ANSWERING COMMON OBJECTIONS
A Closer Look at Christ's Church

THE FOUR MARKS OF THE CHURCH

THE CHURCH IS ONE

The four marks of the Church are actually drawn from the Nicene Creed which we recite at Mass every Sunday, where we confess our belief in the Church, where we say that we believe in "unam sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam", one holy, catholic and apostolic Church. So, we are going to focus on the four marks of the Church, which have become in a sense, a technical, theological device by which the Church's uniqueness and supernatural identity and divine nature are clarified and understood.

Church as an Article of Faith

I want to back up a bit and share with you one fundamental concern that I have, and that is we seldom think of the Church as an object of our faith. Ultimately, of course, God is the one in whom we put all of our faith and all of our hope and all of our love. But we also know that God calls us to love others for the love of Him. So also He shares with us the Holy Spirit so that we might put our faith in the Apostles, not only in their writings within Scripture but also in the many, mighty works that God accomplished through them, especially as He built up His Church through the Apostles and their successors.

So, we believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. We believe that the Church is something more than meets the eye. We believe that the Church is something more than just something we experience, that we can know by reason and by the five senses.

There is something supernatural about the Church or otherwise it wouldn't be in the Creed. It's something that can only be properly and adequately understood when it is understood through the eyes of faith and not just simply through the five senses and human reason.

We are going to look at these four notes (marks) of the Church and I want to move through a series of topics as we look at it in this, our first talk. The first thing I would like to do is to clarify what we mean when we say that the Church is, properly speaking, an object of our faith. Secondly, I would like to look at key Biblical texts that support this understanding of the Church as a divine mystery. Next, I would like to look at the Biblical foundations for the Church, especially the foundational notion of covenant, that the Church is the Body of Christ and it is the New Covenant that Christ has established. Then finally, looking at this covenant family model, we want also to bring in a very important idea from the Old Testament that Jesus stressed in His teachings, and that is the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven and how the Church is to be associated and identified with the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven. Then we will draw some conclusions regarding the unity of the Church.

Called a "Mystery" by St. Paul

As I say, the reality of the Church is an article of faith in a technical sense of the term "faith". It is expressly called a "mystery" by St. Paul in Ephesians. In chapter 3, St. Paul speaks of how, in reading his writing, we can discern the insight that St. Paul has into this divine mystery. What is the mystery? Is it Christ? Is it the Holy Spirit? No. It's the Church. In fact, the mystery of the Church is so great, he goes on to say in Ephesians 3, that the principality in heaven, the principalities and powers, the angels in heaven learn the wisdom of God from the Church and through the Church. (Eph 3:10)

So, it appears, quite rightly, as an article of faith in the Creed. Now, what do we mean by "article of faith"? It is a supernatural truth that is revealed by God. What makes this article of faith unique is the fact that many Christians dispute and deny the Church to be something supernatural, something as an article of faith.

Church as a Supernatural Truth Revealed by God is Denied by Protestants.

Bible Christians believe, just as we Catholics do, in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. They believe that Jesus Christ is His only Son, Our Lord. They believe that He was born of the Virgin Mary, "He was conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, He suffered under Pontius Pilate". They believe in all of that. They believe in the Holy Spirit. Bible Christians who are Protestants, we could say, believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. They will also confess their belief in "one holy, catholic and apostolic church", only they will define those notes (marks), those terms in strictly natural, non-supernatural ways.

They will describe or they will confess their belief in a church which is ultimately not something that is a divine organism. They believe in the miraculous conception and birth of Jesus, His passion, death and resurrection, the personhood of the Holy Spirit and all of that; but they diverge from us when it comes to understanding the one, holy, Catholic Church and the Communion of Saints. They don't deny the propositions; rather they reduce these articles down to the natural level of being mere human realities or being divine only in the sense of being spiritual and invisible. So there's a spiritualizing tendency, so that the Church is one only in a spiritual, invisible sense. By spiritualizing the Church, many non-Catholics do away with any reality that is visible, any visible unity for the Church as a worldwide family of God.

They also de-supernaturalize the Church as it is visible, that is, in the congregation or in the convention or in the denomination; these things they say, quite rightly I believe, are mere human conventions and so they naturalize the Church; whereas the Catholic conception, going back to antiquity, to the Fathers and to the New Testament itself, is that the Church has a human element, to be sure. It consists of us sinners, but it also has a divine element, a supernatural reality, which is properly speaking, the object of our faith.

If you try talking about this matter with Bible Christians, with Protestants, with non-Catholics, I think you will see, you will notice an emerging pattern of uncomprehending responses. "What do you mean the Church is a divine organism? What do you mean it's a supernatural, sacramental body?" It is the Body of Christ, Protestants believe, but that "Body of Christ" is a metaphor. It is not a metaphysical, theological reality that in any way is visible, like a body is normally understood to be visible.

You will probably feel a sense of inadequacy in dealing with those whose faith cannot extend to the Church, because the vast majority of non-Catholic Christians put their faith in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit but not in the work of the Holy Spirit, which is the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. At times, it will almost feel in your conversations that there is no common denominator. You will talk to a person outside the Church about the Church, and it will seem like you're living in different worlds. You will feel powerless to penetrate a natural mindset which denies the supernatural reality of the Church by mere argument. It's like trying to describe color to a blind man. It seems like we don't share the same language.

Church as a Supernatural Truth Can be Seen Only Because of Faith

What's most important for us as Catholics, however, is to remember that what enables us to see the supernatural truth and reality of the Church so clearly, is not our intelligence. It's not our experience, but rather, the faith that is a gift of God. Our faith is from beginning to end, a gift of God. Fulton Sheen gives an illustration. Think of the most beautiful stained glass cathedral windows and how different their appearance to insiders is from outsiders. Standing on the outside, the windows appear to be a meaningless mass of lead and dull colors, but their beautiful colors and vibrant designs captivate you once you step inside.

The higher truth of the Church is like that, like the glorious Host enthroned upon the altar. One man sees a wafer, while another sees the Eternal God made man under the form and appearances of bread and wine. The reason for the difference is the light of faith. This scandal, this stumbling block is an extension of the same scandal or stumbling block that Jesus presented 2000 years ago. One man would see a 33-year-old Palestinian Jew with incredible and extraordinary wonder-working powers, while Peter would see the Son of the Living God.

Church as the Masterpiece of Jesus Christ is Both Soul and Body

Jesus would have to remind Peter. He didn't say, "Dumb people don't understand, but you're so intelligent that you do". He said, "Flesh and blood haven't revealed this to you but my Father in heaven". You cannot see Jesus to be the Son of the Living God apart from the gift of faith. You cannot see the Church to be the Bride of Christ, the Mystical Body of Christ, you cannot see it to be a supernatural organism whose soul is the Holy Spirit apart from the same gift.

So we do not go about defending this view, simply by natural reasoning. It would be futile, in vain. Like an X-ray, faith sees beyond mere appearances to discern the interior reality hidden from view within the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ. This view of the Church, what it is in its inner reality, is not the result of popular consensus or common conviction or majority vote. Rather, faith believes what it does, faith is what it is, quite simply because God reveals it to us and gives us the grace to believe it. Consequently there are not many faiths corresponding to many denominations. There is only one faith, just as there is only one truth, as St. Paul says, "one Lord, one faith, one baptism".

Jesus did not say, "I will teach you the truth like Moses did, I will teach you the truth like Solomon shared his wisdom". He said, "I am the truth". Likewise, Jesus also said, "Upon this rock, I will build my church" (Matt 16:18), not "my churches". And upon this rock (He was speaking of Peter) He built His Church, and He continues to build the Church. And the Church is from beginning to end, the work of Jesus Christ.

So, when we exalt the Church, when we elevate its greatness, when we focus our attention upon it, what we are doing is beholding the masterpiece of Christ. We're not saying what Christ did wasn't enough; we're looking at the fullness of the finished work of Jesus Christ, which is not reducible to individualistic experience, not reducible to group conversions. It's not reducible to fellowships of like-minded and like-experienced Christians who happened to have shared the same conversion experiences and they had the same sort of testimonies.

The Church is what Christ has made it, and from beginning to end this worldwide family of God reflects the greatness of our Holy Savior. So this morning and this afternoon and this evening and tomorrow, I want to hold up for you not what a human institution has done, not what the Popes have accomplished, not what the saints have done, but what Jesus Christ has done and what the Holy Spirit is doing. Because as the Church is the Body of Christ, so the Church has always taught, in accord with St. Paul, as the Popes have often said, that the Holy Spirit is the soul of the Church, which is the Body of Christ. We are made up of body and soul. (We'll go into this later in the day.) We're made up of body and soul, one person who is embodied as a soul.

The Church is the Body of Christ; her soul is the Holy Spirit. It is a supernatural, divine, human organism. It is something so far above and beyond our capacity through the five senses to understand. The greatest philosophers using reason in the greatest ways cannot comprehend what Jesus Christ has done and is doing and will do through the Holy Spirit in the likes of turkeys like me and you. That's what I mean when I say that the Church is the object of faith, because the work of Christ can only be comprehended and grasped through the eyes of faith.

The Church is the family of God. It is the New Covenant. It is the Body of Christ. It requires an awesome vision which we Americans living in an individualistic culture have difficulty understanding. We don't know what it means to be "family". We don't really know what it means to be "community". We reduce it down to voluntary groups, where people band together because they agree together.

Our families are breaking down at an incredible rate. So when we hear that the Church is the household of God, we can barely imagine how superior God fathers His family through Christ and the Holy Spirit in contrast to how poorly we do it. (I didn't mean to get so worked up!) Faith elevates and enlarges one's vision, for there are many truths beyond the power of reason. But the real test of faith comes not so much in adhering to the doctrines concerning a God whose 33-year-old crucified body you believe to be the God-man. Our faith is really tested, not so much in how much we adhere to the fact that Jesus, on the cross is not merely a 33-year-old Jew, but also the second person of the Trinity, that's a real test of faith, but the final exam comes when we look at the Church which prolongs the scandal of how God can take humanity and shape it and make it an instrument for salvation.

Belief in the Church is a Real Test of Faith

The real test comes in when we look at the Body of Christ which is 2000 years old, the Church which is full of slobs like me, and believe that this is Christ's Mystical Body. Back then, His individual body had dirt and grime in the wounds, and certainly today, the Mystical Body of the Church has dirt and grime, as well. Exhibit "A". But the Holy Spirit is doing a work which, at the end of time we will fall flat on our faces and marvel at. And He's doing it through the institution of the Catholic Church which He has established in His own Body and Blood and through the twelve Apostles and through their successors.

Pope Pius IX writes, "The true Church of Jesus Christ was established by divine authority and is known by a fourfold mark, which, we assert in the Creed, must be believed and each one of these marks so clings to the others that it can't be separated from them. Hence it happens that that Church, which truly is and is called Catholic, should at the same time shine with the prerogatives of unity, sanctity and apostolic succession. Therefore, the Catholic Church alone is conspicuous and perfect in the unity of the whole world and of all nations, particularly in that unity whose beginning, root and unfailing origin are that supreme authority and higher principality of Blessed Peter, the Prince of the Apostles and of his successors in the Roman Chair. No other church is Catholic except the one which, founded on the one Peter, grows into one body fitly joined together, as St. Paul describes in Ephesians 4, in the unity of faith and love." So says Pope Pius IX. He's telling us that these four marks must be believed and they must be recognized as being the work of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit in the Body of Christ.

Biblical Basis for Understanding Church to be the Mystical Body of Christ

Now, I want to move on from this notion of the Church as an object of faith. I want to move on to understand the Biblical basis for understanding the Church to be the Mystical Body of Christ, for being, in a sense a divine and supernatural organism. Let's take a look at some of the key texts that deal with the Church and that deal with what Christ is doing. In John, chapter 10 and 11, Our Lord says, "Other sheep I have that are not of this fold, them also I must bring, and there shall be one fold and one shepherd".

He's talking about Himself being a shepherd and He is visible. He's talking about the fold of sheep, and the sheepfold must be one, and He is the one who makes it one through the Apostles. Caiaphas, the High Priest, goes on to prophesy that Jesus should die for the nation, but not only for the nation, but to gather together in one, the children of God that were dispersed.

John Chapter 17

Elsewhere in John, in chapter 17, we have Christ's high priestly prayer where He prays to His Father, "Holy Father, keep them in Thy name whom Thou has given me, that they may be one as we also are one". (Jn 17:11) Jesus' oneness with the Father is an eternal, invisible and spiritual oneness. We're not saying, "The Protestants say it's invisible and spiritual. We say it's visible and physical." We say, "It's spiritual and invisible and also physical and visible. It's not either/or, it's both/and." Why? Because of the Incarnation. Before the Incarnation, the synagogue, the Temple of the people of God in the Old Testament could not make the claims that we make for the Church of the New Covenant. It was the Incarnation that dramatically transformed the reality of the people of God. Because the Son, who was eternally and spiritually and invisibly one with the Father became visible and physical and human and in His body, He formed the New Covenant. And in His body, He incorporates us and unites us and He identifies His Church with His body and He describes Himself as the one who built the Church: "I will build my Church" (Mt 16:18). It's His Church; He's the builder; and just as the Father made Him visible and physical, so the Body of Christ is visible and physical and one with the supernatural unity that comes ultimately from the Trinity itself.

The oneness, the body of unity between the Father and the Son, can you imagine that unity? It's hard for me to find words to describe the love that I feel for Michael, Gabriel and Hannah. Frankly, I have three of the greatest kids in history, objectively speaking. I can't imagine loving other kids like I love these. May God give me the grace to love all with this love, but the natural bond of love and affection and solidarity that unites a father and son here below is so great and so indescribable; can you imagine what it is when you multiply by infinity and see it in eternity within God? And that's the unity that Christ prays for the Church to have. And that's the unity that the Church has!

If that supernatural and divine power can hold together the molecules and the cells in Christ's physical, individual body, then appearances notwithstanding, bad popes notwithstanding, lousy cradle-Catholics who drink and swear too much notwithstanding, that same supernatural divine power can hold the likes of us together in His family, in His body, the Mystical Body. Because of Christ's work and also because of Christ's prayer in John 17, so Paul says, "I appeal to you brethren, by the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and that there be no dissension among you, but that you may be united in the same mind and the same judgment." It isn't just a oneness in some emotional, experiential way: We are one in the spirit, we are one in the Lord, we hold hands, we strum guitars, we turn the lights down low and we sway to the music and we feel real ooey-gooey and one.

We're not talking about a warm fuzzy fellowship. We're talking about a supernatural bond of unity that holds together in one divine, Mystical Body, Chinese, Australian, African, Asian, European, yes, and even Americans! That's the work of Christ. When you look at it, you say, "It has to be God." Two thousand years old and in every inhabited continent, we have agreement that we are united in the same mind and the same judgment through Popes who have no armies. It has to be God!

1 Corinthians 3

First Corinthians 3, Paul tells us, "For we are God's fellow workers." What's wrong with God? Can't He get the job done Himself? Paul said, "We're God's fellow workers." Now, why would God possibly need co-workers? Why would God need a co-pilot, an assistant, a vice-president? I mean, He's God! Why would God call anybody to be fellow workers, co-workers? Is God's work not sufficient?

God's work is sufficient, and the fact that we are His fellow workers is His work, the fact that He can take measly crumbs like me and you and raise us up and make us children of God, sons and daughters of the Most High, His co-workers. He goes on to say, "We are God's field, God's building; we are God's body." God doesn't need our help. He dignifies us by stooping down, condescending to our level and raising us up to participate with Him.

I tell the story, I remember jogging back in Virginia when I was a pastor at Trinity Presbyterian Church; I made one lap around the block. (I only jogged about three or four laps; I wasn't in good shape then, nor am I in good shape now.) I was jogging back then and I saw this man trying to cut his front yard and this little kid who was getting in the way with his toy lawn mower. You could see the annoyance written all over his face. I wasn't sure what he would do. I was curious to see, come the second lap, how the guy would resolve it. I figure, he would probably put the kid inside. The second time around I noticed that the man was holding the boy in his left arm, holding the mower with his right arm, while the two little arms of that boy were also on the handle of the mower.

Now, the beam of delight on the kid's face was great and understandable. He fancied himself his father's co-worker, and he was a fellow worker with his father. But did he do it? Did the father elevate the son for assistance or to dignify and to glorify - to give that son the pride of participating in the work of the father?

When the Catholic Church teaches that we must cooperate, it's only because God operates so as to cause us, to enable us to cooperate. We are monergists; we believe that God's work alone, from beginning to end is what enables us to cooperate. It's what enables us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. We merit, only because God's work is so real in us. He is not a manager or a master. He is a father who raises up children and He shares His wisdom and His power and His love so that we can participate in His work.

Is His glory robbed? His glory is manifested! How does the Father bring glory to Himself? By raising up and glorifying His children, empowering and teaching them. So, the fact is, our justification is our charter of freedom, our title of sonship. It is not just that we are acquitted criminals; it's that we are renegades and prodigals who have been brought back home and have been filled with the spirit of sonship, so we cry, "Abba, Father - Papa, help me, give me your strength, give me your love, give me your wisdom".

That's what the Church consists of - the children of God. We are God's fellow workers, we are God's buildings. Don't you know that you, in the plural, y'all, as they say down South, don't you know that y'all are God's temple? He didn't say that y'all are God's "temples". He says that you all are God's temple and that God's spirit dwells in you. "If anyone will destroy God's temple, God will destroy him, for God's temple is holy", and God's temple y'all are! "For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ." Do you catch that? It's the Body of Christ.

If the Church was an invisible, spiritual unity made up of Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians and Baptists all equally sharing in the one Catholic Church, then what Jesus should have said and what Paul should have said is that we are the soul of Christ, because the soul's invisible and yet unified. But the fact is that human life comes to us in bodily form, in visible appearances, in physical bodies. So the physicality, the embodied life of Christ in His own individual body is expanded and shared visibly and physically by means of supernatural grace in the Church. For by one spirit, we were all baptized in the one body.

What is it that brought us into the Body of Christ? "I accepted Jesus Christ as personal Lord and Savior"; but that's not what Paul says anywhere; not in any place, in any of his writings did he say, "because we accepted Jesus Christ as personal Lord and Savior and believe that He died for my sins and so on, that's what made me one body." He says, quite clearly, "By one Spirit we were all baptized into one body - Jews or Greeks, slaves or free - and all were made to drink of one Spirit". What's he talking about, baptism and drinking? He's talking about communion and baptism -- the two principal sacraments.

Galatians 3:26

Know that you are bodies of Christ and individually members of it. "For as many of you as were baptized in Christ have put on Christ" he says in Galatians 3, verse 26. "You are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise." "Peace and mercy be upon all who walk by this rule upon the Israel of God." (Gal 3:37, 6:16) The Israel of God, what does he mean when he calls us "the Israel of God"?

Ephesians 2

The Church, the Mystical Body, is the new Israel of God. In order to understand what he means, we look elsewhere and find in Ephesians 2, Paul's explanation; "But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near in the Blood of Christ. For He is our peace, who has made us both one..." "that He might create in Himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end." What's he talking about? (Eph 2:13-15)

The fact is that for thousands of years Jews and Gentiles, Jews and non-Jews despised each other. They conflicted with endless hostility. The Jews snubbing their noses and considering the Gentiles goeem, next to swine; and the Gentiles resenting and opposing and killing the Jews. It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same! But God is the Creator and Father of the whole human race and He wants us to be one family, not torn and divided in two or three or four. So, through Jesus Christ, God did what Adam had undone. He reunified the human family and made it His own. It goes on, "For through Him we both have access in one spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the Apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone". (Eph 2:18-20)

The word for "household" in Greek is family. There is no word for "family". The word in Greek for "family" is "household". "Fellow citizens with the saints and members of the family of God in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you are also built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit." What is the Church? It's the family of God, it's a holy temple. We are God's fellow workers. We are imbued, we are infused, we are endowed with supernatural life and supernatural power as God's children. That is the greatest supernatural reality that we have got to understand. That's why Paul, who understands it so well can go on in the next few verses and say, again in Ephesians 3, (actually, I was reading from Ephesians 2 there a moment ago), "When you read this you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ", "how the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel." (Eph 3:4-6)

He goes on to say, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, that it is through the Church that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places. (Eph 3:10) The Church is so great, so much greater than the sum of its human members, so much more than the sum total of the natural powers that we collectively share, because it's the work of Christ.

Ephesians 3:14

Paul says it all in the next few verses, in Ephesians 3:14, he says, "For this reason, I bow my knee before the Father from whom His whole family in heaven and on earth is named," is derived. We derive our life, our existence, our unity from God the Father. The unity that makes us one is the unity that has eternally bonded the Trinity as one. That oneness was in the Incarnate Lord's individual body and that oneness is now shared in His Mystical Body, invisibly and spiritually, to be sure, but visibly and physically, as well, just as the Incarnation revolutionized history.

One thing I should say, Paul's use of this word "mystery" to describe the Church, theologians recognize - all theologians, Catholic, Protestant, whatever stripe. All theologians and Biblical scholars recognize that when Paul uses that word "mysterion", mystery, he is describing something that cannot be known from human experience. It cannot be believed on the basis of the five senses alone or human reason. What is a mystery is a mystery of faith and it must be received by faith because it is only revealed by God. We would not know it to be true, except that God has stooped down and revealed it to be true.

The ultimate mystery, of course, is the Trinity. But God is not just a Creator that we know exists; God is a Trinity, a family, Father, Son and Spirit. Family is not a human convention that we take and project onto God to domesticate the Deity, to make the unknowable somewhat known. Family is eternal and original in the Trinity and we are called to share in family laws and family life, to share in God's life and God's love. We can't do it. Adam blew it, Noah blew it, Abraham blew it, Moses blew it, David and Solomon blew it. Every great Old Testament saint in the Hall of Fame blew it. Christ alone did it and does it and will do it for all eternity through His Body and Blood in His Mystical Body, the Church. He is the new Adam, the founding father of a new humanity. This work of Christ is a mystery.

Ephesians 5

In Ephesians 5, Paul says, "We are members of His Body"; and then he quotes Genesis 2, "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh." This mystery is a profound one and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church.

The nature of the Church and the relationship between Christ and the Church is a mystery of faith. It is known by faith. Non- Catholic conceptions of the Church are sociological. They are empirical. They are scientific. They are what the five senses coupled with human reason would give you, because there is nothing supernatural, there is nothing miraculous, there is nothing extraordinary about this church made up of people who conflict on almost every doctrine and almost every moral teaching and almost every liturgical practice.

Then they say, "Well, we're one because we confess the same Christ." Well, then ask them, "Are the Jehovah's Witnesses also one?" "Well, no, because they don't think that Christ is God." Then they confess that Christ isn't sacred (if they are not one with you) because they don't accept the deity of Christ, which took four centuries for the Church to hammer out. How ironic!

How about the Mormons? Well, no, because they believe that Christ is a god -- small g -- as many other gods who have come before Him. Okay, so they are disqualified. So who decides what doctrines are so essential, what doctrines are so fundamentally important? Who decides whether you are or are not part of the Body of Christ? The Bible; but whose interpretation of the Bible? I tried that for years and it got me "split P" soup: The UP, the OP, the PCA, I was Presbyterian as a result of studying Scripture. I was a Bible Christian for years until I found the Bible leading me to seek elders or presbyteros. So I became a Presbyterian and I looked around to see what Presbyterian church to join, the UPC, USA, the PCUS, the OPC, the RPNA - it just went on. We called ourselves the split P's. We formed one, big, unhappy split P soup family; and we're not anything compared to the Baptists and the Lutherans and the Episcopalians and the Methodists, and they all continually split because sincere, misguided people are quite sure that the Holy Spirit has given them the right interpretation of the Bible on very important matters. Good night, what will it take?

Church as the New Covenant Jesus has Established

The covenant is the bonding agent whereby Christ has made the Church one in His own Body and Blood. He only used that key word "covenant" once in His entire ministry as recorded in the gospels, when He instituted the Eucharist in the Upper Room, when He spoke of the bread being His Body and then He transformed the cup of wine into His Blood, "the Blood of the new and everlasting covenant." So, in order to understand what the Church is, we have to understand what the covenant is.

Covenant is Not the Same as Contract

Let's take a look at that for a few minutes here. There are many misconceptions we have about the covenant. Many people think of covenant and contract as being the same sort of thing. As a result, Presbyterian churches and many other Bible Christian churches which see themselves as covenant fellowships mistake their own identity. They misunderstand the nature of the Church because they misunderstand the nature of the covenant. They think of the covenant as the same thing as a contract. The difference between a covenant and a contract is as great as the difference between a wife and a prostitute, a child and an employee or a slave, the difference between a family and a corporation.

Covenants are what formed family bonds in antiquity, not just in ancient Israel, but throughout the entire ancient Near East and practically everywhere anthropologists study. We discover that the blood-covenant is what forms family bonds. There is a saying among the Arabs that goes way back, "Blood is thicker than milk." What does that mean? - that when you form a blood-covenant with somebody, the bond is stronger than brothers who share the same maternal milk.

Blood-covenants forge family bonds. What is a covenant? Probably the greatest scholar who studied covenant more than any other in the last century was a man by the name of D.J. McCarthy, who after years of studying it defined covenant: "Covenants were the means," he said, "by which the ancient world took to extend relations beyond the natural unity of blood." He defines covenant as a quasi-family union based on oath. All of these blood-rituals, whether it was a meal or it was a sacrifice of an animal or it was cutting your hand and having the other guy cut his hand and then you would mix the blood and so symbolize brotherhood, all of those different rituals were oaths, oath ceremonies.

God Reunifies His People Through Covenants in Salvation History

Oath ceremonies were what symbolically enacted, and actually brought into effect, a one-blood bond. The Latin word for oath is sacrament! The sacraments are the family bonding agents whereby God, through Christ, binds us to Himself as kin, as family, as blood, as His children. The oaths were the bonding agents whereby He formed His family and He still forms it today.

All of Old Testament history is clarified by this understanding, because Old Testament history is a series of covenants that God has made with His people - with Adam, with Noah, with Abraham, with Moses and with David. What is the significance of these covenants? Once you grab the understanding, once you grasp the insight of McCarthy, you can see that these divine covenants that God made with His people were the means by which He fathered His family, when He first created us in Adam. Then, as the humans descended from him, we really were one family, no matter how big we got, even when we got beyond tribes and clans and then nations.

The human race, from God's perspective, is one family biologically and historically. God looks down, and since a thousand years are as a day, He sees us all interrelated. Can you imagine! Look around, you're sitting next to distant relatives. Every single person in the room this morning is related to you, blood relatives. We just lost track of the genealogical ties. Historically, biologically, we're all relatives; scary thought! You guys were thinking, "I don't want to be related to Hahn." But, it's true, historically and biologically; but through the covenants it's true theologically and supernaturally as well. Because one sin tears apart and disunifies the family, God comes down periodically at the key moments in salvation history to reunify His people, to maintain family oneness. That's what the covenants are for.

So the covenant with Adam formed a marriage. The covenant with Noah formed a household. The covenant with Abraham formed a tribe; he was called a chief. He was called a great prince, because he ruled over a great tribe. We think of him and Sarah going along as nomads. Actually historians tell us that Abraham ruled over 3000 to 5000 people in his tribe. His problem was that he did not have a son to succeed him in authority. The covenant with Adam was a marriage, God fathered His family from Adam through Seth, all the way from Noah. There He made it into a family, a household. He preserved the unity by making a covenant and then He preserved that covenant through Noah's firstborn, Shem, all the way until He gets to Abraham, whereby the families become more numerous. So with the covenant with Abraham He forms a tribe and then ten generations later, He forms a national family with Moses and Israel on Mount Sinai and He calls this nation His kinsmen.

Then, of course, a few hundred years later, the climactic covenant of the Old Testament is the one with David whereby He makes this national family of His into an empire, a family empire. For what purpose? - To subjugate and to subdue all the nations, to teach them God's way. That's why Solomon, the King of Israel, was given divine wisdom, to share that wisdom with the nations.

God's whole purpose through these covenants was to set the stage and prepare for the day when Christ would come and fulfill all these covenants by making God's family an international kingdom, an international family. The Greek word for international, we have the English "catha - holae", Catholic. The word "catholic" literally means "worldwide" or "international". The unity of God's family, the unity of the Church, the oneness of the Church was restored supernaturally in Christ.

The Jews had become so nationalistic, so racist in a sense, in despising the Gentiles that Jesus had to break down that dividing wall. So, from the earliest times of the Church, guess what the Church was called. You had the Gentile race and the Jewish race and the Jews said, "We alone are God's family." And God said, "I am the father of all humans. I want to make a covenant that will bring all humans into a family relation with me. So the early Church called the Church "the third race", neither Jewish nor Gentile. We were, we are something that goes beyond mere genes and chromosomes, beyond biology, beyond race. We are the third race, a supernatural race, a divine human family.

Covenants were Accompanied by Unifying Structures that Would Preserve the Unity of God's Family

Every single covenant in the Old Testament was accompanied by a structure, a hierarchy, a family hierarchy where you had a father and under him elders and under them other rulers. You had King David and then his cabinet of ministers and you had elders who ruled over the tribes, just like back in the Mosaic covenant, you had Moses and Aaron and you had the twelve princes of the twelve tribes and the seventy elders.

All of these covenants formed unifying structures that would maintain and preserve and protect the unity of God's family. That's one of the most significant reasons for the covenants in the first place: to preserve the unity of the growing family, even to Gargantuan proportions, when the family becomes a nation or an empire or a worldwide body, as it is in the Church.

So, the New Covenant that Christ forms, what is it? He goes about forming it in such a way as to recapitulate and perfect and complete all the Old Testament covenants.

Just like Moses had twelve princes under him from the twelve tribes and he also had seventy elders, (or 72 elders if you included Metheldad and Medad) he had seventy elders underneath him, so Christ appoints twelve. Then Christ appoints seventy others according to the Gospel of Luke. Christ was calling disciples to reform and restructure a new Israel, an Israel that transcended race, and that transcended regions and geographical boundaries; and this third race is one, which by the way is the name of this talk. The third race is unified by Christ Himself. He is the covenant. He is the family. He is the means by which God fathers His family.

The Catholic Church is the New Covenant Jesus Established

I could go on like this for a long time. I won't. I know it's getting long now but let me just say this: The family of God is the master idea to the Catholic religion, if you want to understand how to grasp the whole, because the Catholic faith is so complex. I mean, you look at the Pope and Purgatory and Mary and the Saints and you look at all of the rituals, all of the doctrines; how in the world can you make sense of it all? One idea, God's family coming from the Trinity through Jesus Christ into the twelve apostles and their successors with the Blessed Mother, because what family is a family without a mother, and the saints as older brothers and sisters, role models to inspire us? All the whole kit and caboodle can be understood and summed up, that we are God's family.

I asked a theologian a few years ago as he was arguing and debating with me privately about these matters whether he thought the Presbyterian church or the Baptist church - whether you could call these "mother church". He said, "Yeah, sure." I said, "Is this mother church, is that mother church; are they different mothers?" "Yeah." I said, "What do you call a man who fathers children through various mothers? Scoundrel? A jerk?" You know, whatever.

That's not the way God fathers. God fathers through one mother, Mother Church. God fathers His children in one family. He doesn't father many families. And a father whose wisdom is infinite, whose power is infinite, whose love is infinite: Is his capacity to keep that family unified infinite? Yes! In its doctrine, yes; in its worship, yes; in its moral code, yes. Has He done so? Not according to non-Catholics. But the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church testifies to the saving work of Jesus Christ, the glory of the new covenant, the family of God which He has fathered successfully, despite the fact that there are scoundrels in it to this day. God be praised.

This fuller picture of the covenant that God's family gives to us; this image that we are a family communion bonded through the sacramental oath that God has sworn through Christ; the covenant relations that established the Church are family relations. The Pope is our Holy Father. The priest is a holy father. Mary is to us a mother. Monks are brothers and nuns are sisters. Why? Because they all reflect and participate in the family love and life of the Trinity. That's how the whole worldwide family of God is structured. That's how it lives and is sustained, through the blood-bond renewed in Communion, through all seven sacraments, through the servant leadership of the Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, who is a living icon, a symbol of our real, ultimate eternal Father.

We bow our knees before the Father in heaven from whom all fatherhood in heaven and on earth is derived. God the Father doesn't do away with my fatherhood; it establishes my fatherhood. God the Father does not feel threatened in His fatherhood by my calling the priest "Father" or the Pope "Holy Father". All of these people are signs and symbols pointing to us God the Father.

That's the nature of the Church's hierarchy. Hierarchy comes from "hieras arce", the rule of priests. Judges 17, 18 and 19 tell us that the Old Testament, the Biblical understanding of priest is fatherhood. This man asks for a priest and says, "Will you be to me a priest and a father?" He says it to his own son. He says to his son, "Will you be to me a priest and a father?", because the priesthood is spiritual fatherhood. The whole priestly hierarchy of the Church is Christ establishing divine fatherhood in every level of human need individually, domestically; in terms of the parish, in terms of the diocese, in terms of the region and in terms of the whole worldwide family of God. This is how we understand our salvation.

The word for redeemer in Hebrew, "goel" literally means "kinsman redeemer". It was usually the oldest brother who did whatever it took to buy out of slavery or rescue from captivity his younger brothers and sisters. The redeemer, the "goel" was the nearest kinsman who would use the family wealth, the family power, the family know-how to rescue family members who were lost to the family. Redemption comes to us from the redeemer, from the first born among many brethren, according to St. Paul, Romans 8. Our redemption is the gift of family membership to us prodigals who have run away.

Justification, according to the Catholic Church, is God conferring the gift, the legal and the actual reality of divine sonship. "Behold what manner of love the Father has given to us that we should be called the children of God, for so we are." (1 Jn 3:1) We are the children of God. Now, if I made a statue of myself and it looked just like me, it wouldn't be a child. If I had a child who didn't look anything like me, he'd still be my child. What is it that makes a child? It's the communication of my human nature. What is it that has made us God's children? A legal decree alone? Not merely a legal declaration; the infusion of the spirit of sonship whereby we share in Christ's own Sonship. We have an actual, physical, mystical, supernatural share in the Trinity's family love and life. That's what justification is.

Sanctification is the spirit, the holy spirit of sonship, maturing the children of God in the family of God. Hebrews 12 talks about how God the Father disciplines us as children. Romans 8 describes a whole process of growing into Christ's likeness as "maturing in sonship". The glorification of the Christian and of the Church is a family fact. God the Father is going to glorify His family and each and every son and daughter that He has brought to Himself.

Even the difficult doctrine of predestination is misunderstood when it isn't tied directly to this master idea of God's family. When Paul speaks of predestination in Romans 8 and Ephesians 1, both times he says, "He also predestined us to be conformed to the image of His Son that He might be the firstborn among many brethren." The nature of predestination is sonship, not merely salvation, because salvation is the life in the family of God that belongs to sons and daughters who share in the Trinity. (Ephesians 1:5) "He destined us in love to be His sons, through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will." Salvation is the reality of divine sonship. Peter tells us, 2 Peter 1:4 tells us that He has made us partakers of the divine nature. We partake of the divine nature, not only individually, but what makes the Church one is the fact that all of the children of God receive the life of God and so from the family of God, and therefore, invisibly and spiritually and physically and visibly constitutes the extended household of faith. Praise be to our Father in heaven!

Conclusion

If you were a father, what would bring you glory? What would bring you the most glory? Simply to declare sinners righteous when they still are sinful or to actually invest your own power and life and love and truth in them through the spirit of sonship, declaring and doing what you are declaring, imputing but imparting, making sons and daughters, making them righteous? What gives the Father the most glory? Many churches who all fight and squabble because they have no headship, no fatherhood, no family rituals, no family moral code, no family doctrines on which everybody agrees? What brings "solo Deo gloria"? What brings to God alone the glory, one Father, one family, one doctrine, one faith, one Lord, one hope, one baptism, one liturgy?

Sure, there's diversity. There's the Byzantine rite, the Maronite rite, the Latin rite; but there's one holy sacrifice of the Mass whereby God the Father calls His children to the family table to share the meal that His firstborn Son, our oldest brother has purchased for us.

The Catholic Church is Trinitarian

That's how we bring glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. This is how we understand the Church's unity. God has renewed His family, God has made us a third race to unify the whole broken human race. The holy Catholic Church is the worldwide family of God. The covenant relations that we see in the Church are family relations. The Pope is Father, pastors as father, Mary as Mother, saints as brothers and sisters. The covenant law is an obligation that we have. These obligations are family obligations that are necessary for communion, and the ministry that God calls us to exercise are domestic service to our brothers and sisters in Christ.

This is not just invisible. This is visible. This is not just spiritual; it's physical; not just at the local level in one congregation of Bible Christians who all happen to agree on what the pastor happens to be preaching on this year but maybe not next year. I know what pastor-centered churches are like. I know what sermon- centered worship services are like. I was one and I led them, and I know the weaknesses. But I know the strength of God's family when it's founded on the one deposit of truth and life that Christ invested to the Apostles and their successors, that He maintains throughout the world to this day by the Holy Spirit.

When we extol and praise and describe the Church, we are glorifying the work of Christ. This is what Christ came to establish; not just individualistic experiences of salvation, but the family of God. You often find non-Catholic Bible Christians - it's just me and Jesus. My father was raised in a family that wasn't ideal. His mom was a fallen-away Catholic and his dad was an agnostic. So he never really went to church, but he went every so often when his mom was allowed back in for a while. She ended up her life as a very holy saint, very beautiful woman of God. But when he was growing up, it wasn't so.

He had some experiences in the Catholic Church when he was a kid, few but memorable. He had a few experiences visiting me when I used to preach in Bible churches and visiting other Bible churches. He says the one big difference that he notices is that it's "me and Jesus" in the Bible churches, whereas it's the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit that begin and end and permeate the Catholic Church service and the Catholic Church. He's not sure what he believes in; he's still working it through, but he notices that the Catholic Church is Trinitarian, whereas the Bible churches tend to be "Christum monus". They reduce it all down to "me and Jesus", the work of Christ, neglecting the work of the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

The Church is the masterpiece of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the soul of the Mystical Body. We give glory and honor and praise to the Holy Spirit when we accept the Catholic Church as the one worldwide historical Body that Christ maintains by His Holy Spirit.

Now we really haven't had a chance to get into this notion of the Church as kingdom. I'm going to begin the talk later today on that idea. But I want to share with you just in closing some quotations. I've had several Protestants say to me, "Scott, what you say sounds good, but it's not what the Catholic Church teaches. That's your version of it!" I have note cards, stacks of note cards, quotations from Popes and from Doctors of the Church and Fathers of the Church. I just randomly selected a few as I was running out to catch my plane.

Supporting Quotations

Pope Pius XII said, "Hold fast to this: The Church is the Church of all men. She is there for all. She wishes to gather all men into one family as brothers and sisters in Christ. Widen your horizons, your vision and your heart. Extend them to every country and to all nations." (I dare say even Iraq!) Only the Catholic Church can dispose of such powers of reconciliation, of understanding, of unity; powers capable of acting on ultimate conviction. The Catholic Church has supernatural and divine power to effectuate the unity of God's family. Pope Pius XII said to Roman seminarians, "If you wish to grow in the love of Christ, you must cultivate the obedience, the confidence, the love of sons toward the Vicar of Jesus Christ, for in him you venerate and obey Christ. Christ is present to you in his person. It is false to distinguish the juridical Church from the Church of charity. There is no such distinction, for the Church which was founded juridically whose head is the Pope, is also the Church of Christ, the Church of charity, the worldwide family of Christians. Let those sentiments, which in a true Christian family unite fathers and sons and sons with fathers reign between us and you."

I have many other quotes, too, from St. Augustine, from St. Jerome. I can't get to them all but suffice to say - well, I'll mention a few. St. Jerome: "Be obedient to your bishop. Consider him as the father of your soul." St. Augustine: "The Apostles were sent as fathers to replace those Apostles. Sons were born to you who were constituted Bishops. The Church calls them fathers; she who gave birth to them. Such is the Catholic Church. She has given birth to sons who through all the earth continue the work of her first father." Jesus Christ's fatherhood is big enough to share and to continue and to grow and to expand.

Cardinal de Lubac has said, "It is only in the broad perspective of the family of God, brought once again to the fore by Vatican II, that the Motherhood of the Church and, more particularly, the fatherhood of her pastors find their proper place and assume their full significance."

Communication Gap in the Church

I have had a very long, adventurous odyssey. I have gone through parachurch ministries, Bible churches. I've gone through various fellowships. I've been very anti-Catholic. I have opposed the Church. I have passed out books, Boettner's book especially. I've done all that I could for years and years to keep people and to get people out of the Catholic Church. Nowhere, at no time did anyone ever explain the Catholic Church to me in these terms. I don't know why there is a big communication gap, but there is. When I read the Popes, when I read the Fathers and the Doctors of the Church, it's all there, plain as day. But when I read American Catholics, it's quite different. I'm not sure why but I suspect it's because we live in a culture that doesn't know what family means. It certainly doesn't know what motherhood means or it wouldn't abort 1- 1/2 million babies every year.

We live in a culture that is so twisted and so sick and so morally despicable that I dare say it will be practically impossible for people on natural powers alone to really grasp the meaning of family. We think of marriage as legalized sex, one student once said to me. He was reflecting his own view. Family is just biography, family is just geography. No, it's theology. It's supernatural grace.

Bible Christians are Divided on so Many Issues; Distortion of the Unity of God's Family

You know as well as I do that Christians who call themselves Bible Christians are hopelessly divided on the Second Coming, on Israel and the whole crisis over there in the Middle East; on charismatic gifts, healing and tongues, on the nature of the atonement, on lordship, salvation, on the need for works, on sacraments, on free will and predestination; and they all claim to derive their beliefs from Scripture alone. Ain't no way! That's individualistic Christianity and that is a distortion of what the Trinity has established through Christ and the Holy Spirit.

In the worship, do you have altars, do you use instruments, do you worship on Sunday or is that the mark of the Anti-Christ, as the Seventh Day Adventists say? Is baptism for infants or adults, is it pouring, sprinkling or immersing? Are churches to be independent or are they to be formed into conventions and presbyteries or what? Are tongues still valid? Should women be ordained? Should clergymen wear robes? How often do we celebrate the Lord's Supper? What does it symbolize? Should there be liturgy or spontaneity? Should there be church membership or only association?

These are the issues that divide Bible Christians and worship. They are not small. They're huge and they rip apart the fabric of God's family and in name, the faith. Morality, abortion, euthanasia, remarriage and divorce, Operation Rescue, birth control, capital punishment - all kinds of vital issues. In the Catholic Church we have one voice, the voice of Christ down through the ages. Outside the Catholic Church, you have many voices competing, but all claiming the Bible as their basis.

St. Irenaeus said that we have to learn the Bible from the mouth of our Mother or else we distort its meaning. I know that to be true and I want to say that I pledge my life to the glory of God the Father alone "solo Deo gloria", to God alone be all the glory. Sola gratia, from beginning to end by Christ's grace alone that we can be a family of God, a worldwide Catholic Church-family with Popes and bishops and priests and so on and with the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of Christ (who is our oldest brother) to be spiritually our mother.

This is a vision that only the Holy Spirit can grant. I cannot debate people into submission. I cannot argue and reason or proof- text from the Scriptures and force somebody's will. I cannot rape an intellect and if I could, I wouldn't because the Holy Spirit is necessary to graciously instill faith, not only in the Father Almighty, not only in the Son, not only in the Holy Spirit but in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

THE CHURCH IS HOLY

Summary of Reasons Why the Church is Holy

As I said earlier, our series is a study of the Church and in particular, the four notes of the Church, the four notes being that the Church is one, holy, catholic and apostolic. We have already considered the oneness, the unity or sometimes it's called the unicity of the Church. We would now want to consider the sanctity of the Church, the Church's holiness. It's a holiness that pertains to the Church because of Jesus, whose body we are, because of the Holy Spirit, who is the soul of the Church, because of the holiness of the teachings of Jesus, because of the holiness of the sacraments, because of the holiness, the heroic and extraordinary holiness of the saints, because of the ordinary and everyday holiness of her members, because of the sanctifying influence of the Church in the world upon individuals. We have so much to consider; we can't squeeze it all into two hours, let alone one. But you know me enough to know that I'll probably try.

The Unity of the Church, the One Family of God

I'd like to just sum up this morning's talk and build upon that foundation. In one phrase it's, "We belong to God's family and that the family of God is the master idea of the Catholic faith." God's concern for Church unity is not some doctrinaire, defensive dogmatism: He wants to make sure everybody thinks the same way He does just because He's God and we're not. It isn't anything like that. God's concern for the Church, its unity, its purity, is not some defensiveness; it's not some autocratic, tyrannical ideology. It's a father's passion to protect his children.

Jesus in His high priestly prayer prayed to the Father that He would sanctify the members of His Church. The term for sanctify, "agiaso" comes from the Greek word "agias" for "holy, to make holy." He said, "Sanctify them in truth". So the unity of the Church and its doctrine and its morality and its truth is the means by which we are made holy. And God's concern for the unity of the Church and its teaching is a fatherly passion to protect His children. That's the fundamental reason why He commands and requires us to be in the one and only true Church, the one He built upon the Rock of Peter because the Father, like any wise leader, like any loving provider, knows best the needs of His children.

Jesus reminds us of this in Matthew 7:24 when he contrasts the wise man with the foolish man. Both of them build homes, and judging from the descriptions, both of them build very beautiful homes. But the wise man built his house upon a rock, whereas the foolish man built his house on sand. We're told that the rains came, the floods came and the winds came and then, finally, the house built on sand fell. But notice how much it took to knock down that house...flood waters, winds and storms had to beat against that house before it fell, but fall it did.

We're not told, but I suspect it's possible that the foolish man's house may have been externally more beautiful, more glitzy, more enchanting. Many times people find Bible churches more exciting. "I go there because I'm fed". I don't believe that. I think they are sincere, but they are misguided in saying, "there they are fed". In the Catholic Church you're fed with the Bread of Life, Jesus Christ, His Body and Blood in the Eucharist. There they are motivated, they are enthused. In the Bible churches they are excited and they are surrounded by other enthusiastic believers, and the Catholic Church needs to be filled with people like that. There's no denying it! In fact, it's time we start emulating them. But the fact is that the house built upon the rock by the wise Father is the only one that stands.

So Jesus says, "I will build my Church upon this rock", which is Peter, and like a loving and wise father, He knows the needs of His children and those needs pertain to the unity of the family, especially in regard to truth, the truth which sanctifies. Denominations and independent congregations in Bible churches are built on sand, without the stability to survive or endure the storms, the winds and the seas, even though some of these churches might last for centuries. We're not talking about the "big, bad wolf" huffing and puffing and blowing the house of straw down. We're talking about denominations and independent congregations that are strong, but not as strong as the Father in heaven wants His family to be.

We belong to God's family. God has revealed Himself to be a family in the Trinity. That's the whole meaning of who God is in Himself from eternity.

That's the whole purpose of Christ's work as our Redeemer, as our "goel". He is our kinsman, He is the firstborn among many brethren. He buys us out of slavery, He delivers us from bondage, He gives us, He invests us with His own life as divine children. That's the meaning of the Christian life for all of us. We become what He has made us, children of God who are called to grow up as sons and daughters of God the Father. That's the fundamental reality, therefore, of the Church, the family of God, the communion, the sacramental, the supernatural communion of the New Covenant, the new family that Christ has established through the sacraments. And that, to sum it up, is the essential work of the Holy Spirit, the spirit of sonship which cries out from within the depths of our hearts, "Abba, Papa, Father". It's a family affair from beginning to end and the Father is glorified by raising up saints and investing them with the holiness that is His own.

The holiness of the Church is what we wish to consider, but I'd like to add a few comments just to piggy-back on our previous talk. I gave a talk on "how the family of God is the master idea of the Catholic faith", soon after I converted because it's something I'd been working on for a few years. Afterwards a missionary nun came up and said that she had been teaching theology in many parts of the world for over forty years, but she said, "In forty minutes, you did more to sum up and to clarify for me the meaning of my religion, of my faith, than forty years of study and forty years of teaching".

So often it takes an outsider to appreciate what's on the inside! It takes an immigrant who comes in and is naturalized as a citizen to really appreciate, say, America, the Beautiful. How much more when the nation is the people of God! Now, pray for the converts because they're the ones who might know a lot, but sometimes people who know less live more. So pray that we live more what the Lord has taught us, because the Lord is raising up a great and mighty army of converts to clarify and to highlight the glory of the Catholic Church as the family of God.

This teaching is not just some incidental approach. It's not just some secondary way of describing the Catholic faith. As I mentioned, some people have suggested to me, and friends of mine, that this family approach is a novelty, rather convenient and helpful for Bible Christians but not really true to the character of the Catholic faith as the Catholic Church teaches it. I mentioned that I had a whole slew of quotes. I pulled out some more and I decided to share just three or four with you. I just can't resist.

One of my favorite quotes, it's a very well-known quote from St. Cyprian, "He cannot have God for his father who does not have the Church for his mother". Is that family language? I think so. "Do you think that a man," Cyprian says, "can hold his own or survive when he leaves the Church and sets up a new place and a separate home for himself?" No, of course not. Cyprian goes on to say, "The devil doesn't trouble himself with those whom he has already made sure of, nor does he labor to conquer those already in his power. Whomever he has already alienated from the Church, God's family, he overlooks and passes by without considering them worth his notice."

The Bible churches are thriving. They are not being attacked or assaulted like the Catholic Church is. In the 20th century, in a unique way, unprecedented in history, the Church has been attacked, not only from without - that's old hat- but from within, in a diabolical way but in a way that will only serve to prove the interior holiness, the supernatural life, the heavenly charter and the divine identity of the Church of Christ.

St. Augustine says, "This is the holy Church, the one Church, the true Church, the Catholic Church fighting against all heresies. Fight it can; be fought down, it cannot. Let us love Our Lord God, let us love His Church, Him as a father, Her as a mother; Him as Lord, Her as His handmaid. No man offends the one and wins the favor of the other. He will not have God for his father who refuses the Church for his mother. "What does it profit," St. Augustine goes on to say, "What does it profit you not to have offended your father, since he will punish your offenses against your mother? What does it profit you to praise the Lord, to honor Him, to preach Him, to believe in His Son, to confess that He sits at the right hand of God the Father, while at the same time you denigrate His Church? Outside the Church you can find everything except salvation. You can have dignities. You can have sacraments. You can sing 'Alleluia', answer 'Amen', have the gospels and have faith in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Spirit and preach it too. But you will find salvation and all the means of grace alone in the Catholic Church." These are strong statements that identify the Church as the family of God. This is not something novel. This is not something that is ancient and in need of recovery. This is something perennial. This is something that all of the Holy Fathers, the sovereign Popes, Vicars of Christ have been saying for many years.

Most recently, John Paul II has said, "The Church, especially in Vatican II, has recognized herself as family". For instance, in the Vatican II document Lumen Gentium, # 28: "Let priests sincerely look upon the Bishops as their father and reverently obey him, and let the Bishop regard his priests as sons." In Lumen Gentium, #28, it goes on to say, "Because the human race today is joining more and more into civic, economic and social unity, it is that much more necessary that priests, united in concern and effort under the leadership of the Bishops and the Supreme Pontiff wipe out every kind of division so that the whole human race may be brought into the unity of the family of God". That is the message and that is the mission of the Church in history.

Pope John Paul II has also said, "In this entire world there is not a more perfect, a more complete image of God than the human family. There is no other human reality which corresponds more, humanly speaking, to the Divine Mystery." He says, "One cannot truly protect the family without getting to its roots, its profound reality, its intimate nature. Its intimate nature is the communion of persons in the image and likeness of the divine Communion. Family on mission, Trinity on mission, the Church on mission. Such a witness, the family's mission, is ultimately inscribed in the sign of the most Holy Trinity".

I could go on and on and on. I love this stuff; but to sum it all up: We are the family of God and we have a purpose: to live the life of holiness, to make the Holy Trinity believable, to make the Holy Trinity known and to make the Holy Trinity loved. That's why the Holy Spirit invests the Church with this mark, with this property of holiness, divine holiness, the Spirit's own holiness.

Now, we've already said that this is hard for Americans, Westerners, 20th-century people to understand. First of all because the whole notion of the Trinity is so neglected. It's me and Jesus in Bible churches. Seldom do you have much exposition of the Trinity. Even less often do you find much real theological or spiritual reflection and contemplation of the practical results of loving and believing in the Trinity. We also have an inadequate understanding of the covenant which makes our own relationship to the Trinity as Church very difficult to grasp and appreciate. If it's a contract, then it's just sort of a social and a legal convention, but if it's a covenant in the ancient Hebrew sense, then it's a sacred family blood-bond that Christ Himself has established.

Because of the rampant individualism and the materialism and the secularism which regards the now, the present as ultimate, all of this vision is very difficult to comprehend for people. Today, the family is at the nuclear unit, it's the economic unit, the parents are producers and the children are consumers and so, who wants to have a big family? It's a crisis. It's a crisis that I'm sure Steve will address later this evening with profundity and wisdom to give us insight into how we can help our own society and Catholics within our society to appreciate our legacy, our heritage much better.

I remember talking to a devout Christian sociology professor. I told her about my doctrinal research into the covenant as God's family and how I was studying this notion of family as a reflection of the Trinity, as a design for the Church and as the nature of the people of God. She looked at me and she said, "Well, I prefer to study, as a sociologist, non-coercive relationships." What? The family by implication, is that network of coercive relationships. What a sad statement, which reflects, I think, a lot more than she was intending to express. But that's the reality.

So, what do we do? Well, we have a tall order; we have a lot of work as a Church in this age, but we've got Jesus Christ praying for us and sending to us the Holy Spirit. Listen to His prayer in John 17: "I do not pray, Father, that you take them out of the world, but that thou shouldst keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world". Did you catch that? We as members of the Church are not really "of the world" just as Jesus is not "of the world". The earth is, for us, a place of pilgrimage, a place of exile, a place where we are aliens, colonists, indentured servants, waiting and longing and traveling to our homeland. "They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth. Thy word is truth". "Thy word is truth" - we need to know God's word.

The Church is Constituted to be a Holy Kingdom, a Kingdom of Priests

Now there are three steps that we can take briefly this afternoon, I think, to correct what is a common misunderstanding when it comes to the Church's holiness, because if there is one of the four marks that is the most misunderstood, or if there is one mark that stands out from among the four as being the most neglected, it's the Church's holiness.

Why are we called "holy" when we look around and we see so much unholiness, so much wickedness? What is holiness? Where in our society do we find anything or anyone that all of us would commonly regard as "holy"? What does holy even mean? Does the word have any concrete, substantive meaning for Americans today? I mean, you can see Robin smacking his hand, saying to Batman, "Holy cow, Batman!" We use the word holy for lots of things, but do we have even a modicum of understanding when it comes to its real substance?

What is holiness? We have to understand holiness, and so I'd like to look at three things. First, I'd like to look at how the Church is constituted to be a holy kingdom, a kingdom of priests, a consecrated kingdom. Second, I'd like to look at the holiness of God and then third, I'd like to look at the holiness of God's Spirit, the soul of the Mystical Body, the Church.

When Jesus Speaks of the Kingdom of God in the Gospels, He Means the Church

Now, I already said this morning that the Church is, in the gospels, the kingdom of God. Now, that is a thesis that is often disputed. I remember in seminary coming across a few Protestant scholars who in their writings were conceding something that I thought was dreadfully Catholic, that is, in the gospels when Jesus speaks of the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven, what He means is the Church. It bugged me because I knew that that was the position that the Catholic Church had always taken and the Protestant reformers had vehemently denied. I considered the evidence and I found an overwhelming number of 20th-century Protestant scholars reluctantly, but quite candidly and honestly, admitting or conceding that fact.

Now there is a large group, a very vocal group of Bible Christians and Bible preachers out there who would deny this to their tomb. Sometimes it goes by the name of "dispensationalism". It's associated with Dallas Seminary, Jerry Falwell, (you've heard of him, I suspect), Pat Robertson and so many other famous radio and television evangelists believe in this dispensational view that holds that the Church is not the kingdom of God. It is a kind of parenthesis in God's historical work; that God was working with His people through the kingdom of David in the Old Testament. Then they rejected Christ as king and so Christ set up a Church for a temporary period of time, which has now lasted 2000 years, after which He will return and set up a kingdom in Jerusalem with the Jews.

That is very common among Bible Christians, very common. You'll find this in John McArthur. You'll find this in many, if not most, of the radio and television evangelists. This is the standard Protestant approach in history, the last four or five hundred years; but in the last century Protestant scholars like I. Howard Marshall, one of the greatest evangelical Bible scholars, says, "The Church as the people of God is the object of His rule and is, therefore, His kingdom". We should not be afraid of recognizing that fact.

Another German Protestant scholar, Hans Holtzman, said, "The kingdom of God was promised by Jesus, what came was the Church". He said that with a kind of complaining whine. In fact he said that the tendency to identify the Church with the kingdom of heaven is so prevalent in the gospel of Matthew that he labels it in German what we translate as "a Catholicizing deformation". Holtzman says that Matthew "deformed" the kingdom by identifying it with the Church. Well, at least he's honest. You've got to give him that much.

Popes and Councils Have Declared the Church to be the Kingdom of God

The Church as the kingdom of God is something that the Popes and the Church Councils have declared the Church to be for quite some time. We have to understand that. Let's just consider a few thoughts. In Vatican II, Lumen Gentium, Article 5, the Council Fathers say, "In Christ's word and His works and His presence, this kingdom reveals itself to men. The Church receives the mission to proclaim and to establish among all peoples the kingdom of Christ and of God. Consequently", it goes on to say that, "Christ has equipped the Church with the tools that are needed for building the kingdom. She, the Church, becomes on earth the initial budding-forth of that kingdom. While she slowly grows, the Church strains towards the consummation of the kingdom and with all her strength and all of the power that Christ gives, it works to be united to the king in glory." But ultimately, Vatican II makes it clear that we are to see ourselves as God's kingdom.

Scriptural Basis for Identifying the Church With the Kingdom of God

Now I mentioned Holtzman a minute ago. He points that there are several passages in the Gospel of Matthew that makes this very clear. In Matthew 3, verse 2, we find that at the beginning of Christ's ministry, the message that was proclaimed was, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand". That means it's imminent; it's about to break in. "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Again in Matthew 4, verse 17, Jesus went about preaching, quote, "the gospel of the kingdom". He preached to all of the people in the Sermon on the Mount, "Seek first the kingdom and its righteousness", and he promised that those who would seek with faith, "to such belongs the kingdom of heaven". In Matthew 12, we read something very interesting: Jesus says, "Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste and no city or house divided against itself will stand. If it is by the spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God is come upon you".

The power of Jesus released to overcome evil is the manifestation of the kingdom and that power has been given to the Church, to bind and to loose. It's the power against which the gates of hell will not prevail. Therefore, we have Jesus' own guarantee that the Church is the colonial outpost of God's kingdom on earth; and we've got royal power from God on high, if only we would use it. In Matthew 13, Jesus bombards His disciples with a series of parables. They are called "the parables of the kingdom" and He speaks to the disciples about how they have been given the secrets of the kingdom. The kingdom of heaven is a field full of wheat and tares. How is that? A wheat field full of tares. Now, if you want to identify the kingdom with the final state of glory, then this wouldn't be possible. Jesus couldn't say that the kingdom is like a wheat field full of tares. No, the Church as God's kingdom is a wheat field that is full of tares and weeds and the disciples are told not to pluck them up because the angels will come to harvest the wheat and the angels will have what it takes to differentiate between the wheat and the tares.

There you have special clarity in seeing that the Church is the kingdom. I suspect most of you are sitting here thinking, "He's flogging a dead horse. Okay, okay, enough is enough; the Church is the kingdom of God"! But it's something that you need, not just for yourself but for other people who call upon the name of Christ and who believe that He is their king, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. It's one thing to say that Christ is your king, but it's another thing to remain intentionally outside of His kingdom.

What is your confession of His kingship if you will not submit to the kingdom and the royal government that He has established in the Church? So we need, for love of our non-Catholic brothers and sisters, we need to understand how to show them from the gospels how this is clear over and over again.

The kingdom in Matthew 13, verse 47 is compared to a dragnet that draws good and bad vessels up. Again, that isn't the final, glorious state in heaven forever. That's the Church in history on earth. We also see in Matthew 16, perhaps, the clearest statement of the Church as God's kingdom because there Jesus declares Simon to be the rock upon which He will build the Church and immediately, he gives to Simon Peter, the Rock, the keys of the kingdom. He says on the one hand, I am going to build my Church on you, petros, on you, rock; and I give to you, rock, the keys of the kingdom. So how will he be the instrument through and by which Christ builds His Church? By possessing and administering the keys of the kingdom of heaven.

You can see this elsewhere, in Matthew 18, where Jesus instructs the Apostles on how to reconcile fallen brethren: by confronting them privately with their sins and asking them to repent. He goes on talking about how, if they refuse to listen "even to the Church" then they should be outsiders. Then in the very next passage, he goes on to talk about a king who forgave one of his servants. The whole principle of forgiveness in Matthew 18 is wrapped up with forgiveness in God's kingdom as well as forgiveness in the Church. Lastly, in Matthew 21, verse 43, Jesus tells the scribes and the Pharisees and the chief priests in Jerusalem that the kingdom will be taken away from you and given to nations that produce fruit worthy of it. That's the Church, the nations are the Gentiles and the Catholic Church is the kingdom that was taken away from the people who wanted simply a military, political kingdom under David and refused to accept the Son of David who came to establish the kingdom of heaven with spiritual authority.

I should also add, in Matthew 19:28, Jesus tells the Apostles that they will sit on twelve thrones, ruling the twelve tribes of Israel. Once again, royal imagery. Enough is enough! I mean we could go through many other passages of Scripture, but I think this suffices. I'm a college professor. I have classes after lunch. You should see, it's just terrible. Even my best students start slumbering! You know how it is.

The Church is not Fully Identical With the Kingdom of God

The Church is the kingdom of God on earth but the Church is not fully identical with the kingdom of God. That is why Jesus is at pains to describe the kingdom as also the kingdom of heaven. Only in heaven is the fullness of the kingdom because only in heaven do we have the king in all of his manifest glory. Therein we find divine and royal authority and truth. Only at the end of time is the glory of the kingdom going to be fully manifested, when all history is consummated. And only in the saints who are glorified and residing now in heaven is the reality of the kingdom fully present and really alive.

That's what we really mean when we say that the Church is holy. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints. We are members of the Church. We are saints. We are sanctified. We are set apart to be holy and yet our membership is, in some ways, provisional, probationary. It is real, but it is something which needs completion and perfection. Not so the saints in heaven. So, when we confess our faith in the Holy Spirit, the soul of the holy, Catholic Church, we confess, likewise, the communion of saints, because the saints in heaven are the full- fledged citizens of the kingdom; for up there, in heaven, is the reality of the kingdom in its fullness. In heaven is our King and I might also add, our Queen Mother, and all who have died in Him and for Him, sitting enthroned and crowned with glory as the Book of Revelation describes.

So, what are we? I like to describe the Church on earth as the royal colonial militia. The Pope, the bishops, the priests and the laity constitute the Church Militant in battle against sin, enmeshed in a titanic struggle with the world, the flesh and the devil. Under the earth are the POWs, waiting, expecting, desiring release, yet imprisoned, in a sense. Our militant action on their behalf has a liberating power. We can ransom them through the power of Christ alive in us.

The Vatican? Well, naturally, it's the embassy of our homeland, our royal kingdom. The earth is our colonial mission ground. It's wilderness. It's a place of exile, but it's a place, which in a sense, serves as our boot camp, our training ground, our place for preparation, where we learn to love and live the things we will do for ever and ever with the saints who are now glorified in heaven. God grant us a renewed understanding and belief in all that stuff.

People think, "Well, if you think that way, you're going to become so heavenly-minded, you'll be no earthly good"! I would say, "On the contrary, it's only those who are truly heavenly-minded who are really of any earthly good, because they understand the goods of earth as they really are in themselves". The goods of earth are good - marriage, sexuality, wealth, power, freedom - all those things are goods! They are lower goods, of a lower order. They're temporary; they're transient; they're fading for all of us. You can't take it with you!

So, the saints are those who see that the goods of the earth are like hors d'oeuvres that are only meant to whet your appetite for the real main course, which will be served in heaven. It's the person who has nothing to fear on earth because everything he possesses he knows is only temporary; it's that person who can really be courageous and bold and fearless in the face of tyrant kings, in the face of Communist parties, in the face of all kinds of materialistic and sensual temptations in our land. That's the person whose eyes and heart are fixed upon the treasure in heaven.

If we become heavenly-minded, as the saints are, if we become what we are as saints, we will be invincible on earth, as the saints have been, absolutely invincible! We are the kingdom of God, but we are a kingdom unlike any other kingdom in all of history. Our king does not have a wife. Our king is not raising up a son to be His successor. Our king does not have armies to protect all of His political holdings. Our king is the most unlikely figure of all, a man who has renounced money, sex and power for Himself. That, after all, is the essence of the threefold vow of the religious life. Poverty, chastity and obedience constitute the threefold vow that monks and those in religious life accept and take.

Why? Is it because money is bad? No, it's a lower good. Is it because sex is evil? No, in the Catholic Church marriage is sacramental and it's the act of marriage which consummates marital communion. No denomination in all the world has such a high view of sexuality as the Catholic Church. That's why no denomination on earth views sexual sin as seriously as the Catholic Church. The corruption of the best is the worst. It was precisely because Satan was the greatest angel that he became the greatest devil.

Money, sex, power - is power bad? No, but power down here is nothing compared to power and authority on the thrones in heaven. So these are the people who really understand that you can't take it with you; that the money, that the sex, the power and all the sensual gratification that we can enjoy here and now - all of that is fleeting! How long will it take for Americans to wake up and learn that lesson again? How jaded are we going to have to be with pornography and with drugs and with alcohol before we reinvent the wheel of human life?

The Church is Called to be a Kingdom of Priests

The saints are the ones who show us this power and this call to be a kingdom of priests is proclaimed by God from the Old Testament all the way through the New Testament, to give to us a clear sense of who we are. We're not a political or a military kingdom. We are "a kingdom of priests", we're "a royal priesthood", First Peter tells us, "a holy nation". A royal priesthood, the kingdom that we are is priestly. Therefore, we don't go around forcing conversions through the sword or through weapons. We don't go around using the means of this world. Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world". If it was, my disciples would fight. That does not mean that "my kingdom" is not in this world. It means that Christ's kingdom does not derive its royal authority from swords or armies or majority votes or political parties. He derives his royal authority from the Father and from the truth that Christ is in Himself.

Pilate could only answer cynically, "What is truth?" But his kingdom is long gone. Christ's kingdom is ever-expanding in the Church as a royal kingdom/priesthood. Now, I'm going to raise an issue here that I really can't deal with satisfactorily, but I almost always do that. That is the priesthood and especially the celibate priesthood.

Why does the Catholic Church require celibacy for priests? First of all, the Church does not condemn marriage. It espouses it as a sacrament. The Church does not forbid marriage. It just says that if you are called to the priesthood, there are certain sacrifices to be made. Everybody acknowledges that, they just squabble over which ones.

St. Paul makes it clear in 1st Corinthians 7 that his heart's desire as an apostle of Christ is that all God's ministers could be like him because then you could serve the Lord in a single-minded way, with greater devotion. But in Matthew 19, the disciples reply to Jesus, "Not all men - who can bear this saying?" When Jesus talks about how permanent marriage is, (and) Jesus acknowledges the fact that only some men can be in a sense what he calls "eunuchs for the kingdom", those who renounce sex and marriage for the kingdom.

Eunuchs were those individuals in antiquity who usually were forced to renounce sex through castration, so that they would be put in charge of the royal harem. So that all the wives of the king were under the charge of men who couldn't "mess around". Jesus uses that rather corrupt and perverse image to describe His ministers, those who have made themselves "eunuchs for the kingdom". They haven't been castrated; they have renounced a lower good, sexual satisfaction, bonis conjugalis, they have renounced the marital act and the marital covenant so that they can protect the royal bride. You see, Jesus doesn't have many wives. He's got one wife, the Church, His bride.

Those who renounce marriage to be eunuchs for the kingdom give themselves in single-minded devotion to protecting and preserving Christ's bride, the Church. There is a certain credibility in this holy sacrifice. One of the greatest converts of the 19th Century in North America was a man by the name of Orestes Brownson, perhaps the greatest intellectual in the U.S. a hundred years ago. He has an article entitled, "The Church's Influence on Ancient and Barbarian Society", where he deals with the issue of celibacy from a practical standpoint and he describes how the Church, in the Middle Ages and even before the Middle Ages, had a great pagan world to subdue and convert.

"Looking in Northern Europe, wild and lawless heathen and heretic united, the barbarians covered the face of Europe, a motley and chaotic assemblage of tribes, languages, customs and governments. But the Church began her work again and dauntless missionaries went forth on every side to Goth and Visigoth, Saxon and Hun and Vandal before whose fierce valor, the male legions of the empire had been defeated. They yielded to the peaceful teaching of those men of God and bowed their neck to the sweet yoke of Christ."

How could the most barbaric tribes submit to the gospel of peace? It's because devout religious men and women went forth, having renounced money, sex and power in the threefold vow of poverty, chastity/celibacy and obedience. They had credibility. I mean, if men show up in your tribal village, what are you going to suspect these foreigners are going to be looking for? Either your money or your women or controlling you, taking away your freedom.

But then all of a sudden, after a few hours, after a few days you discover that these men who are fully men have renounced, by a vow to their God, sex. They're not going to take away your daughters or your wives. They renounce money, so they are not here to plunder your wealth and they have renounced freedom in a vow of obedience to their superiors so they cannot become tyrants over you.

You've got to ask yourself one question - what did you come here for? If you're not here for my money or for my women or for power over me, what are you here for? You must really believe this message that you wish to proclaim. Let's hear it! Even barbarians have to sit up and listen and respect that sort of saintly sacrifice. And I daresay the world is not so entirely different today. And not until we pray for an increase in holy and worthy vocations to the priesthood and the religious life will we see this neo-pagan, barbarian culture of ours subdued once again to the gospel of peace.

We will, sooner or later, relearn the glory of celibacy and of the saintly sacrifice entailed in that. He goes on. He quotes the distinguished Protestant philosopher, Guizot who declares in his "General History of Civilization" "that it was their celibacy alone which prevented the clergy in the Catholic Church from forming a caste system like those in India. Had the clergy", he says, "Had the clergy been married, it would have been morally impossible for the church dignities not to have become hereditary, like the rank of feudal lords, for the clergy would naturally have allied themselves by intermarriage and common interests the feudal nobility and would have united with them in retaining in their own hands all the intelligence of the age, all the wealth and power of the nations, while the lower classes would have been irretrievably sunk in ignorance, poverty and servitude, like the wretched lower castes of India. This," Guizot says, "would have been the inevitable consequence of the marriage of the clergy; whereas the effect of the celibacy was that while all else around her fell under the regime of privilege and birth, the Church alone maintained the principle of equality and admitted all men, without regard to their origin, to all her charges and all her dignities. As a matter of fact, the Church by this institution, not only threw open to the poorest classes all the means of education, all the treasures of learning, all the dignities and wealth which she possessed; but, moreover, through the immense temporal power which the clergy then enjoyed opened to the poorest at the same time all the highest offices in the society."

The power of celibacy is power to convert cultures and societies and civilizations. This is the example of the holiness of the saints, but it's something that we're not quite ready to understand. We're going to look at the saints a little bit more in just a minute. Before I step into that, I'd like to stop and step back and consider God's holiness.

If there's one thing I believe that constitutes the crisis of our age as Msgr. Josemaria Escriva has said, "The crisis of our age is a crisis of saints." We lack courageous saints in the world. Now, saints are not weirdoes. That's what our world tells us, though: the saints are the people who really don't fit. They couldn't do anything else and so they became priests or whatever. Not so. The saints are those who are fully and truly human. They are fully rational. They are in true and proper possession of their senses because they understand reality better than most of us.

Scriptural Accounts of People Who Have Seen God

What do I mean? Think about God. Imagine what it would be like to see God. Pretty hard, isn't it? Imagine what it would be like now to come into the presence of God. What would it do to us? Well, I think we have tamed God so much we think that it would be something less than the trauma it would actually be. We know what it's like because we have accounts of such encounters in sacred scripture. In Isaiah 6, for instance, the holy and righteous prophet Isaiah is in the Temple and he has a vision in the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah says, "I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up and His train filled the temple and above Him stood the seraphim , the highest of the angels". The name "seraphim" literally means in Hebrew, "the burning ones". "Each had six wings. With two wings he covered his face, with two wings he covered his feet and with two he flew, and one called to another and said, 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts'. The whole earth is full of His glory and the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of Him who called. And the house was filled with smoke." And Isaiah says, "Woe is me for I am undone, for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of Hosts".

The Apostle John has the same vision of Jesus in His holy glory and when he beholds Jesus in His holiness and glory, he falls at His feet as though dead. He doesn't say, "Hey, long time no see, Jesus. It's been thirty or forty years, hasn't it? Oh what a friend we have in Jesus!" We do, but what a holy Lord we have! We have forgotten the holiness of God. We have lost the sense of God's utter sanctity. The term in Hebrew for holiness, "kodesh" is a word that has in a sense two meanings. On the one hand it means to "set apart", but it's to be set apart for devotion. It's interesting that the same Hebrew word for holiness, "kodesh" or "kodeshine" is the word that the Hebrews use for marriage.

God is "Holy" -- "Set Apart for Devotion"

Schillebeckx from his book on marriage describes how it's kind of an odd occurrence - that the word "kodeshine" means holiness, as God's holiness, but it also means marriage, because that which is holy is set apart, utterly set apart for a very sacred purpose.

Did you ever notice a pattern in profanity? Have you ever noticed that when people are profane what kind of images and words they use? The bathroom and the bedroom! Why? Because those places are set apart. One place, the bedroom, for noble, holy, private, intimate, indescribable acts that bring new life, and the bathroom because of its ignoble, its perhaps more shameful activities. The word profane in Latin comes from "profanum", which means "out of the temple". To take something that is holy and to drag it out of the temple is to profane it. To take something which is proper and holy in the marital bed, in the bedroom, and just kind of drag it out. The words that describe the acts of marriage are words which are used in profanity. Words that describe things that we do in private are kind of dragged out of the closet for shock value. We don't understand why we do this, but we do. And then when we use God's name in the same way, we take something that is holy and we use it like it's trash, to show that we are lord over all of this realm.

We can use God's name as we please. We can describe holy functions in ways that befit our own intentions and purposes. That's profanity. Our culture is profane. We don't understand Isaiah's experience, St. John's experience. This is not the God of the Old Testament. In the Book of Revelation we see the same thing. The angels and the saints before God's throne, crying, "Holy, holy, holy". Do you know that nowhere in the Bible do you find any statement where God is "love, love, love" or "mercy, mercy, mercy" or "forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness"? But in the Old Testament and in the New Testament we have God described as "Holy, holy, holy".

You see, in the Hebrew language, you don't have superlative suffixes like "good, better, best", "black, blacker, blackest". If you want to raise to a higher lever of intensity and emphasis a certain idea, you say it twice and if you want to say, not just good, not just better, but if you want to say best, you say it three times. God isn't just holy. He's not just holier. He is absolutely the holiest being who exceeds and transcends all other beings. When we come before Him, even if we were righteous and holy Isaiah, we would fall at His feet and say, "Woe is me. I am undone".

When we approach the Church, when we come before the altar, when we prepare to receive the Blessed Sacrament in the Holy Eucharist; when we repeat the cry of the angels in the Mass and we say, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of Hosts", do we really believe what we're saying? Do we really understand that our God is utterly different and separate from everything in the universe? Do we take off our shoes? Do we bow our knees? Do we prostrate our hearts before God and say, "Whoa!"?

This experience of God, Rudolph Otto described as the "mysterium tremendum". It's sort of like, "I've got to get away, but where else can I go, because nothing is so glorious? I want to get near, but I dare not." When we experience the holiness of God, we experience the purpose for our being. We experience the goal of our life. We experience the end of our existence. We experience that for which we have been made, and yet it terrifies us; because we know that in and of ourselves we're so unholy.

So, what are we to do? Of ourselves, we can do nothing. But we are not left to ourselves. Christ is with us in the Holy Eucharist. The sacraments are the divine instruments, the powerful agents to change us into saints, to sanctify us, to raise us up as children of God. The term holiness, as I've mentioned, means to set apart. I set apart the garbage cans every Thursday night for the Friday morning pickup but they're not holy, are they? We're talking about things that are set apart for an exclusive purpose of interpersonal love, family! Your sons and your daughters, your mother and your father, your wife or your husband, they're set apart. We are saints because we have been set apart. We are no mere creatures. We're not just servants. "I call you friends", Jesus says to His Apostles. We are children of God. We are the bride of Christ. We are His family so we are set apart as a holy temple, a royal household. And we have got to ask God to rekindle within our hearts a belief in His absolute and total holiness.

That alone will absolutely transform the Catholic Church wherever it happens. I pray that we will study and pray about God's holiness. If there is one thing, I believe, that makes a saint "canonizable", it's living with the understanding that, yes indeed, God is holy. Does that mean that we go about somber, serious, deadpan, refusing, repudiating, renouncing all of the goods of this earth? No, it doesn't, although there comes a time when we should renounce the goods of this earth. Incidentally, I just came across a book last week, (I love books, I've got about 14,000 of them in my own library. I'm a "bookaholic".) There's one book that's an absolute blockbuster by Father Christian Cuccini entitled, "The Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy", just came out from Ignatius, four or five hundred pages long, showing that from the earliest days, the Church has long recognized how proper and necessary priestly celibacy is. There's another book, Manfred Hawkey's book, "Women and the Priesthood", also published by Ignatius in 1988 that really answers a pressing question concerning another issue related to that.

But back to the business at hand here. We are talking about God's holiness and how to live in accord with that holiness, not in some somber, deadpan pessimism, but rather with a buoyant, joyous optimism that is absolutely optimistic in the face of all adversity and trouble because, down here, there's nothing to fear. As one man has said, "He is no fool to give up what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose". What can we keep down here? Not a thing.

Saints Show Us How to Live in Accord with God's Holiness

Saints are the ones who renounce joyfully, gratefully, the good, the lower goods of this earth to live out a heroic lifestyle of holiness. Think of the saints. St. Paul, one of my all-time favorites. St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. Basil, St. Gregory, St. Athanasius; another favorite of mine is St. Augustine. We have St. Bernard Clairvaux, we've got St. Benedict, St. Francis of Assisi. I teach at a Franciscan University in Steubenville. It is one of the most exciting places to be in the world today because there, St. Francis of Assisi is known. He is loved. He is addressed and he is emulated by men and women. It's exciting. St. Dominic, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure. These saints constitute the Church's Hall of Fame. They give to the Church a radiant splendor that we cannot find words to describe. St. Ignatius of Loyola, who founded the Society of Jesus, St. Francis Xavier, who killed himself loving Oriental people to the Lord, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, the Doctors of Prayer and the Mystical Life, St. Vincent de Paul, who loved the poor more than they loved themselves, St. John Vianney, who loved his parishioners enough to tell them what sins they were really committing and the confessional lines took hours and hours to go through. He would hear confessions 12, 13, 14 hours a day because he told it like it was.

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, we pray: O Father in heaven, my words are such an inadequate representation of truths that transcend our boldest dreams and our greatest imagination, give to us that faith, increase our faith, that we might see the Church as you see it, the Bride of Christ, the Household of Faith, the Family of God, that we might see it structured physically and visibly and continued in history, displaying the ongoing work of Christ and manifest in the power and love of the Spirit. These requests are a tall order, but Lord, that's what Christ died to give us and so we pray that Christ would give us a renewed vision of His Bride, of the family that He has purchased with His own flesh and blood and together, Lord, hear us as we pray the family prayer He taught: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. In the name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

THE CHURCH IS CATHOLIC

Introduction

A Bible Christian and evangelical theologian by the name of C.B. Moss a few years ago wrote a book entitled The Christian Faith, An Introduction to Dogmatic Theology. In it I found a section that recommended certain types of treatment for those afflicted with what he called "Roman Fever." He says, "In dealing with those who are attracted by the claims of Rome, we should keep certain facts in mind. The first is that the chief appeal of Romanism is not made to the reason but to the imagination. That is why it is so dangerous, for it is the imagination, not reason, which leads men to act. Secondly, our case against Rome is the case of truth against falsehood, freedom against slavery. Every convert to Rome becomes an agent of a great dictatorship whose power is directed against freedom in many different forms. Thirdly, the attraction to Rome is sometimes a morbid symptom." (Call a psychiatrist here.) "I could mention cases known to me in which it was due to physical causes or mental disease. Every case of what is commonly called 'Roman Fever' should be treated psychologically and the real cause of the attraction discovered, if possible. In some cases argument only makes the patient worse." (A patient... how therapeutic!) "The claims of Rome are great indeed and to the eyes of unbelief, they appear dictatorial and tyrannical." To my eyes they seemed that way for years and years.

If the Church isn't What She Claims to be, She's Diabolical

I think we have to really be charitable in recognizing the sincerity and, indeed, the rationality of opponents of Rome because if Rome is wrong, it isn't a little wrong. Because no denomination on earth claims what Rome claims for herself. No other Church or other ecclesial community makes such pretentious demands upon her members. So, if the Catholic Church is not a supernatural organism, if it is not the Mystical Body of Christ, whose soul is the Holy Spirit, we're in trouble.

If the Church is Correct, How Blessed We Are

But if it is all that Scripture has revealed, all that tradition confirms and all that the Church has always taught, then we should count ourselves blest indeed and fortunate to be called as apostles to share the exciting truth that God the Father has not forsaken His sinful family, but through the Church has brought about a universal reunion, a great and grand family reunion which is truly beginning and spreading continually through the ages until finally we make it back to our heavenly homeland for the everlasting reunion.

Meaning of the Word "Catholic" and the History of its Use

That's what the catholicity of the Church entails, the universality of the Church. The word comes from a Greek compound "kath-holan" which means "embracing all or pertaining to the whole." The word was first used by Ignatius of Antioch in 107 A.D. in an epistle he wrote to the Church at Smyrna. It caught on quickly. In fact by 140 A.D. it was commonplace to refer to the Church as Catholic. In the account of Polycarp's martyrdom, it's spoken of that way without any sense of novelty. By the year 200, it's found in the Muratorian fragment and from there, it just becomes a standard, stock formula to describe the Church of Christ. Of course it also appears in the Apostles' Creed, which some scholars date back to the first century or the second century. So it is a very ancient and revered term indeed.

Before I go on, I want to share with you some of the key quotations from the early Church Fathers that highlight the glory of the Church's catholicity. After all, we're known as the Catholic Church and it is important to understand just how beautiful that characterization is.

St. Irenaeus

St. Irenaeus in France, writing in the second century; "As I have already observed, the Church, having received this preaching and this faith from the Apostles, although scattered throughout the world, yet as if occupying one house, carefully preserves it." He's writing in the second century, now, from France. "For the churches which have been planted in Germany do not believe or hand down anything different, nor do those in Spain, nor do those in Gaul, nor do those in the East, nor do those in Egypt, nor do those in Libya, nor do those which have been established in the central regions of the world."

Tertullian

In the third century, Tertullian could write in his Apologeticum, "If we desire indeed to act the part of open enemies, not merely of secret offenders, would there be any lacking of strength, whether of numbers or resources?" He's boasting of how numerous the Catholics are and how widespread the Church is. "We are but of yesterday and we have already filled every place among you -- cities, islands, fortresses, towns, marketplaces, the very camp, tribes, companies, palace, senate and forum. We have left nothing for you but the temples of your idols, for now it is the immense number of Christians which make your enemies so few, almost all the inhabitants of your various cities being followers of Christ."

St. Cyril of Jerusalem

St. Cyril of Jerusalem writing in the fourth century tells us that the Church is Catholic because she is spread throughout the whole world, that is, from one end to the other. Also because she universally and without ceasing teaches all of the doctrines which mankind must learn.

So, there is a geographical catholicity; that is, it's universal in terms of geography. But there's also a doctrinal catholicity, that throughout the world the same truth is proclaimed -- a truth which heals and saves mankind. Furthermore, because she directs all mankind, rulers and subjects, educated and unlettered, to the worship and reverence of God, the Church is catholic.

St. Augustine

Perhaps nobody speaks as much of the catholicity of the Church being her glory as does St. Augustine. I have about twenty quotations. I'll spare you. But I want to read just a few to you because this is personal. For many years before I became Catholic, I boasted of how Augustinian my own evangelical Bible-believing, reformed tradition was, stemming from Luther but even more from Calvin and even more from the great Scottish "Covenanters" and the reformed communities in Europe. We always prided ourselves in being consistently Augustinian. Augustine is somebody, he's one of those saints, he's really the only saint, that everybody tries to claim for themselves. But I found the more I studied St. Augustine in his own writings, the more thoroughly Catholic he was. There was just no way to hijack him for non-Catholic purposes and uses. St. Augustine tells us, "The Church is hidden from no one for it is the Catholic Church itself which is therefore called universal in Greek because it is spread throughout the entire world. It is not allowed to anyone not to know this Church for which reason, according to the word of Jesus Christ, it is not possible that it be hidden. There are many other things which keep me in the bosom of the Catholic Church -- the unanimity of peoples and nations keeps me here, her authority, inaugurated in miracles, nourished by hope, augmented by love and confirmed by her age, keeps me here. The succession of priests from the very seat of the Apostle Peter up to the present episcopate keeps me here and last, the very name of Catholic, which not without reason belongs to this Church alone in the face of so many heretics, so much so that although all heretics want to be called Catholic, when a stranger inquires where a Catholic Church meets, not one of the heretics would dare point out his own basilica or meeting place. The name of the Catholic Church is peculiar to the true Church."

One of my closest friends from seminary, another PCA minister, I might add, was just received into the Catholic Church a few months ago and just a few weeks ago , he was officially excommunicated from the PCA. There was one man in particular who sort of served as devil's advocate, as the main antagonist and this guy practically hunted Bill down. He insisted time and again that if Augustine were alive today (and I quote): "He would be a reformed Calvinist in the PCA." I'm not sure exactly how someone in Northern Egypt would be in the Presbyterian Church of America; (that does seem rather provincial) but I shared with Bill these quotations. It was mind- boggling. It left him in shock. How could somebody say that Augustine would be anything but Catholic? He was surrounded by heretics, schismatics, separatists, sectarians. He was surrounded by sincere people who had separated from the one family of God and he said, "none of them; none of them is truly Catholic and being Catholic is the chief family trait by which I'm identified. The Church," he goes on to say, "the Church of the Christian religion is called Catholic, not only by her own members but even by our enemies; for when heretics or the adherents of schisms talk about her, not among themselves but with strangers, they willy-nilly call her nothing else but Catholic for they will not be understood unless they distinguish her by this name which the whole world employs in her regard."

Response to Objection that "Roman Catholic" is a Contradiction

Now many Bible Christians will say, "Well, I'm catholic too: small c, catholic. I'm unreformed catholic or a Lutheran catholic, or a Christian catholic, not Roman Catholic." Many people insist that to be Roman and Catholic is a contradiction because catholic pertains to the whole world, whereas Rome is just one city. That ignores the use of the term that was widespread throughout the whole world for centuries and centuries. I can't resist -- St. Augustine again: "We believe in the holy Church meaning assuredly the Catholic Church, for both heretics and schismatics call their own congregations churches; but heretics holding false opinions about God violate the faith itself, while schismatics, on the other hand, break off from fraternal charity in wicked separations, although they may believe just what we do. Consequently, heretics do not belong to the Catholic Church, which loves God, nor do the schismatics form a part of the Church inasmuch as the Church loves its neighbor."

Now, he might be going to extremes here, but notice that he is erring in one distinctive direction. His catholicity is his boast and that catholicity is Roman, that catholicity is Petrine, that is, it's rooted and grounded in Peter and the prerogatives that Jesus entrusted to him and to his successors. There are pages and pages of more quotes. This fellow also said to Bill that, "if Thomas Aquinas were alive today, he'd be a devout and staunch Presbyterian Calvinist."

Now you might laugh, but I used to say that, too. In discussing the papacy, the Pope is the successor to Peter, St. Thomas Aquinas says, "The real character of rank heresy consists in lack of submission to the divine teaching authority in the head of the Church." Now I don't hear many members of the PCA enunciating that with any clarity or any other Bible-believing -- by the way, if I'm picking on the PCA, it's because the person who introduced me brought it up. I happen to have the greatest respect and admiration, for I find very godly men in leadership and in the congregations of that particular denomination.

Thomas Aquinas Testifies to the Catholic Church

St. Thomas Aquinas also tells us, "According to the promise of the Lord, the Apostolic Church of Peter remains free from all taint of heresy or deceit in its pontiffs, the Popes, and in the full faith and authority of Peter, and while other churches are shamed by errors, she reigns the solitary Church, unshakably established, imposing silence and closing the mouths of heretics and we, of necessity for our salvation, proclaim and confess this as the pattern of holy, apostolic tradition."

That's strong language. I mean, if I used that kind of language today, I'd be in trouble. Thankfully, this sainted doctor of the Church has, but I don't know how people could possibly misconstrue this person for a Presbyterian or anything but a Catholic and a Roman Catholic at that.

So, why are we so humbly proud of being Catholics? Because that's what we can be. That's what we should be. There's a humility. There's the sense of awe that we have been blessed with an awesome grace of being members of a universal family that dates back to Christ Himself.

The Challenge of Catholicity is to See all People as Brothers and Sisters

There's a certain pride. There's a certain humility. There's a great responsibility because it is the catholicity of the Church which defines our mission. We cannot be so wrapped up as patriotic Americans that we look at Iraq or Iran or Israel or Syria or Lebanon or South Africa or Nicaragua and see an enemy nation. The Catholic faith trains us to see brothers and sisters who are not fully reconciled through the Body and Blood of Christ.

The Eucharist is the supernatural means by which this extraordinary feat can be pulled off, if we believe in that. We're Americans, we're Mexicans, we're Canadians, we're Europeans, we're English or whatever; but we are Catholics. So we see all men and women as brothers and sisters, at least potentially, St. Thomas would say, "and through the sacramental grace of the Church, it can be made actual." That is the substance of our faith and certainly it should be the substance of our hope and our work in love for unity and peace in our world. I'm just going to throw in a footnote here. I mean, we have to support our country as patriotic Americans, but at the same time, we have to recognize that peace and justice are not going to be established in the world apart from the kingship of Christ in the Church that He has established as His kingdom on earth.

We can do everything within our earthly and human means to establish and maintain justice and peace, politically, militarily and so on; but ultimately we should tell ourselves over and again that there is no way that this human race can become a unified family in justice and peace apart from Christ. Because if it could, God the Father would owe the Son an apology for sending Him to die. So, if we go to war in a few weeks, let's not lose perspective or the proper sense of proportion that the Catholic faith is meant to instill within us.

We're not talking about a humanistic or secular one-world government. We're talking about a heavenly kingdom with a colonial outpost whose embassy is in the Vatican and whose emissaries and ambassadors we are, with a heart big enough to embrace people whose race, whose ethnic and cultural customs and backgrounds are strange to us. No wonder St. Augustine could see catholicity as his one sole boast as a Christian.

Biblical Roots for "Catholic"

Now let's go into the Biblical roots of the term so we can appreciate how long it took for the family of God to reach this goal. The idea that God would bless all nations goes back into the Old Testament. We are often prone to misunderstand the Old Testament, thinking that back then, God had some sort of exclusive arrangement with the people of Israel, that they had a sort of ethnic monopoly, that they had a kind of corner on the market of God's grace, that there was a divine favoritism. Not so! Not so at all! In fact, over and over again in the law and in the prophets God keeps trying to get through to the Israelites one lesson: "I love the whole world and you, Israel", he said to Moses, "Go tell Pharaoh Israel is my firstborn son"; which means that the other nations are second-, third-, and fourth-born sons of God, "but let my son go to serve me or I'll slay your firstborn sons."

Israel Chosen to be the First of Many Nations Welcomed into God's Family

In other words, let Israel fulfill its role and responsibility as the eldest brother-nation in showing my truth and my love and my justice to all of his younger brothers. The universal mission of Israel was something that was suppressed because of racial pride, nationalism and all the same things that afflict us as proud Americans. There is nothing wrong with national pride, once it's put in perspective and kept in proportion to the universal love of our Father and the universal extent of our family.

In the Old Testament the greatest promise was given to Abraham. Genesis 22, verse 18: "As soon as God saw Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his firstborn son", (something that shows the faith that goes beyond your concern for the sustenance of your flesh and blood line). Once God saw Abraham's faith transcended his own fleshly regard for his son, He made a promise, which actually comes in the form of an oath by which God swears by Himself in verse 18 of Genesis 22: "I swear by myself, he said, (which means I put a curse upon myself; if I don't fulfill what I am about to say, may I be accursed), "that all the nations of the earth shall be blessed through your seed."

Do you know that in Jewish tradition that is one of the most neglected promises? Do you also know that in Christian tradition, likewise! There is something so deep and pervasive in every one of us and in every culture that is myopic, nearsighted, that sees one's own concerns, that sees one's own family, one's own community, one's own society, one's own nation and has trouble seeing beyond the borders, the boundaries. There's something in all of us like that. Abraham was able to drive it out and God gave him His oath that "all the nations of the earth shall be blessed through your seed."

God Establishes a Covenant with David for the Whole Human Race.

Do you know what the first verse of the New Testament is? "This is the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the seed of Abraham." "All the nations of the earth, Abraham, shall be blessed through your seed." So what is the trigger of the New Testament? What is the springboard of our hope? You got it -- that all the nations of the earth should be blest. It goes on, though, from Abraham. He's not alone. We also find in the covenant that God made with David this hope expressed time and again. In fact, when God makes the covenant with David in second Samuel 7, you can see in verse 19 David's exclamation. He's exuberant. He says, "I understand what you have given me. You have given me a torah, (the Hebrew word for law) a torah for all adam, (for all humanity). In this covenant that you have established with me, in the kingdom that you are going to give to me, you are establishing a charter, a constitution, a family order for the entire human race." He was ecstatic. Of course we see in his sin and then in his son Solomon and then in Solomon's sin the breakdown of this family order but not until God has given us the blueprint of the true kingdom of the true Son of David in the heavenly Jerusalem established by Christ.

Only in God Will the Nations Find Security and Peace

So David could describe in the Psalms how this kingdom established the covenant with him and through his son could establish God's rule on the earth. In Psalm 2, which is one of my favorites, David writes, "Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and His anointed saying, 'Let us burst their bonds asunder and cast their cords from us.'" The nations are plotting to overthrow the divine order. There's nothing new here, but what is spoken in the next verse is significant: "He who sits in the heavens laughs. The Lord has them in derision. Then He will speak to them in His wrath and terrify them in His fury saying, 'I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.'"

It's sort of like God has been horning in on their conspiratorial plot, their little quiet, back-room, smoke-filled discussions. You know, He's heard them all. He knows their plans and He says, "No, no, no, I'm going to confute you. I've set my own king. I will tell of the decree of the Lord. He said to me, 'You are my son. Today I have begotten you. Ask of me and I will make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. So, therefore now, kings be wise. Be warned, o rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear and with trembling; kiss His feet lest He be angry and you perish in the wave, for His wrath is quickly kindled, and blessed are all who take refuge in Him."

Do you know there is only one hope for America? The kingship of Jesus Christ. There's only one hope for each and every country in this world -- the kingship of Jesus Christ in the kingdom of his Church. Not the United Nations, as worthy a project as it may be, not in any other league or alliance that we form, as useful as they might prove to be in the short run. In the long haul, the only nations that are going to retain stability and security are those that retain justice and righteousness in the peace of Christ.

Are we imperialists? In a sense, yes. We really are. Communism's problem is that it thinks too small. We say, "They've got a conspiracy, a worldwide conspiracy." We should frankly admit, at least among ourselves, we do, too. It's just that in this century, they have executed theirs better than we've executed ours.

David's Kingdom is a Prototype of the Kingdom to Come

The real difference, the bigger difference, is the difference between coercion and charity; between ruling by force and ruling through love and truth. That's the real challenge of our kingdom and its mission. This was the prototype, back in David's time, of a great and glorious project that Christ established; not only in Himself, not only on the cross, not only in Heaven but on earth through His Church. So we see the prophets saying the same thing over and over again. We discover that the Old Testament prophets perceived the defects in David's kingdom. They recognized the fact that the vast majority of kings in David's line were corrupt, were ruthless. They were loathsome and they were so corrupt that most of them received nothing but divine condemnation.

But that didn't stop God from using it as a prototype of His kingdom and also, notice, that Jesus Christ was not ashamed to be identified with the royal line of succession going back to David, in spite of the fact that there were many corrupt successors. This is going to be useful for us in our talk tomorrow morning as we look at Apostolic succession among the Popes and the Bishops, because the fact is clearly presented that, when God swears an oath concerning a line of succession, despite the fact that there might be corrupt successors, God is able to overcome that corruption. He is able to supersede it. He's able, in a sense, to carry on despite the sins, punishing those who are corrupt.

Isaiah, chapter 2 is perhaps the most glorious prophecy from the great prophet Isaiah concerning how David's kingdom in Jerusalem was only a prototype. "The word which Isaiah, the son of Amos, saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem: It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains and shall be raised up above the hills and all the nations shall flow to the house of the Lord." All the nations shall come streaming into God's family in the latter days. Isaiah knew that it was not going to be in the present time nor in the immediate future because corrupt kings would make that impossible. They wouldn't come flowing into the house of the Lord when it was so corrupt. "But the time will come", Isaiah said, "that the house of the Lord would be established higher and stronger than any other kingdom and all the nations shall flow to it."

The Knowledge of the Lord Shall Cover the Earth

Lastly, in the Old Testament we have what I regard as the greatest series of prophecies concerning what it means to be Catholic. I mean, you could go elsewhere. There are many prophecies that I should mention: Habakkuk 2:14 promises us that the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, which the Catholic Church is fulfilling through history. But Daniel, the prophet Daniel gives to us a great prophetic insight and hope into the nature of the kingdom's catholicity in a time of great corruption and affliction. And here in Babylon Nebuchadnezzar rules as a pagan. He has crushed Jerusalem, he has destroyed the temple, he has dispersed the inhabitants and he has taken captive people like Daniel. Then he has a nightmare and he commands that the wise men come in and interpret it. Nobody can. Daniel comes in and he interprets the dream that Nebuchadnezzar had. He tells Nebuchadnezzar that in your dream you saw this great image of a statue with a gold head and silver shoulders and bronze belly and bronze thighs and legs of iron and feet of iron and clay.

Daniel Prophecies the Catholicity of God's Future Kingdom

Nebuchadnezzar was impressed. He didn't even have to tell Daniel the dream. Daniel knew the dream, and then he proceeded to interpret it. He said, "You, O king, are the gold head, Babylon, but there will come a kingdom after you that will take over your authority." He was referring to the Medo-Persian empire which corresponded to the silver shoulders. Then he goes on to describe how the bronze belly, the Greek empire under Alexander the Great would take it away from the Medes and the Persians. Then fourthly, a great and terrible power would be raised up, the legs of iron, terribly strong, referring to the Roman empire.

Then what happens? He goes on to describe this. He says, "As you looked, a stone was cut out but by no human hand and it smote the image on its feet of iron and clay and broke them in pieces. Then the iron and the clay, the silver and the bronze and the gold all together were broken into pieces and became like the chaff on the summer threshing-floors and the wind carried them away so that not a trace of them could be found." This little stone fell upon the fourth empire, the Roman empire symbolized by the iron legs, broke the feet, shattered the legs and the whole image crumbled and blew away. A little small stone; but the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth. And he goes on to interpret this particular kingdom and he says, "In the days of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed, nor shall its sovereignty be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it shall stand forever."

What is he talking about? Well, there is only one kingdom that came down from heaven as a small stone which the builders rejected and it became the cornerstone of the new temple. The word for stone in Hebrew, "evan", is almost the same as the word for son, "ben." So the son is the stone who came down and, through His sacrifice and through His spiritual kingdom in the Church, destroyed the fourth and final empire in Rome and brought about a worldwide empire that will last forever, whose citizens we are.

Nebuchadnezzar fell on his face and did homage to Daniel and said to Daniel, "Truly, your God is God of gods and Lord of kings and a revealer of mysteries, for you have been able to reveal this mystery." And he gave him all these honors and he gave him great authority and power in Babylon. Can you imagine that? Jerusalem was destroyed by Babylon and God had predicted it many, many years before it happened, because of its idolatry and corruption. God said, "I am able through your suffering, obedience and faithfulness to convert the Babylonian lord and tyrant." Nebuchadnezzar ends up confessing what Jerusalem priests should have been teaching: that Yahweh is the Lord of lords and the King of kings and the great God above all other gods. That's coming from the lips of the pagan tyrant whom God's prophet converts.

Daniel goes on to highlight and, in a sense, to rev up the engines of hope in God's people for this catholic, this worldwide, this universal empire. We read, for instance, in Daniel, Chapter 4 about how Nebuchadnezzar, upon recovering his sanity recognizes that God's kingdom is the only lasting kingdom. But then in Chapter 5 we discover that after Nebuchadnezzar dies, his successor son, Belshazzar is this arrogant idiot, a tyrannical fool.

He decides to throw a feast one night and use the sacred vessels from the Jerusalem temple to party with. In the midst of his feasting, the handwriting appears on the wall and it says in effect, "Your kingdom has been weighed in the balance and has been found wanting and will be taken away from you and given to the Persians this very night." And at that time, up the river the Medo-Persians were damming up a river so they could march under the walls of the city and take it with barely a fight. So the Medo-Persians came, just as Daniel had prophesied. And they were ruled by Darius.

Daniel goes on to describe how Darius also persecuted Daniel for a while and then, as a result of discovering through Daniel's faithfulness in the midst of the lion's den, Darius issues a decree. Verse 25: "Then King Darius wrote to all the peoples, nations and languages that dwell on all the earth, 'Peace be multiplied to you. I make a decree that in all my royal dominion, men tremble and fear before the God of Daniel, for He is the living God enduring forever. His kingdom shall never be destroyed and His dominion shall be to the end'."

So we have another step closer toward this catholic empire being established and realized. But in Daniel 7, we have a variation on this prophetic theme. Daniel has a night vision: four beasts that correspond to the four metals, the gold, the silver, the bronze and the iron are now seen in a different light. These four empires are seen, the first one is like a lion with eagle's wings -- that's Babylon. The second one is like a bear that devours the flesh. The third one is like a leopard because it runs with such speed -- that corresponds with Alexander the Great whose rapid rate of world conquest was unprecedented. Then this fourth beast, terrible and dreadful and exceedingly strong, iron teeth devouring and breaking in pieces everything in its way, this fourth beast that seems unbeatable, unstoppable, unconvertible stands in the way. Then all of a sudden, in Daniel's vision, we see that fourth beast conquered: "There came one like the Son of Man and He came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before Him and to Him was given dominion and glory and kingdom that all peoples, nations and languages should serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away and His kingdom one that shall not be destroyed."

The Son of Man, through His suffering, obedience and faithfulness would conquer the unconquerable fourth beast, the Roman empire. Do you know that nobody ever called Jesus the Son of Man, but Jesus almost always and invariably referred to himself as the Son of Man. Why? With this humble self-reference, "aw, just little ol' me, the Son of Man"? No, not at all. He was plugging into a deep and profound tradition from the prophet Daniel -- that the one who would conquer the unconquerable kingdom of Rome and establish an everlasting kingdom and receive worship: (not just authority: worship, which the Jews reserved alone for God), the Son of Man could somehow receive and yet not institute. Idolatry. The Son of Man would somehow be a Son of God and through His obedience would overcome these kingdoms. And that's what happened; but not until much suffering had come to the people, because so much penance was required of a wayward and hardhearted folk who presumed upon God. They in effect said, "God, you have given us your oath. You have sworn to the line of David that there would be this kingdom and that we would be on top and that we would always have dominance, that we would always have prosperity. What's wrong? You haven't delivered. We're in captivity. We're in exile and there is no Davidic king on the throne."

They didn't understand that the plan of God was for righteousness, not political domination. The reason I mention that is because many traditionalist Catholics pine away their days, longing for the days of political dominance and cultural superiority, where the Popes could crown the kings like he did Charlemagne or even Napoleon. Now that was in some ways good for the world. But it made things confusing for the Church and her true identity, because ultimately it's in opposing the world and being persecuted by the world that Christ is really exemplified in the Church. The Church really reflects Christ in times of adversity and persecution. That doesn't mean we're holy masochists looking for persecution, trying to incite affliction, trying to aggravate and bring draconian measures down upon ourselves or something. You know, "we'll build you the Colosseum if you throw us to lions, or something." Not at all.

But the people of God learned a lesson of obedience. They learned a lesson that the early Church Fathers understood even better, that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church; that when sanctity is displayed for suffering, you have a power that no earthly force can overcome. So elsewhere, Daniel 7, it talks about the Son of Man having this dominion. It tells us in particular that His kingdom and His dominion shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High. "Their kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom."

Many scholars wonder at how one author could have written all of Daniel 7 because on the one hand, the Son of Man has the kingdom and all dominion, but on the other hand, in the second half of Daniel 7, the saints of the Most High receive the kingdom and the dominion. Figure it out. We're the saints of the Most High and those saints glorified in heaven and enthroned above are in spades. And all of this was set forth to the nations and to Israel. It was a well-known prophecy. In fact it became instrumental in the conversion not only of Nebuchadnezzar and Darius but also Cyrus, the Persian ruler who was presented with the prophecy of Isaiah, who lived over a century before Cyrus, and Isaiah had prophesied not only that Babylon would destroy Jerusalem, but that Babylon would be destroyed by Persia and that a ruler would be raised up in Persia who would serve God's purposes in a holy way.

God speaks to Isaiah and refers to this Gentile ruler and names him Cyrus and calls him "my anointed one." In Hebrew that's Messiah. This Gentile ruler, Cyrus, shall be my anointed one and he shall tell my people. He shall allow them to go back to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. When Cyrus heard these prophecies and recognized his own name in these prophecies which had been given a century before, like you, he was impressed. How could you help but be impressed? Naturally, he said, "Okay, I will. I will allow you to go back to your city and rebuild the Temple" and do whatever else is necessary and so on.

Even Alexander the Great, in a sense, experienced a kind of conversion. Josephus tells us about Alexander the Great's conversion. He was intent upon laying siege to Jerusalem and destroying it like so many other cities that he destroyed. He had camped outside of Jerusalem one night with his armies, intent upon destroying it, obliterating it entirely. But he couldn't sleep that night. He kept having this nightmare. In the morning he saw this little peace party coming out from the main gate in Jerusalem, led by the high priest who was in his eighties with his long flowing beard and as soon as he saw the high priest draw near, Alexander the Great, who by his late twenties had conquered the whole known world, had been beaten by nobody, Alexander the Great standing before this feeble, old, holy priest, Alexander fell flat on his face because he recognized that man as the one who had appeared to him in his dreams. He not only spared the city, in a sense extended all kinds of privileges to the Jews, which had never been given to anybody else before by Alexander.

Alexandria, the city built in his honor in Egypt, in fact became the educational center of the world, the great library of Alexandria, and in that library were hundreds of rabbis who were free to teach the word of God. And in Alexandria, for the first time, the word of God was translated out of Hebrew in the Greek at the request of the non-Jews. We call it the Septuagint.

Jesus Establishes God's Catholic Kingdom

The word of God was getting out through the suffering of God's faithful saints; but ultimately it wasn't the Catholic empire that God intended. It wasn't the "real McCoy." So, Jesus comes; but when would He come? That was the question. Jeremiah had said you are going to have seventy years of exile and penance and then God will hear your prayer. In Daniel 9, Daniel was an old man after the seventy years had ended and as soon as he recognized that the seventy years were up, he began to pray earnestly. He asks the Lord in Daniel 9 to remember the promise that he gave to Jeremiah. He said, "Look, I know your people, my people are still sinful. I'm sorry", and he begins to repent for their sins. Then he says, " But please let us return to your city. Let us rebuild the Temple."

Seventy years are up but Daniel knows in his heart of hearts that the people of Israel, exiled in a foreign lands have not returned to God in their hearts. So what does he do? He prays all the more earnestly in confessing their sins. Gabriel the archangel comes with God's response. Seventy years, it seems, were not enough. The people had not softened their hearts. They had hardened them further. So in Daniel 9, we have what many scholars regard as being the most significant Old Testament prophecy concerning Christ anywhere.

When Would This Happen

Gabriel comes with God's response. He says, "Seventy weeks of years are decreed for you and your people." Seventy sevens, which means literally in the Hebrew, 490 more years. Seventy years were not enough. God wants to forgive you but you haven't repented. Seventy years He gave you of exile and captivity but you haven't responded. So what's He going to do? He will extend His favor to you seventy-sevens.

This is where Jesus gets the idea, "How many times should we forgive somebody?" Seventy times seven, because that's what the Father in heaven extended to the people of Israel.

"I'll give you seventy times seven more years to experience my chastening love, my discipline." So for 490 years Israel knew God's plan and listen, "490 years are decreed concerning your people and your holy city to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin and to atone for iniquity. To bring an everlasting righteousness." In other words, after 490 years or so, what's going to happen? Your holy city is going to be destroyed. Transgression will come to an end. Atonement for iniquity. Everlasting righteousness shall be established. A most holy one will be anointed. Know therefore and understand that, from the going forth of the word to restore and rebuild Jerusalem to the coming of the anointed one, a prince, there shall be seven years", and it goes on and on. But it describes how, after this time period, the See of Jerusalem shall be destroyed. Its end shall come with the flood and to the end there shall be war. Desolations are decreed; but he shall make a strong covenant with many for one week and for half the week. He shall cause sacrifice and offering to cease.

Now what does all of this mean? It means that the people of Israel who wanted a worldwide empire that was political and military, that would put them in charge, put them on the top, didn't get what they wanted. That's why they didn't accept Jesus when He came. But they were given a timetable, a very specific timetable to know, not only when the Messiah would come but what He would do when He came and how He would be rejected and how the holy city of Jerusalem would becme an unholy city, targeted by God for destruction and punishment. So that a new and stronger covenant would be established so that sacrifice, the Old Testament Levitical sacrifices would cease.

This gives to us the time parameters, the time limits for when all of these prophecies would be fulfilled. The four metals, the four beasts would all transpire within 490 years. So, no wonder, when King Herod had heard that the Messiah had been born n Bethlehem, he went nuts; because he knew that the expectations for a Messiah hd reached a fever pitch and he knew that this Messiah would supplant his own false rule. So he had to stomp it out a soon as he could, because he knew all the people were familiar with this prophecy, with the timetable of events which were now coming to a climax.

We are Members of this Kingdom, Though We Don't Appreciate it.

We have in the New Testament something that we barely appreciate because we do not undertand the Old Testament. We don't know how long they waited, how hard they worked for the Catholic Church/kingdom of God to be established. We're sitting asleep on top of Fort Knox. We have the supernatural means and the sacraments, we have in Jesus Christ and in his Queen Mother and in all the saints of the Most High enthroned in heaven, the divine meaine means by which this kingdom has been established and is spreading throughout the earth, and we fall asleep during a homily! We tell our priests not to go too long because the Super Bowl or some other playoff game is going to be on.

Where are our priorities? I love football! Don't get me wrong. I can't wait to see the Cincinnati Bengals beaten after the Steelers didn't get in, but all my petty little prejudices must give way to the priority of God's Catholic kingdom. That really is what we're about. That is who we are. We're Catholics. We're world citizens of a worldwide universal family that reaches up to the heavens and down to the underworld in purgatory below. If only we could close our eyes and then open up the eyes of faith and see with 20/20 vision, I think we'd drop dead of a heart attack. Because we have been settling for scraps. We have been reducing our religion down to a few rote rituals, when what we have is a very glorious legacy that is meant for all.

Testimony of Historians to the Catholic Empire

Christopher Dawson, one of the great historians of the 20th century, who taught at Harvard wrote, "To the ordinary educated man looking out on the world in A.D. 33, the execution of St. Janus must have appeared much more important than the crucifixion of Jesus, and the attempts of the government to solve the economic crisis by a policy of free credit to producers must have seemed far more newsworthy and promising than the doings of an obscure group of Jewish fanatics in an Upper Room in Jerusalem. Nevertheless, there is no doubt today which was the most important and which availed most to alter the lot of humanity. All that Roman world with its power and wealth and culture and corruption sank in the blood and ruin. The flood came and destroyed them all, but the other world, the world of the Apostles and martyrs, the inheritance of the poor survived the downfall of ancient civilization and became the spiritual foundation of a new order", a 2000-year-old spiritual empire that we're the royal citizens of.

Lord McCauley, a great British historian, a non-Catholic (I believe he was Protestant), says this: "There is not and there never was on this earth a work of human policy so well-deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together with the two great ages of human civilization. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday when compared with the line of the supreme pontiffs, the Popes; the line we trace back in an unbroken series from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the 19th century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the 8th and far beyond the time of Pepin, the august dynasty extends. The republic of Venice is gone and the papacy remains. The papacy remains not in decay, not a mere antique but full of life and youthful vigor. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the earth world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustine and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila the Hun. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all." That's a non-Catholic, a historian with a historian's appreciation for the Catholic empire that God alone could have established.

Can't Use the Popes to Explain the Success of the Catholic Church

There is no way you can look at the people that have been Popes and say, "Well, therein lies the explanation." Starting with Peter, loud-mouthed Peter - pray for us, St. Peter - but we see in the Gospels especially in Mark, which Peter inspired himself; I mean, Peter is the source for most of Mark's testimony and in Mark we see the most humbling portrait of Peter of all. We see an Apostle open his mouth and change feet. We see an Apostle who is impetuous and inspired by the flesh more than by the Spirit; but an Apostle whose faith Jesus described as being so small that it was enough to enable him to walk on water. We see an Apostle who stands up and confesses Jesus to be the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of the Living God and who receives in a very gracious exchange a new name of "Rock" and a promise that he would be the foundation stone for the kingdom, the city, the Church that Christ would build.

G. K. Chesterton once said, "All the empires and kingdoms have failed because of this inherent and continual weakness - that they were founded by strong men." That's why empires fail because they were founded by strong men, Chesterton says. But this one thing the historic Christian Church was founded on a weak man, Peter, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link. No, not for that reason alone, but because the weak man now has acknowledged Christ and because Christ makes him strong.

Weak, fallible Peter was rendered infallible by Christ through the Holy Spirit. So the unbroken line of followers that constitutes the Catholic Church in the Papacy represents again, as I've said all through the day, the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit. So, as we pledge our allegiance to the kingdom of God on earth, to this royal, colonial militia of which we are a part, boot soldiers perhaps, but still we have a vital apostolic mission, each one of us: in the kitchen washing dishes at the sink, in rush-hour traffic, no matter what we are, no matter what we do; we have this humble but important task. The fact remains we are royal citizens. We are children of the Most High King.

Summary

Now I have many more things that I want to say. I want to address some things tomorrow morning, so I want you to remember the lessons from this evening. The first and most important point is that we are the family of God and because God is the father of the whole human race, God's intention is to restore the unity throughout the whole world, no matter what race, no matter what geography, no matter what strange customs.

We also recognize the fact that the people of God were prepared through the ages for what we now take for granted. We also see that the early Church Fathers, our forebears, bequeathed us a legacy of which they were justly proud and of which we should be justly proud as we humbly receive it and transmit it to our children. We are Catholics, we are worldwide citizens of a worldwide empire, the family of God.

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, we give You thanks and we pray: Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen

THE CHURCH IS APOSTOLIC

Introduction

St. Clement of Rome, writing about 97 A.D., gives to us a statement that I think sums up the message of apostolic succession right well. "Our Apostles knew," he says, "through our Lord Jesus Christ that there would be dissension over the title of Bishop. In their knowledge of this, therefore, they proceeded to appoint the ministers I spoke of and they went on to add an instruction that, if these should fall asleep, other accredited persons should succeed them in their office."

What we're dealing with, with Apostolic succession is a family fact, that is, Jesus Christ has come to us as a "New Adam," using the language of St. Paul, the founding Father of a new covenant, a new family in His own flesh and blood. The old covenant, the old earthly family established by Adam in his flesh and blood was a fallen family, degraded by sin, destined for mortality and condemnation. Jesus Christ comes as He is sent by the heavenly Father to restore the life of God's family and to reunite them to His Father. He does this in a way that proves, that confirms, that reinforces the fact that this is a family affair.

We said throughout the weekend that the master idea of the Catholic religion is the fact that we are the family of God, that this explains who the Pope is as the successor of Peter. This explains who the Blessed Virgin Mary is as the Queen Mother, as our mother. It explains the saints, it explains redemption and salvation and why we are called to be sanctified and mature, to grow up as sons and daughters of God. It explains also why the Church is truly catholic, worldwide, universal, because God is the Father of all humans. Men and women from every inhabited continent look to God as their common Father and a good father doesn't father many families, he fathers one family. And that one, holy, Catholic family is also apostolic, because it was through the Apostles that Jesus Christ went about creating His Mystical Body, His Father's family, the new covenant people of God.

So, in a sense, when we look at this principle of Apostolic succession, we see a spiritual genealogy. I don't know how many of you have tried to read the Old Testament, but if you've tried, you've probably, even undoubtedly, come across the famous sections sometimes known as "the begats," the genealogies. You might be cruising along, feeling good, getting a lot out of it, then all of a sudden you hit a chapter or two, like in Genesis 10 and 11, where you've got nothing but a series of ten, thirty, fifty, seventy names that you can't even pronounce, much less identify and who can remember them? So you think, why, Holy Spirit, if you were only going to give us one book, did you fill it with so many genealogies?

Yet, do you realize that for the ancient Hebrews that was the most exciting section of Scripture to read? Because therein was their family record, therein was their pedigree. They could identify themselves by seeing this lasting legacy that proved the fidelity of their heavenly Father in fathering an earthly family made up of sinners and scoundrels like you and me, but God's faithfulness could always override the unfaithfulness, the lapses, the failures of the earthly fathers.

Family Succession in the Old Covenant

So, the genealogies of the Old Testament are not only a sign of God's fatherly faithfulness and love, but also a principle of self- identity whereby the people of God know themselves to be God's family; and know that whatever trials they face, God will see them through those trials, just as he has taken the forefathers through. It would almost be similar to how we might recount American history by going down a line of Presidents. And what do we call George Washington? -- the Father of our country. We use that in a kind of metaphorical way because we don't really think of ourselves as a nation-family.

We have trouble thinking of Mom, Dad and the kids as a family these days! Still, it's a language. It's in our language. It's a customary expression. It's a hundred times more meaningful to ancient Hebrews and ancient Christians because it was the trademark, it was the stamp of divine approval, it was the trademark that we are God's family. It was proof positive.

Apostolic Succession in the New Covenant

Apostolic succession in the new covenant, therefore, is the one sure proof we have that God is still a faithful Father to us. We are His children and He has provided Fathers to teach us, to train us, to raise us. The Church, therefore, without the Pope and without the Bishops as successors to the Apostles, would be like a family without a father, a body without a brain. There's no way Christ would do it that way. And He didn't, thanks be to God! He saw the needs of his children before they arose and He took measures and steps to meet those needs. He commissioned Apostles, twelve of them primarily, of course you know the twelve disciples were Apostles. The term "apostolo" means to be sent, and the Apostles were sent by Jesus. But in addition to the twelve, there were also seventy others in Luke 10, or seventy-two others, and Jesus gives to these apostles unbelievable authority.

In Matthew 10, verse 20, He says to the Apostles, "It is not you that speak, but the spirit of your Father which speaketh in you." Not just the Holy Spirit, but the spirit of your -- master, your Lord, your employer? -- no, your Father! It's the Spirit of sonship of which Paul writes in Romans, the spirit that causes our hearts to cry out, "Papa, Abba, Father." The spirit of the Father was given to these Apostles, the twelve, so that the Holy Spirit would speak through them. Matthew 10, verse 40, therefore, states categorically, Jesus tells them, "He that receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives Him who sent me." And who would that be? -- the Father!

These Apostles are family ambassadors. They're family messengers. They are going out to regather God's children, the prodigals, the runaways. In Luke 10, when Jesus sent out the seventy-two, He tells them. "He who hears you hears me," and here's something new, "he who rejects you, rejects me, and he who rejects me, rejects him who sent me," the Father! Notice how high the stakes are! I mean, you might say , "It's not fair; after all, these are fallible men. These are sinners like you and me. These measly mongrels we call Apostles, they're people who fell short of God's holy standard, but when they spoke, it was the Spirit of the Father speaking to the children through them. When you receive them you receive Christ and you receive the Father who sent his only Son. When you spurn them, you despise Christ and you repudiate the Father who sent his only Son, because God's omnipotent love infallibly works through fallible sinners to communicate this message of love, this Fatherly affection.

When the seventy come back from their mission, it says in Luke 10, verse 17: "The seventy return with joy saying, 'Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name.'" Jesus warns them, don't rejoice at that, "Rejoice, rather that your names are written in the book of life," in the family register. In that same hour, Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, "I thank you, Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes." That's what we have to become if we are going to be able to see through the Apostles or their successors in the Bishops and the representatives in the priests. If we are going to be able to hear the voice of Jesus, the word of our Father, we have to become like babes. We have to become children through faith to receive the truth and the love of the Father.

So Jesus thanks the Father that He has hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes: "Yea, Father, for such was thy gracious will. All things have been delivered to me by my Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him."

Notice that the language is drawn exclusively from what sphere of life? -- the family! Everything is reducible down to this Father-Son relationship. I would do anything to get across to Catholic Christians this ultimate reality that you really are God's children. Wake up! Sit up! Rise up and conquer in the name of an omnipotent Father who has given us an unspeakably precious gift. So Jesus in the next verse says, turning to the disciples He says privately, "Blessed are the eyes which see what you see, for I tell you that many prophets and kings desire to see what you see, but didn't see it and to hear what you hear, and didn't hear it." Unspeakable and immense privileges the Apostles are given and their successors and we who hear them.

In John, Chapter 14 we read, "Jesus promised to send the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the Comforter, the Counselor." And Jesus says, "But the Paraclete, the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, He will teach you all things and bring you remembrance all that I have said to you." Now, Jesus is not talking to each and every one of us. He is not talking to each and every believer back then. He was talking privately and, in some sense, exclusively to the twelve Apostles in the upper room in His last discourse, promising them the Holy Spirit which would cause them to remember all that Jesus had taught.

Then two chapters later in John 16, verse 13, he says, "When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will glorify me, for He will take what is mine and declare it to you." The Father gave everything to the Son. The Son gives everything to the Spirit and the Spirit gives all truth and everything that Christ has given to the Apostles and through their successors to us, if we will receive it as babies through faith. And so He adds in John 17, verse 20, in His high priestly prayer, "I do not pray for these Apostles only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one."

If there is not Apostolic succession, there is no hope for success. There is no hope that God's family will endure as one, holy, Catholic Church. That's fact! But Christ has not left us orphans, He says. He has not only given us the Spirit. He has given us Apostles and successors to father us through the spirit of His Father in the wholeness, in the maturity. That's why the Epistles follow the Gospels with such clear force in telling us who the Apostles are and what they transmit and also about this principle of succession, first of all.

St. Paul makes it clear in 1st Timothy, 3:15 what we really are. He says I want to come to you but just in case I can't come to you, "I'm writing this to you so that you will know how you ought to behave in the household of God, which is the Church, the pillar and foundation of truth." I once asked a friend of mine who was a very keen theologian, "What do you regard as the pillar and foundation of truth?" Knowing that I was struggling with the Catholic Church at the time, trying to resist and avoid conversion to it, he said, "For us, Scott, the pillar and foundation of truth is the Scripture." And I said, "But why did I find the Scripture teaching that the pillar and foundation of truth is the Church, the household, the family of God?"

He said, "Where is that?" I showed him. He said, "You set me up!" I didn't... I felt more set up than he felt. In 1st Timothy, 4, verse 14, Paul describes to Timothy how through the laying on of hands, the gift of the Holy Spirit and the gift of ministry was imparted to him by the elders. That's why he can speak of Timothy in 2nd Timothy, Chapter 1 verse 2 as "my dearly beloved son," this fatherly principle of ordination. That's why in 1st Timothy 5, verse 1, Paul admonishes Timothy not to rebuke, not to publicly scold the elders. He says, instead, "Entreat the elders as fathers." Why? Because that's what they are.

I had an interesting conversation Friday night after the debate that was held here at the parish, between Mitch Pacwa and James White. There were two other well-known anti-Catholics here in the audience. One was a man by the name of Bart Brewer and the other was a man by the name of Bill Jackson. I was talking to them afterwards and they were saying, "Show me one place in Scripture where you have any kind of priestly hierarchy established." I said, "Well, all right, but let's first understand what you mean by 'priest'. Do you realize that the Old Testament tells us what priest means, practically speaking? For instance, in the Book of Judges, Chapters 17, 18 and 19, you see a man looking for a priest to serve him. So he chooses his son and he says to his son, 'Will you be to me a priest and a father?'" Two ways of saying the same thing. He's talking to his son and he's saying, "Will you be to me a priest and a father?"

I said, "Do you realize, Bill, that priesthood is spiritual fatherhood? He said, "I have no problem with that, but where do you get this idea of hierarchy?" I said, "What does hierarchy mean?" He said, "Heiras archae, it means the rule of priests." And I said, "Well, look, if we have seen that priests are fathers, then what is a hierarchy but a family order, an order whereby the Church is governed by spiritual fathers representing God, our infinite Father?" He looked and you could see in his eyes that he was trapped and he thought, well, this is a kind of clever device that he had never heard before. I said, "But it's there!" He said, "That's not the way Catholics think."

I didn't have all these note cards at the time, but I did have a few quotes from memory that I sprung on him. I said, "On the contrary, this is how the Fathers of the Church and the Popes have always spoken. St. Augustine spoke of how the faith has been passed on from the Fathers to the Fathers through the Bishops who are our fathers. St. Jerome said, 'Be obedient to your Bishop, consider him as the father of your soul.' What does it mean to "father"? It means to communicate your own nature."

"Now I might make a statue of myself and I might have a child, but my child has been fathered; the statue hasn't, no matter how remarkably similar it may be to me and no matter how remarkably dissimilar my child may be. I didn't communicate my nature to the statue, but I did to my child."

"So, do priests father us? Well, in an earthly, natural level, when I fathered my children, Michael, Gabriel and Hannah, I communicated human nature to them in the form of their physical bodies. The Catholic Church following good philosophy has taught, though, that when we father, when we parent, we do not communicate the principle of life in the human soul; that is especially created by God. I only, in a sense, fathered the human nature and the bodily dimension. God had to specially create the psychical dimension, the soul. So, I fathered the lower form of human nature, communicated that aspect of my nature." I asked, "When priests communicate to us the flesh and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, when they communicate to us the grace and the life of the Holy Spirit in Baptism, are they communicating to us a lower form of life and nature that I did to my children or a higher form? A higher form."

"That makes them even more fathers than I am a father. Priests supernaturally father more than I naturally father. It isn't just a quaint metaphor, a cute simile that is meant to kind of stir up warm feelings. This is metaphysical, philosophical, theological truth -- certainty! This priestly hierarchy is a supernatural fatherly order whereby God loves his family, teaches them and guides them in the wholeness through truth and through grace."

You should have seen how evasive every one of his comments became at this point. But I submit to you that this is the way the Church thinks and teaches. St. Augustine says elsewhere, "The Apostles were sent as Fathers to replace those Apostles -- Sons were born to you who were constituted Bishops. The Church calls them Fathers, she who gave birth to them." Such is the Catholic Church. She has given birth to sons who through all the earth continue the work of her first fathers.

One of the greatest theologians of our generation is a man by the name of Cardinal Henry de Lubac. Cardinal de Lubac has said that this idea of spiritual order -- he says, "To suppress the fatherly type of authority in the Church would not only be to suppress in principle the character of respect and reciprocal affection in the relations between the faithful and pastors; it would be to destroy the only legitimate foundation of their authority. Spiritual fatherhood," de Lubac says, "is the only legitimate foundation of priestly and episcopal authority."

When we call our priests "Fathers," we say a lot more than we might be realizing. But that's solid, rock solid truth! And this is the Catholic faith. Pope Pius XI in "Ecclesiam Dei" says, "The Church in the wonderful plan of God was established to become in the fullness of time an immense family embracing the whole human race. Among other distinguishing signs, we know that it was to show its divine origin by its unity and its universality through the Bishops as successors to the Apostles, our founding Fathers."

This human race was created to be God's family. It ran away from home collectively in Adam, and then, through Christ, it has been reunited. So, Pope Pius XI speaks of how we have to deepen this intimate conviction that we are members of one great family and children of the same heavenly Father and further, that we are one body in Christ and everyone members of one another. Look around and behold the faces of the brothers and sisters that you will be spending eternity with. Don't you think it's about time that we learned to love each other and forgive each other and heal our differences?

"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." We're one, big, happy family. This explains, I think ... I once had a friend at graduate school who was a cradle Catholic. He's in the Christian Brothers and he was asking me why I was planning to convert. I shared with him this family vision. He said, "Wow, that's exciting. I never thought of it before quite like that, but it really draws things together." And he said, "Do you know the one thing it really draws together? It's why we disagree so much and why there's so much bickering and squabbling and why we take each other for granted so much." He said, "What family do you know where everybody wakes up in the morning and kisses and hugs and says, 'We're family, let's hold hands and let's feel close and warm and tight?'" I said, "Bob, you're right!" That explains all the dissent and all the squabbling. It also explains why the Holy Father needs our prayers, so he can get all of our older brothers and sisters in line. We, ourselves, as well!

This is the kind of family that Americans can barely imagine. We have trouble enough just trying to hold our own families together, the little nuclear units that sociologists tell us about -- Mom and Dad, the kids and the cousins. I asked my students in class, "How many of you are members of what we would call an extended family?" Invariably, maybe 20 or 25% of the hands will shoot up. Then I'll say, "What do you mean by that?" People say, "Well, we get together with cousins, like practically every year or two." "How many?" "Well, thirty, forty," and in some classes I've had people say 300 or 400. One girl just this past semester said 500; every three or four years they get together,

I said, "Do you realize that wouldn't be a drop in the bucket." That wouldn't be even one tribe out of twelve in the family of Israel which was constituted by millions of people who called themselves 'brothers and sisters' and were organized by the divine covenant that God made with Moses so that they could actually be structured as a huge family?" It's almost grotesque by American standards, but it is glorious when you look at it through the eyes of our Heavenly Father. Because what father wants a disunited family? What father is pleased or glorified when he sees his sons and his daughters bitterly divided and hostile on matters of truth and love and worship and service and works of mercy?

Cardinal Ratzinger has recently stated, "Wherever human fatherhood disappears, God can no longer be expressed or thought of." Practically speaking, that's very true. God hasn't died but in human beings something has totally died, that is a necessary condition for God's existence in the world. Ratzinger says that the crisis of fatherhood which we are living through today constitutes the heart of the human crisis that is threatening us.

We don't know what it means to father or to be fathered. Pope Pius XII said, "Hold fast to this: The Church is the Church of all men. She is there for all. She wishes to gather all men into one family as brothers and sisters in Christ." And then he exhorts us to widen our hearts and enlarge and lift up our vision so that we might see this. This is the essence of apostolic succession. This is really the meaning. This is what we are talking about. And this is why Paul can say in Ephesians, Chapter 2, verses 19 and 20, that the family of God is built upon the foundation of the Apostles.

The family or the house of God is built upon the foundation of the Apostles, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone because Christ is the chief Apostle in many respects. If "apostle" comes from "apostello", which means "to send," Christ is the one who is sent above all. Then He appoints twelve Apostles and seventy. In the Book of Revelation, chapter 21, verse 14, we read that the wall of the city "the new Jerusalem, the Bride of Christ" had twelve foundations and on them the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. The twelve Apostles were the twelve foundations of the holy city, the new Jerusalem, the Church of Christ, the Bride of the Lamb. Who were the twelve? Well, we know there's Matthew, Simon Peter ... was Judas one of them? Was Judas one of the twelve names written on the twelve foundations of the Church? No, I don't think so. We could squabble, we could speculate, we could debate; but what happened to Judas after he died?

We know what happened to Judas after he died. If you have a Bible, turn with me to Acts, chapter 1. We'll see something that is most remarkable. At least it was most remarkable to me when I first saw it. In Acts, chapter 1, we have an account of how Judas hung himself because of his despair and remorse. So what happens? Peter stands up in Acts, chapter 1, verse 15, "In those days Peter stood up among the brethren and he said, 'Brethren, the Scripture had to be fulfilled," and he talks about the prophecies that foretold Judas' betrayal. "He was numbered among us and was allotted his share in this ministry." Then he describes how he died and then he quotes the Old Testament Book of Psalms, Psalm 69, "For it is written in the Book of Psalms, 'Let his habitation become desolate and let there be no one to live in it'." But then he goes on to quote Psalm 109, "His office will another man take." In the Greek, the word for office is "episcopae," where we get the word "episcopas" or "episcopal." It literally means "overseer." It's the word for bishop.

"Let another man, his bishopric take," the King James Protestant version reads. What do we have here? Episcopal succession. The first bishop to replace the first deceased Apostle is installed by Peter without debate. Without any controversy, without any hubbub. How can this be? Because he sees in the Old Testament, the pattern, the type, the blueprint for the New Testament family, the Catholic Church.

In the Old Testament some things were different. Flesh and blood genealogies are now replaced by a kind of spiritual genealogy where spiritual fatherhood and spiritual sonship are supreme. But still we have fathers who raise up sons to be their successors, only in a spiritual and moral way. In the Old Testament we also know that you had one unified and unitary hierarchical structure, a family hierarchy. This is what Peter is plugging into and no disciples are disagreeing. Nobody is saying, "Where did he get that from? This is the New Testament. This is the Church. This isn't Israel. This isn't the Old Testament."

"We are the Israel of God," St. Paul tells us in Galatians 6. In Galatians 3 we are told that we who are in Christ are the offspring of Abraham, "heirs according to all the promise that God gave to Abraham." So we have clearly enunciated in Acts, chapter 1, not only the fact that the Apostles would be succeeded, but they would be succeeded in their "episcopae," their bishopric, their episcopal office. So Matthias is chosen and he is ordained.

So not only are Apostles sent by Christ, but the Apostles raise up their successors to carry on the ministry of the Apostles when they die. In 2nd Corinthians 5, verse 20, St. Paul tells us, "We are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us." In 1st Corinthians 3, verse 4, he tells us that the Apostles are God's co- workers, God's fellow workers. In 1st Corinthians 4, verse 1, he speaks of how the Apostles are stewards of the mysteries of God or oiconimas, stewards. That word oiconimas for steward literally has as the first part of its compound, that word oicas which means family or household. They are stewards of the household.

Jesus describes for us in the Gospels what this type of thing is all about. Turn with me to Matthew 24 and you can see just what Paul is thinking of. Paul is building upon the teaching model of our Lord. In Matthew 24, Jesus describes for us a typical household, an extended family. He describes in verse 45, "Who then is the faithful and wise oiconimas, steward or servant whom his master has set over his household to give them their food at the proper time?" Notice, that there is one household and one master, but what does the master do to rule his household? He sets up an oiconimas, a steward, a servant, a chief servant. He sets him over his household to give them their food at the proper time, just as Jesus our Master set up Peter to be the chief steward of his household to feed us the Bread of Life and the truth of Christ at the proper time.

"Blessed is that servant whom his master, when he comes, will find him so doing. Truly, I say to you, he will set him over all his possessions." Get that? The master will set the chief steward over all of his possessions. That's why we speak of Peter and his successors, known as the Popes, as Vicars of Christ, because Christ, the Master, sets them over his entire household, entrusting to them all his possessions. "But if that wicked servant says to himself, 'My master is delayed and begins to beat his fellow servants and eats and drinks with the drunken, the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know and he will punish him and put him with the hypocrites. There men will weep and gnash their teeth."

Notice he does not say that once the chief steward becomes wicked, then you have a divinely authorized mutiny, then all of the other household members are free to go off on their own. No, they're victimized by somebody who sits on a seat of authority to abuse that authority. But what do we do when we have a Bishop who's bad? And I dare say Church history is full of them. We shouldn't be surprised. I think Jesus not only knew it in advance, but foretold in advance, prepared us for that fact by choosing Judas and by choosing others that He knew would either betray Him or flee from Him in His hour of need.

But notice what Jesus says in a previous chapter in Matthew 23 in verse 1. It says, "Jesus said to the crowd and to His disciples, 'The Scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat. So practice and observe whatever they tell you, but don't do what they do because they don't practice what they preach.'" Have we ever met priests or Bishops who don't practice what they preach and who sometimes even stop preaching what we should practice? Yes. What should we do? We must do whatsoever they tell us. Why? Because these scribes and Pharisees sat on Moses' seat; the Greek word is cathedra. It's actually brought into the Latin so that when the Pope speaks ex cathedra, we are infallibly sure that this is infallibly binding upon us.

This is nothing new. Now what does Jesus think of these scribes and Pharisees who sit on Moses' seat? The rest of Matthew 23 tells us. He goes on to scold -- scold is too kind -- rebuke, that's too kind, castigate, lambaste, slander. He says, "Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites," he calls them, "blind guides, he calls them, "fools," he calls them, "whitewashed tombs that look good on the outside but are full of dead men's bones and rottenness and uncleanness on the inside." That's incredible!

Reminds me of St. Anthony of Padua who from the pulpit would call Archbishops who were corrupt to account. On one occasion the Archbishop actually asked him to hear his confession. The scribes and the Pharisees I don't believe did that with Jesus. But the principle was established, nonetheless.

There is in the Old Testament what there is in the New Testament, a seat of authority. The seat was Moses' in the Old; the seat is Jesus' seat, it's Peter's cathedra in the New Testament. Because there's a greater fullness of truth, there's a greater completeness to what God has revealed. There's a greater outpouring of God's power in the new covenant, compared to the old covenant. Are we less bound or more bound to obey the truth that is proclaimed to us from the seat of Peter? More bound, of course.

So we have ample Biblical grounds to see who the Apostles were, constituting the foundation of God's household and how they understood and recognized the need for successors and made provisions accordingly, and so we would understand why someone like St. Irenaeus, writing in the next century, could say, "Anyone who wishes to discern the truth may see in every Church in the whole world the Apostolic succession clear and manifest. We can enumerate those who were appointed Bishops in the churches by the Apostles and their successors to our very day, but as it would be very long in a book of this kind to enumerate the successors of all the churches, I will point out the Apostolic tradition in faith announced to mankind which has been brought down to our time by the succession of Bishops in the greatest, in the most ancient and well-known church, founded and established by the two most glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul, at Rome. We can confound all who in any way either for self-pleasing or vainglory or for blindness or perversity gather more than they ought. For to this church, that is the church of Rome, established by Peter, on account of her more powerful principality, it is necessary that every church should come together; that is, the faithful from all sides in which always that which is the tradition from the Apostles has been preserved by those who are from all parts."

Then he proceeds to list all the successors from Peter down to the present time. All of the first Popes were martyrs. I mean I'm talking not about ten, not fifteen, not twenty, not twenty-five, but like thirty in a row! You're not talking about power-hungry politicians. You're talking about men who loved Christ so much that they weren't ashamed to die like Peter upside down on a cross. You're talking about men who knew how to love to the death, men who were invested with a supernatural power that was given uniquely and expressly to Peter so that the Church might see one Bishop above all other Bishops, so that when Bishops disagreed, there would be a way to resolve the differences. And I've got to tell you, brothers and sisters in Christ, down through the ages of the Church, many Bishops have disagreed with other Bishops.

Many Bishops have been deposed or excommunicated as heretics. But not one Bishop of Rome has ever been accused of heresy or deposed -- even when they were relatively powerless, next to the Empire which strengthened the hand of the Bishop of Constantinople, which was the imperial capitol, after Rome had fallen upon hard times. Not once was the accusation laid at the feet of the successors to Peter that they expressed heresy as truth. On the contrary, the Popes were the ones down through the centuries who called to account powerful, influential, politically supported Bishops who with their material and earthly means were propagating heresy time and again.

The more you study Church history, the more Catholic you become. Cardinal John Henry Newman once stated, "To go deep into history is to cease to be Protestant." He should know. He went deep and he ceased to be Protestant, one of the greatest converts of the last two centuries. This apostolic succession is a testimony to God's fatherly faithfulness, but the succession of the Popes from Peter is the greatest testimony of all.

The Primacy of Peter

We need to understand this a little bit better. We don't have as much time as I'd like and so I just repeat what I said from the outset. That is, there are several tapes available on the tables dealing with this, but in addition to that, I think we also need to turn briefly to the main text, Matthew 16. If you have a Bible turn with me to Matthew 16 the locus classicus for all we're talking about.

As you're turning let me share with you a quotation I just found last week. The leading evangelical magazine in the country, if not all of North America, is Christianity Today, written by Bible Christians, Protestants, Evangelicals, and some Fundamentalists. I came across a very interesting quote last week by an Evangelical scholar with a Ph.D. He said in essence that Evangelical Protestant Christians are incapable of establishing unity anywhere in the Church throughout the world today. I quote, "Nevertheless, even their efforts are doomed to limited success at best since Evangelicalism is so plagued by doctrinal variance, organizational multiplicity and mutual distrust so that no group, whatever its credentials, can effectively establish itself as the arbiter of orthodoxy."

That's sad. That's tragic. That's disastrous. That's catastrophic for a family that wants to stay together, that has trouble even praying together. Thank God that He has given us a father figure, an icon of Jesus Christ in the Holy Father, the Pope. We have in Matthew 16 the charter that Jesus gives. He asks the disciples who men are saying that Jesus is. They tell him. "Who do you say that I am?" He asks. In verse 16, Simon Peter replied, "You are the Christos, the Messiah, the Anointed One, the Christ, the Son of the Living God." Jesus answered him, "Blessed are you Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, Simon, you are Rock, Petros, and on this Rock, Petra, I will build my Church."

Now, I make that distinction between "petros" and "petra" because many Bible Christians, many non-Catholics, many anti-Catholics will stress this, that "petros, the name given to Peter can mean small stone, whereas "petra" where Jesus says "On this rock, I will build my Church," is in the feminine form which means "big, huge, rock." The fact is, all spellers agree, Jesus, when He said this, did not speak Greek where you have a masculine form of the word which can mean "stone" and a feminine form which means "big rock."

He spoke Aramaic and in Aramaic, there is only one word for "rock." You see in the New Testament Jesus referred to as Cephas because "caipha" is the Aramaic name that Jesus gave to Simon, which means "rock." There's no possible way for Jesus, speaking Aramaic, to make a distinction between the small stone, Peter, and the big rock, Christ or Peter's faith on which the Church would be built. It's Peter who is the Rock upon which Christ would build the Church. This is something about which there is total consensus among scholars today.

I have numerous quotations from the top Bible-believing, Evangelical Protestant scholars: D. A. Carson from Trinity, R.T. France in England, Gerhardt Meyer in Germany. Over and over again they testify to the fact, William Hendrickson and others, that Peter is the Rock on which Christ said He would build His Church and it was only Protestant prejudice that led for a few centuries some Protestant scholars to deny or to dispute this. Now there is unanimity. There's consensus.

So, "you are Rock and upon this Rock I will build my Church and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven and whatever you (singular) bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." This idea of the keys of the kingdom is also highly significant. We know, for instance, that this notion of the keys of the kingdom comes from the Old Testament. Once again, Protestant scholar, J.A. Emerton, tells us that Jesus was deliberately and explicitly citing Isaiah 22.

Now, we're not going to have to go back to Isaiah 22. Let me just sum it up. When Jesus gives to Peter, not only a new name, Rock, but the keys of the kingdom, this image of the kingdom keys was a well- known figure because in ancient Israel for centuries there was a divine kingdom established by God with the covenant with David. And we know that the key holder was the son of David, the King of Israel. The King of Israel, as the son of David, held what Isaiah referred to as "the keys of the House of David." He was the key holder as the King, but he would entrust to the Prime Minister, the keys for administration. Just as the master of the house would set the Chief Steward over all the household possessions, so the King, as the one who holds the keys, would give the keys to his Prime Minister.

Now there was always a royal cabinet of other ministers: Minister of Transportation, Minister of Defense, or whatever; but over the other ministers was a Prime Minister and what distinguished him as the Prime Minister was the fact that he administered the keys of the kingdom.

Now in a debate a few weeks ago, a non-Catholic was arguing that because Revelation, Chapter 3, verse 7, tells us that Jesus holds the keys, therefore we cannot say that Peter administers the keys. On the contrary, Revelation 3 tells us exactly what we would expect: that Jesus as the Son of David, Jesus as the King of the New Israel, Jesus as the builder of the new temple and the new Jerusalem, the Church, is naturally the key holder, but He will entrust those kingdom keys to His "Prime Minister." That's what we mean when we speak of the primacy being Peter's. He is the Prime Minister. He is the key holder in an administrative sense. He is the chief steward set up over the possessions of the house of Christ.

"It, therefore, seems that the whole of Matthew 16 and not merely one line is dependent on Isaiah 22," Emerton concludes, as a Protestant Scripture scholar with no desire to support Catholic conclusions. He's just being honest and sincere.

It was to Peter that Jesus gave the new name "Rock" and said, "I will build my Church upon this Rock." Notice Jesus says, "I will build my Church." It wasn't Peter building it and it wasn't Peter's Church. It is not Pope John Paul's Church now. It's Christ's Church! John Paul is the holy instrument that Christ has set apart to use, to nurture and to love us. Christ gave to Peter the keys of the kingdom. Christ gave to Peter in John 21 the commission to "shepherd the flock, to feed the sheep." And there in Acts, chapter 1, we see Peter standing up and calling for a successor to Judas without any debate.

In Acts, chapter 2, Peter is the one to deliver the first sermon. In Acts, chapter 3, he delivers another one. In Acts, chapter 4, he confronts and he accuses the Jewish Senate, the supreme governing body, of murdering their Messiah. Where does he get all this authority? Straight from the King of kings. In Acts, chapter 5, he exercises supreme jurisdiction within the Church, and it cost the lives of Ananias and Sapphira who, in lying to Peter, are said to have lied to the Holy Spirit. Even his shadow falling upon a sick person would heal the sick person, in Acts, chapter 5. The first miracle worker is Peter. The one to whom Paul goes to confirm his gospel is Peter. It goes on and on and on. Peter's primacy is established as part of the work of Christ.

So St. Clement of Rome in writing in 96 A.D., very early within the same generation as the Apostles -- he might have been writing when St. John was still alive, "But if any disobeyed the word spoken by him, Peter, through us, let them know that they will involve themselves in transgression and no small danger." St. Clement was the second or third Pope, the Bishop of Rome and one of the great martyrs. Tertullian writing in the late 100s wrote, "Was anything withheld from Peter who was called the Rock on which the Church should be built, who also obtained the keys to the kingdom of heaven with the power of loosing and binding in heaven and on earth?"

St. Cyprian, writing in the 3rd century spoke of "a primacy which is given to Peter, and it is thus made clear that there is but one Church and one Chair." St. Ephram, who lived outside of the Roman Empire -- he lived in Syria and the Syrians were hostile enemies to the Romans -- but on Holy Week he wrote a hymn that was to be sung in his churches. And by the way, St. Ephram is one of the forty or so Doctors of the Church. In his hymn he writes and they sang, "You, Simon, my disciple have I set at the foundation of Holy Church. I call thee Caipha from of old, that thou mightest bear all buildings. Thou art the overseer of those who built for me the Church on earth. If they built anything hateful, your foundation restrains them. You are the fountainhead of my teaching, and you are the head of my disciples. By them I will give drink to all nations. You have the sweetness of life which I will give. It is thee I have chosen to be the firstborn of my teaching, to be heir of my treasures. I have given thee the keys of my kingdom. Behold, thou rulest over all my possessions."

Jesus established Peter as the chief steward over all His possessions and this was recognized outside the Roman Empire by St. Ephram. Now the reason I stress that is because many Protestant scholars argue that the Church of Rome just became a mere image of imperial Rome's bureaucratic organization, its imperial hierarchy. Actually, what you discover is that the Christians outside of the Roman Empire venerated the Chair of Peter even more explicitly and emphatically than the Christians within the Roman Empire, even though that could have been misinterpreted by non-Christian Syrians as treasonous. This was not a mere image or reflection of some political bureaucracy. This was the result of the person and work of Jesus Christ.

So many commentators see this in our own day and age. Just this past week I was working through a book written by one of the top scholars in Germany, a Lutheran scholar by the name of Ernst Kasemann. Kasemann is no Catholic and he has no desire to support the Catholic Church, but I was shocked by what I read in his book, because he is a very honest interpreter of Scripture. If he disagrees with something that he finds in the Bible, he won't try to change it to fit what he already thinks. He will just say," This is what the Bible says and I am very uncomfortable with it."

He speaks, for instance, in his book on New Testament Questions of Today of how the classical document for all doctrine concerning the Church is Ephesians. He writes very uncomfortably about this. He says, "The sacramental presence of Christ in the Church for the world, that is the central motif of the early Catholic doctrine of redemption and even this view can claim a precedent in Paul. He did in fact make the sacramental incorporation into the worldwide Body of Christ the criterion for being a Christian." He goes on to talk about the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, the Lucan writings. He also speaks of the pastoral Epistles, the ones that Paul wrote to Timothy and to Titus, although Kasemann doesn't think that Paul wrote them.

"Here we find, it seems to me, the monarchical Bishop surrounded by presbyters, Deacons and others bound by vow. In the pastoral Epistles," Kasemann says, " I have to be honest with you and tell you that we find the monarchical Bishop surrounded by priests there in the Church. The office is conferred by ordination, and because it is regulated by the disciples of the Apostles, it's placed in Apostolic succession. The Lucan work, the writings of Luke as a whole, are totally incomprehensible if it is not seen that only in the stream of Apostolic tradition does one also belong to the one, holy, Catholic Church." I won't go on, it's a long quote, trying to translate complex German, but Kasemann's point is simple.

In Luke's writings, Luke in Acts and in the Pastoral Epistles, we have the Bishop as monarch. We have Apostolic succession. We have all the things that make Kasemann feel quite uncomfortable and by the time he gets to 2nd Peter in his book, Essays on New Testament Themes, he has something even more startling to say because here is one of the top Protestant non-Catholic scholars writing in Germany in the 20th Century conceding the fact that when you look at 2nd Peter, 1, verse 20, you cannot hold to 2nd Peter 1:20, and to the Protestant doctrine that the Bible alone is our sole authority. Why? Because 2nd Peter 1:20 does away with that view. Quoting Holtzman, another Protestant, he says, "Our epistle 2nd Peter already considers an authoritative Church interpretation to be essential. Even exegesis, our interpreting the Bible, is exposed to the threat of error." In other words, people interpreting the Bible can make important mistakes.

"It must, therefore," Kasemann says, "be regulated according to 2nd Peter and this is done by tying it to the Church's teaching office. Thus the churches hear the possessor of the correct interpretation of Scripture. Every unauthorized exegesis and interpretation can now be prohibited. The time," (this is the most important quote of all of Kasemann's statements,) "The time when it was possible to set up Scripture in its totality in opposition to Catholicism has gone beyond recall. Protestantism today can no longer employ the so-called formal principle, that is the Bible as our only authority without rendering itself unworthy of credence in the eyes of historical analysis." Because, there in the Pastorals and there in 2nd Peter, we have the Bishop as monarch in the family-kingdom of God. We have Apostolic succession. We have the Church invested with divine authority to interpret the Bible in the correct way.

Now how does Kasemann explain this? He says, "You've got to understand what they were trying to achieve. The object that was aimed at and no doubt the result that was widely attained was sound doctrine that was at once normative and regulative." Kasemann says, "The churches saw themselves above all as a model of God's family." That's Kasemann, not John Paul. "The churches saw themselves above all as a model of God's family with corresponding importance attached to the building up of the Christian family. The Christian family was, so to speak, the germ cell for God's family taken as a whole. Thus a patriarchal system took root."

We have a patriarchal system of family order in the Church, the family of God. I might also add a matriarchal system, too, because who reigns supreme over every Pope and every priest? -- the mother of God! There's real feminism. There's real women's liberation. Doesn't God know how to father His family well?

The Catholic Church and Sacred Scripture

We love Scripture; don't get me wrong, and the Church encourages us to study it. St. Jerome said, "Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ." But this idea that we chained the Bible is bunk; it's nonsense. This idea that Luther made the Bible available in the vernacular is historical nonsense. I have data before me that tells of how, before Luther was born, the Roman Catholic Church was responsible for 84 separate editions of the Bible -- 62 in Hebrew, 22 in Greek, 343 editions in Latin, which was the common language of educated and literate people.

What about Germany, though? Well, there were 30 editions of the entire Bible in German published by the Church's approval before Luther was born; 20 in Italian, 26 in French, 19 in Flemish, 2 in Spanish, 6 in Bohemian, 1 in Slavonic. The Church has always longed for her children to understand the Bible so long as they understand it with fidelity and with accuracy, in keeping with the Apostolic tradition that the Bishops, and especially the Bishop of Rome, are responsible to maintain and transmit down through the ages.

This idea of the Bible alone as our sole authority is anti- scriptural. It goes contrary to Scripture. What it reduces down to is, "I pick and choose, and I interpret the Bible in accord with my own views." In a sense, it is a very inconsistent stand. It's a very incoherent stand because invariably what Christians do is they bring in all kinds of principles from their own culture, from their own experience, their own upbringing and use those to interpret the Bible. Nobody ever comes to the Bible alone. They always come with their own interpretive biases, their own experiences, their own prejudices. Anybody who thinks he comes as a blind slate -- I won't say he is a fool or an idiot, but if you said it, I wouldn't mind.

The Protestants who came to Scripture alone, they said, came up with many interpretations that are interesting. I don't want to be anti-Protestant, but I do want to oppose those who are anti-Catholic. Melancthan was sure that Pope Zozimus fulfilled the prophecies of Scripture as the anti-Christ in 420. Beza said, "No, it was Pope St. Leo the Great in 440." Cranmer's brother-in-law, Bolinger said, "No, it was 763 with Pope St. Paul 1st." John Fox, another Reformer argued that "No, it was Pope Boniface the 8th." They all agreed, of course, that one of the Popes was the anti-Christ and had then established the line of Popes as the anti-Christ, all in fulfillment of Scripture.

But Scripture teaches us that we have to hold fast not only to Scripture, but also to the tradition that Christ gave the Apostles and that they have entrusted, not only in writing but also in oral tradition. Second Thessalonians 2:15 speaks of how we have to hold fast to what Paul has transmitted not only in writing but also orally. F. F. Bruce, one of the top Evangelical scholars, speaks about how the spirit of Christian freedom and progress is by no means incompatible with loyalty to the primitive Christian heritage.

He goes on to say, "Christian stability calls for the maintenance of Christian continuity in belief and action alike in corporate and in personal life. This maintenance of continuity is encouraged by the injunction, 2nd Thessalonians 2:15 'to hold fast to the traditions.' But it is not tradition as such, but false, inadequate or outmoded tradition that is deprecated by Christ in Matthew 15." Even Evangelical scholars recognize how normative and authoritative tradition was for St. Paul.

Tradition is not some sort of burden that is added to Scripture to make it more difficult to interpret. Tradition is the vital life- giving force of the family of God that Christ entrusted to His Apostles and transmitted through them to their successors and to us through them. It is a vital energy, a life-giving force. That kind of family legacy is not reducible to writing. It is not going to be apparent to outsiders who do not have any experience of the living liturgical life of the family of God.

The liturgy of the Church is the lifestyle of God's family. We need to immerse ourselves in it. There we discover how vital and alive sacred tradition really is. It's protective of the true interpretation of scripture, but it's propulsive of Christian growth. It helps us mature as sons and daughters of God. Tradition reminds us of truth, but it renews us in that truth as it leads us in worship. Tradition can't be reduced to writing. It's beyond the grasp of our human hands, but it's planted within our hearts. It transmits life and not merely laws, and it's that which the Church, through the Bishops as the successors to the Apostles, it's that which the Church is responsible to maintain.

Conclusion

Oh, there's so much more, there's so much more I want to share, but there's not so much more time to share it. Let me just encourage you at the close of this series of mine to ask the Lord to give to you the family Spirit of Christ so that you will have a deeper devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. I especially encourage you who might be questioning Mary, who might have dropped the habit of praying the rosary long ago to pick up that habit and ask Jesus to give to you His heart for His mother.

We don't want to venerate her more than Jesus does. We want to imitate Jesus as He honors His mother. We want to honor her with the same honor with which He honored her, no less and no more. She is a powerful mother and no family is strong without a powerful mother. She loves us in a way that we can barely imagine, with her Immaculate but Sorrowful Heart, and we can love Christ with the heart of Mary. That's why He gave her to us in the first place.

We also need to ask the Lord to deepen our devotion and loyalty to the Holy Father. I wouldn't take his job for a billion dollars. I have trouble enough being a half-decent father of three. I can't imagine what a billion would be like. He is the Father of the whole human race, because all humans alive today are the children of God at least potentially, and it's his mission and his ministry to draw them back to one shepherd and one fold. Oh, does he need our prayers! So does your Bishop as the successor to the Apostles. You've got a good one. Pray for Bishop Braum. He is a very holy man, very wise in the ways of the Catholic faith, but very immersed in all kinds of struggles and crises in the modern Church. Pray for him every day and ask our Lord and ask our Lady to pray for him and pray for the Monsignor and the parish priests that you are part of, in whatever parish family God has placed you. See in your parish your true family. See in the Church your everlasting home. See in the faces of other Catholic Christians your brothers and sisters foreverlasting time and ask Jesus to help you love them as He loves them as His younger brothers and sisters. Thank you very much.

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