Transcript

The Nicene Creed says that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.

These four claims denote what are traditionally termed the marks of the Church.

Now on one level, the marks of the Church are signs given to our natural human reason so that we can recognize the Catholic Church as the true Church founded by Christ.

We can see her perennial endurance through the ages and her apostolicity.

But on a deeper level, the marks of the Church indicate a mystery.

The Church is the mystical body of Christ.

So we should briefly consider each of these marks distinctly.

First, the Church is apostolic.

According to the teaching of the New Testament, Christ founded the Catholic Church Himself.

This is what it means to say the Church is of divine origin.

We see this particularly in the Scriptures, in His choice of the 12.

Consider for example in Matthew 10:1-2, where He calls the 12 apostles to Himself.

This is what we call the Apostolic College, whose number is meant to reflect the original 12 tribes of Israel.

The apostles, for Christ, represent a new Israel that will now be opened through Christ's redemptive death to both Jews and Gentiles in the sacraments, especially through baptism.

So he says in Matthew 28:2-12, Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Baptism incorporates Christians into one body that is both mystical and visible.

The early Church understood this reality and recognized in Peter and the other apostles her visible leaders after the resurrection of Christ.

The apostles instituted bishops by ordination, who governed local churches in the ancient world that the apostles themselves had founded.

And in the post-apostolic age, the bishops understood themselves as the successors of the apostles, responsible for the visible unity and communion of the Church.

In 110 AD, we can read the writings of Ignatius of Antioch already strongly underscoring the fact that the bishop is the principal celebrant of the Eucharist for his local church, and that communion with the bishop at the Eucharistic altar assures the visible unity of the Church of Christ.

So already in the early second century, you see that this apostolic identity is essential to the Church and to her leadership.

This apostolicity of the Church is maintained down to our own age in unbroken fashion due to the continued lineage of bishops known as apostolic succession.

Every bishop is ordained by another bishop and by another one before him.

In addition to their unified communion down through time, they're united in actual communion with the successor of Peter and Paul in Rome, who is the Pope, so that the bishops are together one body of officials, you might say, who speak authoritatively for the truth of the Catholic faith and who maintain governmental unity.

So the unity of the Church, which is the second mark, follows directly from its apostolicity.

What binds the Church together is a common faith and a visible communion of charity in Christ.

It's not just a unity of truth, it's also a unity of hope and love.

The faith of the Church is one down through the ages, and this unity of faith is manifested and maintained in part through the outward declarations of the doctrine of the Church, solemnly defined dogmas, what we call the extraordinary magisterium, but also the other official Church teachings, the ordinary magisterium, the things that the Bishop of Rome and his fellow bishops teach in an ordinary way through the catechesis of the Church.

All of this provides and maintains the unity of the Church by helping us to identify the true content of divine revelation, and it allows us to rightly interpret the Gospel.

The Pope, by virtue of his office, has the particular charism and responsibility for maintaining the unity of the Church by assuring the infallibility of Church teaching.

Uh, that doesn't mean that everything a Pope says or teaches should be considered infallible.

It's not some kind of magic or some kind of blank check given to the Pope for whatever he says.

The Pope teaches infallibly only when he solemnly designates his teaching as such, and he can do that in a council with other bishops or by a discrete act of proclamation, which is typically called an Ex Cathedra proclamation, meaning from the throne of Peter.

The unity of the Church is assured not only by these commonly held truths of the faith, as we've said, but also by love or charity.

That's the communion of the Church, her membership with Christ and God and with each other.

The charity of the Church is especially manifest in the celebration of the Eucharist, where Christ renews the life of the Church by grace.

He binds the faithful more closely to God and to one another in the communion in his body and blood.

And so at its heart, the visible Catholic Church is a communion of love, a mystery of charity.The third mark of the Church is holiness.

The holiness of the Church derives immediately from the holiness of Christ.

It's by His grace that the Church lives both in her sacred teaching and in her communion of love.

It should be made clear that all of the members of the Church, excluding Christ and the Virgin Mary, are sinners.

But the Church herself is without sin insofar as her sacraments are channels of the grace of Christ, independently of the ministers who celebrate them.

And her revealed teaching is received from God, who is all holy.

It's without error.

The Church is also holy due to the grace of Christ that is present in her members, which derives directly from Jesus, the God-man.

Now, of course, all of her visible members are people wounded by sin to varying degrees, and they stand in need of gradual conversion, purification, and sanctification.

The Church is a home for sinners who are called to salvation in Christ, not a place reserved only to those who count themselves pure.

At the same time, by the grace of God, the Church also has produced a great multitude of holy saints down through the ages.

Persons who've been radically conformed to Christ in their lives of faith, hope, and charity, and who have often lived heroic lives for the sake of the Gospel.

The communion of the saints in the Catholic Church is meant to magnify the presence of Christ and his unique saving grace.

It gives us confidence in the presence of the Holy Spirit, who actively sanctifies the faithful down through the ages.

The final mark of the Church is her catholicity.

Now that word Catholic is a Greek word which means universal.

The catholicity of the Church denotes her universality.

Now, the Church is universal both across time and across place.

From the beginning of the Apostolic Age until now, down through time, the Church perseveres.

As the humble, and at times almost hidden, but ever-present steward of the mysteries of God.

Throughout history, she is a precursor of the Kingdom of God that will be made manifest in the life to come.

From the first age of her existence, the Church sent missionaries to all corners of the known world, and through time, has established a visible presence throughout the world, seeking to go to every known place.

This presence continues to expand daily, and is a sign of the reality of the promises of Christ, that He would remain with the Church always and accompany her in her mission, even to the ends of the world.

So there's a universality of place, of expansion, of missionary vitality as the Church moves to all the frontiers of the world.

But what about those who are outside of the visible frontiers of the Church?

Can they find the truth?

Can they be saved by the grace of God?

Based on the authority of sacred Scripture, the Catholic Church teaches that Christ died for all human beings.

Consequently, God wills to offer the possibility of salvation to all, even those who, through no fault of their own, are unable to come to the explicit knowledge of Christ.

This means that the invisible grace of Christ and His Church are present, you might say, at a distance, acting in the minds and hearts of those who do not yet recognize either the existence of God or the Holy Trinity or Christ or the Catholic Church.

People with differing degrees of knowledge and ignorance.

Now, those who are in what we call invincible ignorance, that's to say non-culpable ignorance, about the mystery of Christ and His sacraments, can be saved if they cooperate with this invisible grace, which is the working of God in them.

Now in practice, it's not always possible to determine if this is actually taking place in a given person.

And we have to be careful and leave the judgment of hearts to God alone.

Theologians speculate about ways that non-Christians may cooperate with the grace of God, for example, through the workings of their moral conscience and in their sincere search for the truth, especially their search for the truth in matters pertaining to God and religion.

Often God draws people little by little into the visible communion of the Church so that they eventually consent to baptism or to the confession of the fullness of the Catholic faith.

The Holy Spirit is at work in the world, calling all human beings to seek the truth so that they may find God.

Now, saying this is not a reason to abandon the work of evangelization.

On the contrary, it's the reason we should hope in the prospects of evangelization, because the Holy Spirit is out there at work and we are to bring the visible Word of the Gospel to others so that they can enter into the fullness of life and be saved.

So, the Church teaches that the Holy Spirit is at work outside the visible frontiers of the Church, touching minds and hearts.

And at the same time, the Church is necessary to us if we wish to find security in our relationship with God.

Those who embrace the means of salvation found in the Catholic Church stand in a much more advantageous situation objectively with regards to the judgment of God.

As Jesus commands us in Mark 16, Go into the whole world and preach the Gospel to all creation.

Today we've explored the mystery of the Church.

Next time we'll talk about one of God's greatest gifts to us, the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Communion of Saints.