“Christ intentionally left behind Him the organised institution that we call the Catholic Church.”

Great men and women fall into two broad categories.  There are those who left no clear organisation to carry on their work, merely leaving it to providence, and there are those who put a well thought-out structure in place to continue their work.  It is the contention of this essay that Christ falls very clearly into the second category: Christ intentionally left behind Him the organised institution that we call the Catholic Church.

We need to be clear in our minds what we mean by an organisation.  Firstly an organisation exists for a clear purpose, it has a mission.  Secondly, it will have the specific powers necessary to fulfil its mission.  Thirdly it will have a head and a clear chain of command.  Fourthly it will have a rite of entry and there will be specific things required of its members.  Finally its members should be united in the same articles of faith and morals.

Within a few months of Our Lord starting His public ministry, He began hand-picking twelve men for special coaching.  First Andrew who had been a follower of St John the Baptist; he immediately drew in his brother, Simon, whom Our Lord, as soon as He clapped eyes on Him, renamed Rock (in English, “Peter”).  In three months Christ had completed the task of selecting the twelve men who were to become the foundation pillars of His Church.  Henceforth Our Lord’s mode of operating would be to preach to the masses in parables and then call the twelve aside and explain the parables to them.  So, from very early in Our Lord’s ministry, if one wanted to fully understand what He was teaching, one would have had to go to His Apostles.

Christ described His Church in many different ways.  He called it a Kingdom frequently.  He called it a net cast into the sea.  He referred to it as a field that contained good wheat and weeds; He then added that the weeds should be left until the harvest.  He called it a sheep-fold of which He is the Good Shepherd.  He also intimated that not all the leaders of His church would be good shepherds; some would be hirelings, and these hirelings would not protect the sheep.  Finally, He called it “My Church” on the occasion that Simon Peter acknowledged Him as God.

The Church exists for a clear purpose, it has a mission.

Judaism is the “womb” in which the Church grew.  Someone has described Judaism as the caterpillar and Christianity as the butterfly.  No intelligent butterfly would despise the caterpillar from whence it came.  Moreover, Christ said that He came to fulfil not to destroy the old religion.  It is therefore important, in order to understand the Church Christ founded, to have a broad understanding of Judaism.

Ancient Judaism was built upon the three offices of priest, prophet and king.  Each of these offices had an important function: the kings ruled the people; the prophets taught the people truths about God and their relationship with Him and the priests sanctified the people and offered sacrifices on their behalf.  Christ infuriated the Jewish authorities by claiming all three of these offices - priest, prophet and king - in His own Person.  Christ went to great pains to bestow all three of these offices upon His Church, so as to ensure that His Church would be able to continue His mission until the end of time.

Christ bestowed His priestly office upon His Church

Prior to His crucifixion, Christ inaugurated the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in the course of celebrating the ritual of the Jewish Passover festival with the Apostles, the first bishops of His Church.  The Gospels record: “And while they were still at table, Jesus took bread, and blessed and broke it, and gave it to His disciples, saying, ‘take, eat, this is My Body, given for you; do this for a commemoration of Me.’  Then when supper had ended, He took a cup, and offered thanks, and gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink all of you, of this; for this is My Blood, of the new testament, shed for many, to the remission of sins.  Do this, whenever you drink it, for a commemoration of Me.’”  For the last 2000 years every Catholic priest in the world has obeyed this command by daily offering the holy sacrifice of the Mass.

Ten days later, Christ gave these same men the power to absolve men from their sins.  St John records the scene: after the Resurrection Christ suddenly appeared to His apostles in a locked room.  The apostles were naturally terrified, fearing that they were seeing a ghost, so Christ asked for something to eat, to demonstrate that He was not a phantom.  Once the Apostles’ fears had subsided, Christ said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit: when you forgive men’s sins, they are forgiven, when you hold them bound, they are held bound.”   Again for the last 2000 years Catholic priests have obeyed this command by hearing confessions and absolving penitents from their sins.

Christ bestows His kingship upon His Church by giving it a clear chain of command and real authority.

Just over a year after Christ had completed the selection of His apostles, He asked them who they thought He was.  Simon, the man Our Lord had rename Rock (Peter in English), responded, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

To which Christ replied, “… And I tell you this in My turn, that you are Peter [Rock], and it is upon this rock that I will build My Church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it;” and then added, “and I will give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”  Later He told Peter, “I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail; when, after a while, you have come back to Me [Christ is alluding here to the fact that Peter would betray Him at one point] it is for you to be the support of your brethren.”

The power of the keys and the power to bind and loose are Jewish legal jargon for the power to admit or exclude people, and the power to make laws and to abrogate laws.  To give such sweeping powers to one man, if the Church was to be a mere vague spiritual kingdom would make absolutely no sense.  The bestowal of such an astonishing, sweeping, plenitude of powers upon one man irrefutably proves that Our Lord was painstakingly putting a real organisation into place to carry on His work after He had returned to His Father in heaven.

The statement, “… and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it,” obviously means that what I am here organising will survive come what may.  It is therefore very significant that the Bishop of Rome, the successor of St Peter, the man Our Lord renamed “Rock”, is still ruling the Church 2000 years later; for no earthly dynasty has ever survived even half as long.

A couple of months later, Our Lord extended the same powers that He had bestowed on St Peter personally, to the Apostles as a college.  Christ was explaining how disputes should be settled in His Church: after exhausting sensible measures such as speaking privately to the individual causing problems, Christ states that one should “speak of it to the Church.”  Our Lord then goes on to say that if the individual concerned refuses to listen to the Church, he should be treated as an outcast.  He concludes, “I promise you, all that you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and all that you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”  Again it must be emphasised, if Christ was speaking of a mere spiritual kingdom, how could He logically instruct us to “speak of it to the Church”?

Christ bestowed his prophetic office upon His Church

It is important to understand what we mean by prophet.  It has come to signify someone who accurately foretells the future, but that is a very minor part of the prophetic office.  More importantly, a prophet in Scripture is someone who speaks on God’s behalf; he instructs the people in the things of God and in their moral obligations.

On the Thursday, the day before His crucifixion, on three occasions Christ assured the first leaders of His Church that they would not be abandoned after His death to their own resources.  He told them that He still had much to teach them, but that they could not be expected to take it all in at this time.  No less than three times that evening He made the following promise: “God will give you another to befriend you, the Holy Spirit; He is the truth-giving Spirit and He is to dwell continually with you for ever.  He will recall to your minds everything I have said to you, He will make everything plain, He will guide you into all truth and will make plain to you what is still to come.”

The Apostles would have recalled that Christ had said to them earlier, “He who listens to you, listens to Me; he who despises you despises Me; ….”  Here Christ equates listening to the future leaders of His church with listening to Him personally!  That surely puts an awesome responsibility upon anyone who takes Christ’s claim to divinity seriously.

Three weeks after Our Lord’s resurrection from the dead, there is another moving encounter between Christ and Peter.  Peter and four of the Apostles had been out in a boat fishing all night and had caught absolutely nothing.  They were approaching the shore, their spirits no doubt somewhat despondent, when through the early morning mist they spotted Jesus standing beside a fire.  He called to them to cast out their net on the right hand side of the boat.  They obeyed and were astonished to find that they had such a large catch that they could scarcely drag the net ashore.  Christ then cooked their breakfast, and after the sun had risen over the lake, He called Peter aside and the following conversation ensued:

Christ: “Simon, son of John, do you care for Me more than these others?”

“Yes Lord,” Peter responded, “You know well that I love You.”

Then Christ said to him, “Feed My lambs.”  Then a second time Christ asked Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you care for Me?”

“Yes Lord,” Peter responded again, “You know well that I love You.”

Christ said to him, “Tend My shearlings.”  Then Christ said to him, “Simon, son of John, do you love Me?”

Simon was deeply moved at this point and responded, “Lord, You know all things; You can tell that I love You.”

Jesus said to him, “Feed My sheep”.

This exchange further clarifies the sort of office that Christ was putting in place to govern His Church, the future papacy.  Peter had not been merely given the power to bind and to loose, he was also required to be a shepherd, to take care of Christ’s followers, to lead them and feed them spiritually: the papacy was to have a pastoral role in Christ’s Church that was every bit as important as its governing role.

Rite of entry

A few weeks after the above encounter with Peter, Christ arranged to meet all His Apostles (eleven now because of the defection of Judas) somewhere in Galilee.  He had this to say to them: “All authority in Heaven and on earth has been given to Me; you, therefore, must go out all over the world, and preach the gospel to the whole of creation, making disciples of all nations, and baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all of the commandments that I have given you: he who believes and is baptised will be saved; he who refuses belief will be condemned.”

Christ’s Church now has a clear divine mandate, plus a specific rite of entry, namely baptism in the name of the Trinity.  Note: because Christ said “all nations” the Church calls itself “Catholic”.  The word “Catholic” emphasises the truth that Christ’s Church is for all people and all times.

United in Faith and Morals

A couple of hours before His arrest, one of the very last things Christ did was to pray for the unity of His Church in these words, “It is not only for them [the Apostles, the first leaders of His Church] that I pray; I pray for those who will find faith in Me through their word; that they may all be one; that they too may be in Us, as You, Father, are in Me and I in You; so that the world may come to believe that it is You who has sent Me.  And I have given them the privilege which You gave to Me, that they should all be one, as We are one …”

Note: Christ did not merely pray for the unity of His Church, He bestowed unity upon it, “And I have given them the privilege which You gave to Me, that they should all be one.”  For 2000 years the Catholic Church has maintains its unity in faith and obedience to Peter.  The Catholic Church has never trimmed its sails to accommodate the spirit of the age.  Some individual shepherds (those hirelings Christ warned us about) may have done so, but never Christ’s Church as an institution.

Are non-Catholic churches genuine churches?

This is best answered by an analogy, a parable if you like.  Let’s suppose for the sake of the argument that I do not like some of the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, so I decide to found an American Supreme Court more to my personal taste.  I convert my front room into a replica of the American Supreme Court.  I buy myself and my friends sets of judges’ robes.  We then regularly sit together in my front room and gravely decide important issues of law.

Will my personal American Supreme Court have any real purpose or authority?  Of course not; it is simply not within my power to found an American Supreme Court.  Indeed, what I have done can never be anything more than a comic farce.  And that remains true no matter how sincere I am in my dissent from the decisions of the real American Supreme Court.  Indeed, it remains a charade even if I was morally right in my initial opposition to the decisions of the real American Supreme Court.

Likewise, no mere man can found a church.  It is simply not within the power of man to do such things, even if he be the King of England.  The Church has a divine mission and sacerdotal powers to fulfil that mission.  A mere man can neither assume nor bestow such awesome authority or powers.

Conclusion

Immediately after Our Lord’s ascension we see the Church acting as an organisation.  For example, the Apostles immediately set about choosing a man to fill the vacancy left by the apostasy of Judas.  And the Scriptures repeatedly refer to others joining their fellowship, never to others going off to found their own ecclesial communities.

One of the very last thing Christ said to the Apostles, the first leaders of His Church, is, “And behold I am with you all through the days that are coming, until the consummation of the world.”  What further guarantee do we need from Christ before approaching His Church?