Catholic Apologetics Online

Questions and answers on Catholicism and Protestantism

Given from the Catholic Broadcasting Station 2SM Sydney Australia

Choose a topic from Vol 3:

Necessity of the Church

285. Do not Roman Catholics make too much of the doctrine of the Church?

They give it that place in their faith which Christ intended.

286. We Protestants have a great respect for Christ, but we do not have faith in any Church.

That cannot be right. If you believe in Christ, you must consider as necessary what Christ believed necessary. To wish to believe in Christ without believing in the Church is a great mistake. For centuries Christians have said, not only, "I believe in Jesus Christ, our Lord," but also, "I believe in the Holy Catholic Church." They made an act of faith in both Christ and His Church. If you no longer believe in a Church, something has gone wrong somewhere.

287. Christ does not say, "Come to My Church." He says, "Come to Me."

We come to Christ by coming to His Church. As a matter of fact, the Church, in the person of the Apostles, first preached Christ to the early converts to Christianity. The first fact for the early Christians was, therefore, the Church. They experienced faith in the mission of the Church, and because of that, believed in her teachings about Christ. You will notice, in the Acts of the Apostles, when Saul was persecuting the Church. Jesus appeared to him, and even identified Himself with the Church, saying, "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?" The denial of the Church is therefore really a denial of Christ, if people, but realize it.

288. People are rapidly coming to the conclusion that, without ceasing to profess Christianity, they can dispense with Churches.

I admit that that is the logical ultimate result of Protestantism. The Anglican Dr. Goudge recognizes this. "We are," he says, "congenital individualists, and exceedingly unwilling, in religion as elsewhere, to recognize our dependence on others. It appears to us obvious that our religion is wholly bound up with our individual relation to God, and that others are not concerned with it. We become members of Christ, so we think, by our individual faith alone. This is the Protestant view. The result is that we neglect the doctrine of the Church. It is not so much that Protestants have a false conception of the Church as that they seem to be without any clear conception of it. We all tend to be hazy on this subject. Yet the doctrine of the Church is, next to the doctrine of God and His redemption, the most important doctrine of revealed religion, both in the Old and in the New Testament."

289. I can be religious without the Church.

But you cannot thus be religious in the way God wants you to be religious. And since religion is concerned with duties to God, it is for God to dictate the terms and conditions, not for us. Your attitude is due to lack of knowledge and thought. You are contenting yourself with no more than a vague religious sentiment. But religion demands a devotedness of the whole man to God, a devotedness of mind and heart and will. That means that we must believe what God has taught, love Him above all else, and serve Him both by worship and obedience to His law. For all this a man must study and know just what God has revealed, and not be content with a merely vague religious outlook. And as he is not only individual, but also social by his very nature, man must render both private and public worship to God. Christ established a Church to teach all nations and to gather to itself all whom it leads to a belief in Christ. One who says he is religious, yet who refuses to have anything to do with the Church Christ established, simply does not know the Christian religion.

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