considering the claims of his own Anglican tradition, the evidence in favor of the Catholic Church’s continuity and flourishing in its God-given role in the world was much stronger than the evidence for its deterioration and abandonment of its identity. No matter how far back in Church history Newman went, he could never seem to find the real Church he was looking for. He described his findings in his masterful spiritual memoir, Apologia Pro Vita Sua:
The drama of religion, and the combat of truth and error, were ever one and the same. The principles and proceedings of the Church now, were those of the Church then; the principles and proceedings of heretics then, were those of Protestants now.
“What is the Catholic Church?” There are as many wrong answers as there are people to propose them.
Let us search for the right answer.
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