catholicism 101 / part 19

Catholicism 101

(The outline of this series is taken rom Father Vernon Staley’s book The Catholic Religion.)

(Actually,
today’s lesson is all Fr Will – not Fr Staley.)

Church of the Holy Cross

July 27, 2008

Part 19

Let us Pause and reflect.

-      What is Catholicism?

o   Fundamentally, Catholicism is a property of the one Church:

§ “We believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church…” (from the Nicene Creed)

§ We only believe in “one… Church” and that Church we describe (among other things) as “catholic”.

o   More fundamentally still, Catholicism is a property of Jesus Christ:  Everything that God IS, he gives.  And most fundamentally he is himself:  “I am.”  So we can see that he gives himself.

o   And to whom does he give himself?  His bride, the Church.

§ “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5.25).

·   The Sacrament of Christian Marriage is a holy image, an eikon of this love of between Christ and his Church.

o   In the old form for the Solemnization of Holy Matrimony, the Bridegroom put a ring on the finger of his bride and said: “With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

§ The old meaning of “worship” was simply to
revere and to declare the “worth” of something (or someone).  The formal title for mayors in England
to this day is “Your Worship”.  So “with my body I thee worship” means that the husband is declaring the “worth” of the bride with his body – not least in the marital embrace.

§ This too is a poignant icon of the cross,
whereon Jesus solemnly declares the worth of (or “worships”) his bride with his body.

o   “Catholic” means “universal”.  Olos means something that “forms a whole” and kaq olou means “together in one whole”.

§ If “Catholicism” is a predicate of the one Church, if its something the Church “has”, then it must be given to her by the Bridegroom, who endows her with all his “worldly goods” – i.e. everything he
has (and he has everything).

§ This universality is in virtue of Christ’s being the “universal man”.

·     St. Paul expresses this universality of the man Jesus Christ when he calls him the new Adam:

o   “For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15.21f).

o   Christ abolished “in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself ONE NEW MAN…” (Ephesians 2.15).

o   Henri de Lubac (in Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man): “For Irenaeus again, as indeed for Origen, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa, for Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus, Hilary and others, the lost sheep of the Gospel that the Good Shepherd brings back to the fold is no other than the whole of human nature; its sorry state so moves the Word of God that he leaves the great flock of the angels, as it were to their own devices, in order to go to its help.  The Fathers designated this nature by a series of equivalent expressions, all of a concrete nature, thus demonstrating that it was in their view a genuine reality.  They seemed to witness its birth, to see it live, grow, develop, as a single being.  With the first sin it was
this being, whole and entire, which fell away, which was driven out of Paradise and sentenced to a bitter exile until the time of its redemption.  And when Christ as last appeared, coming as the ‘one bridegroom’, his bride, once again, was the ‘whole human race’.”  (Quoting Pseudo-Chrysostom.)

§ At Pentecost, the reconciling work of the “universal man” (this work = the cross) is poured out, and the prophecy of Joel is fulfilled (as Peter says explicitly in Acts 2.14-17):

·   “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh” (Joel 2.28).

·     And the universality of this outpouring is symbolized in the multiplicity of tongues:

o   “When the day of Pentecost had come, [the 12 Apostles] were all together in one place. And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And ther appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in his own language.”

§ This episode undoes what was done at the Tower of Babel (which symbolizes the disunity and disharmony of our fallen condition, our alienation from one another):

“And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men had built. And the LORD said, "Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.  Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city” (Genesis 11.5-8).

§ The disciples all proclaimed the same thing,
“the mighty works of God” (Acts 2.11), the Gospel of Jesus.·   This outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Church, the Bride, is proleptically figured in the annunciation to Mary (“Spouse of the Holy Spirit”):

o   ‘And the angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be
called holy, the Son of God”’ (Luke 1.35).

§ The same thing is going on with Mary as will happen at Pentecost with “all flesh” – the Holy Spirit comes upon her, and she conceives and brings forth Jesus.

·     So we see that the birth of the Church, at Pentecost, (when the Church was already catholic – universal – and when there were as yet only 12 members of her).

·     Members of “the Catholic Church” must therefore manifest a unity of faith with the Apostles in part because we say that we believe the one Church is also “apostolic”, but mainly because in anticipating Pentecost, Jesus said to the 12 Apostles:

o   “But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Sama'ria and to the end of the earth.”

o   And because his gift of unity (“oneness”) is a gift of unity in faith with these 12 men:

§ “And for their sake [the sake of the 12] I
consecrate myself, that they also may be consecrated in truth. "I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. The glory which thou hast given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that thou hast sent me and hast loved them even as thou hast loved me” (John 17, passim).