An Authority for the Ages

Ultimately, to be a Catholic it is necessary to believe one thing: the authority of the Apostles is inherited by the bishops of the Catholic Church. Before this claim is to be believed or rejected, it is first necessary to examine what it is the Apostles preached and by whose authority they preached it.

They report that they encountered a man in Roman-occupied Judaea from the town of Nazareth named Jesus. This man had a mysterious charisma about him. Though a son to a simple carpenter, his personality attracted all sorts of people spanning such classes as fisherman, government officials, public sinners, rabbinic teachers, lepers, soldiers, and even astrologers from Persia in search of a king. Something about him drew all these people away from their normal lives and demanded from them an uncompromised obedience to his will. Many -by no means all- gave this fidelity to him and the more that the Apostles got to know him, the more they sensed something more than human in him. For they began to sense something in this grace-filled man that, while being perfectly human like them, was also in some way divine.

The Apostles make further claims saying that this same Jesus, whom they called Lord and Master and Teacher, had fulfilled numerous prophecies found in their sacred writings. These scriptures, which spanned the centuries leading up to their own time, looked forward to this unique individual as the long-awaited Messiah, the promised King of the same lineage as David, the prophet who would surpass even Moses himself in speaking to God face-to-face. Zechariah, Isaiah, Daniel, Micah, Joel, all the prophets knowingly or unknowingly spoke of him whom the Apostles walked, talked, and ate with.

The Twelve Apostles also report that the Lord Jesus gained followers by performing miracles and wonders the number of which, if written down, all the books in the world would not be able to contain (c.f. Jn 21:25). Multiplying loaves, walking on the sea, calming storms, turning water into wine, healing the sick, raising the dead. Yet, all these miracles only seemed to confirm, in their own minds, the authority with which this same Lord Jesus had always taught, commanded, and acted; a sometimes gentle, but always powerful authority that compelled some to embrace him, others to reject him, and still others to fall down and worship him. The sharply varied responses Christ provoked in others is what caused friction between this extraordinary Rabbi and the rulers of the state who, supported by the acclamations of the crowds and the religious authorities, put him to death by crucifixion. But it is this very death, the Apostles teach, that was an act of unsurpassing love on the part of God which brings about the forgiveness of our sins. It was his subsequent rising from the tomb in which his corpse had been laid three days previous that foreshadows our own resurrection at the end of the world.

Now, lest the prospective Catholic think that the case for Christ has been sufficiently established with what has been said - that there can be such a thing as "mere Christianity" as C.S. Lewis put it and that the aforementioned is just that - he must look further into the Apostles' message. For as many Christians believe that the mere testimony of Jesus Christ as Savior equates to "The Faith", we have not yet answered the question as to why a Catholic says he ought to follow the Apostles and not directly follow Christ. After all, it is reasoned the Apostles witness to Him as Lord, not to themselves so whence does their authority arise and why submit to it?

With a deeper look into the witness of the Twelve, one will see that they seem to emphasize that this same Jesus from Galilee, whom they worshiped as the Son of God, chose to establish a visible Church on earth that would reunite the 12 tribes of Israel into a new body. The Apostles would go out, baptize, and teach Jew and Gentile alike the new universal revelation of God found in Christ Jesus. This new Body, the Church, alluding to the 12 scattered sons of Jacob, would be built on the foundation of the 12 Apostles with Peter as its cornerstone. These men would be given the gift and responsibility of transmitting the Christian faith with authority to the next generation. The Church would share the same mission as her Founder: to call men out from the crowds into her protective ark, to heal them of their wounds, to strengthen them with grace, and to prepare them to partake of the divine nature as adopted sons of God.

So that this message and work of Christ would not die with the death of the last of the Apostles, the Twelve planned ahead and appointed other men, in the same manner in which the Lord had appointed them, to succeed them in the apostolic office as authoritative witnesses to the Gospel (c.f Acts 1:20-26). These successors, whom we now call bishops, would also share in the Lord's promise given to the Apostles that the Spirit of Truth would lead them into all truth (c.f. Jn 16:13), that whatsoever they bind on earth would be bound in heaven and whatsoever they loose on earth would be loosened in heaven (c.f. Mt 16:19, Mt 18:18), and that whosoever sins they forgive will be forgiven them and whosoever sins they retain will be retained (c.f. Jn 20:23). To them would also be given the privilege of making new disciples by baptizing and teaching the nations (c.f. Mt 28:18) and feeding the people of God with the Lord's own flesh and blood (c.f Jn 6:48-58, Lk 22:14-20).

Having evaluated these weighty duties and responsibilities the Lord gave to the Apostles, and in effect the Apostles gave to their successors, it is now clear that there can be no good news of Christ except by way of this apostolic body He designed. As Hilaire Belloc once wrote: "There is no such thing as a religion called 'Christianity'- there never has been such a religion. There is and always has been the Church" (Belloc, The Great Heresies). For Christ has freely bound His revelation to the Church as a husband freely binds himself to his wife. Indeed, as St. Cyprian said only a couple centuries after the Apostles: "No one can have God for his Father who does not have the Church for his mother"(On the Unity of the Church). The whole Christian message is handed down to us not as a philosophy we grasp individually nor as a compilation of a wise man's teachings we subscribe to, but as a living, divine witness we receive through imperfect, weak men whose authority is made perfect by the One who sent them. There can be no other way in which the divine teaching of Christ is to remain anchored in a message that is consistent through the centuries than by the assurance that these teachers were given a special grace to do so in an ecclesial body that St. Paul teaches "is the Church of the Living God, the pillar and bulwark of truth" (1 Tm 3:15).

Perhaps St. Peter Fabre put it even more eloquently at a time when the Church's unity was being shaken to its core during the Protestant Reformation in the 16th-century: "One cannot retain the candle and disregard the candlestick for the candle would have no place in which to be firmly fixed." It is this candlestick that holds up a burning light to us that we can either turn to and enjoy all things in which the light casts illumination on or turn away from and try to make the best of things in the dark.

In either accepting or rejecting what this Body proposes for belief, the Church is really asking a deeper question to the prospective Catholic: do you accept our authority to hand the faith onto you in all its fullness? An affirmative answer to this is, for the consistently thinking person, the end of the search for the true Church, the orthodox Faith, the real Jesus. For if a man accepts the Magisterium and its authority, he no longer needs to go through each article of faith and hold it up to his own scrutiny. He has already done that with the Church's claim to authentically teach the faith entire so he is rest assured that if the gates of hell cannot prevail over this Body (c.f. Mt 16:18), much less of a chance does his reasoning have in doing so.

The 20th-century former Anglican who turned Catholic priest, Ronald Knox, articulately describes two different ways one can search for the true Church. In one way, a man seeking out a church to suit his fancy has within his intellect a set of proposed doctrines he is willing to accept; a "fides" as Knox calls it. His job then is to find a church body, a "fideles," that teaches those same beliefs he already holds in his intellect. His whole search from beginning to end remains comfortably within the limits of his own reasoning.

On the contrary, Knox highlights another type of search that entails not matching one's fides with a fideles, but learning one's fides from the fideles. When it comes to divine revelation, Knox argues this is really the only way to rationally search for and discover true doctrine; one must first search for and discover the true Church. The starting point must always begin with the credentials of the witnessing Body that teaches rather than the palatability of individual doctrines.

Did the Apostles ever say to those they brought to Christ: "Does he fit your image of what the truth is?" or rather did they not simply say, "Come and see"(Jn 1:46). It is a sort of creedal Copernican Revolution; for it is not that the light of faith conforms to the way we envision it, rather it is by entrusting ourselves to a faith we receive outside of our intellect that we are then enveloped in its light.

But why must the faith's abode be within the authority of the Church? Why could it not rest merely within a prayerful interpretation of the Scriptures by an individual Christian? Could not one simply look to the Bible to be enlightened by the light of Christ?

The need of a Church that has retained apostolical succession within its episcopate has already been put forth and cannot be overemphasized, but in addition to this, the answer as to why a theology of sola scriptura cannot be cogently argued is that the Scriptures are not an all-sufficient authority on revelation because they are not self-authenticating. They did not come down from Heaven and tell us that their words are to be believed. It took an outside authority to first compile them together and sanction their use in a formal canon. This did not happen until the Decretum Damasi of the late 4th-century. It would then reasonably follow that the authority that sanctioned the use of this approved list of scriptures must also be the same authority looked to for the interpretation of their content. As one of the greatest intellectuals the Church has ever known once said: "I would not believe the Gospels if it were not for the Catholic Church"(St. Augustine, Against the Letter of Manichaeus). It was the authority of the Church that compelled St. Augustine to give credence to the Christ of the Gospels, not the other way around. The authority of the Church remained preeminent even to the Bible itself in the thinking of Augustine. The fact that his lifetime coincides with the late 4th century to early 5th century- when the Church, in the person of Pope St. Damasus, first officially proclaimed what books were inspired by the Holy Spirit- probably explains why Augustine thought this way.

For the Catholic, once the authority of the Church's Magisterium is established as credible, the truth of its various doctrines can be inferred as true by the aforementioned Magisterium's very trustworthiness. There can be no other way in which divine truth can be safeguarded from one generation to the next except by a divinely appointed authority that passes it on. Additionally, it is self-evident that it must be this same divinely appointed authority that interprets the revelation for each generation to learn it anew, for in the end no prophecy, no scripture, no tradition is a matter of private interpretation (c.f. 2 Pt 1:20) and this interpretation is the prerogative of those who have first received what they then hand on (c.f. 1 Cor 11:23, 1 Cor 15:3). It is noteworthy that St. Peter says St. Paul himself can be easily misunderstood in his letters (i.e. in the majority of the books of the New Testament) for there are in them "some things hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures" (2 Pt 3:16). In other words, the Sacred Scriptures are not to be read isolated from the spirit of the Church that holds the Christ-given authority to preach them. As St. John Henry Cardinal Newman put it: "Every creed has [scriptural] texts in its favour, and again [scriptural] texts which run counter to it," for this reason the leading Oxford controversialist concluded "the sacred text was never intended to teach doctrine, we must have recourse to the formularies of the Church"(Apologia Pro Vita Sua). It was this line of thought that would help lead John Henry Newman from being one of the most influential Anglican prelates in the 19th-century to a priest of the Roman Catholic Church.

Ultimately, all the prospective Catholic needs to determine is this: Does the Catholic Church exist in his day along the same line of authority as that given to the Apostles. Does the Catholic Church have a legitimate claim and ability to prevent the flame of the candle from falling to the ground and thereby risk being smothered?

One who has surrendered to Rome's claims recognizes that she is the only Church which claims responsibility for the welfare of all Christians in the world because with her the authority to teach, sanctify, and govern has been preserved in a concrete line of apostolic succession reaching all the way back to Christ Himself. With her is the petra, the petros, the successor to St. Peter in the person of the pope, the rock upon which Christ built His Church. The keys have been taken from the former steward Shebna, they have now been laid upon his petrine shoulders to open what shall not be shut and shut what shall not be open (c.f. Is 20:15-25, Mt 16:18-19). No other church preaches such a sweeping, universal claim as being the "Mother of all Churches" and that outside of her salvation cannot be found. It is through her we encounter the fullness of Christ's message and not one bit of that message is something that can be disregarded without a commensurate misunderstanding of the person and message of Christ.

Christ, as the Gospels (i.e. the Apostles) show, did not enter a nebulous cosmos devoid of space and time. He entered our world at a specific time, at a specific place, to a specific group of men. Imperfect though they be in wisdom or moral conduct, He chose to impart His Spirit on them to make them reliable transmitters of His message and grace through word and sacrament. If one doubts that the Lord could do that, he ought to doubt more spectacular things professed in the various creeds of the churches. If one doubts that He did do this, he ought to doubt God actually wants to be known, for to think that He would make Himself known for a span of three years (the length of His public ministry) and expect the rest of human history to still know Him centuries after, makes one question the wisdom of the divine Mind. To put it tersely: " For God to have given His revelation and made no provision for its preservation would have been sheerly insane" (Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity). Even in the immediately following generation after the Lord's earthly life, knowledge of Him would be quickly distorted - as happened with the growth of heresy by those who ventured away from the authority of the Church in the early centuries of the first millennium. It is only fitting that Christ would establish a reliable authority empowered by His Spirit to authentically lead men back to God.

Christ came to us as a man so that, through men, we might come to Him. It really is as simple as it was in the early days of the Church when the preaching of St. John the Apostle was stilling ringing in the ears of St. Ignatius of Antioch in the early 2nd-century: "Wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be; as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church"(St. Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Smyrnaeans).