CHAPTER ONE
CATHOLIC? NO WAY!
If we are asked, "Which is the Church that Christ founded?" because we are Catholic, we say, " Of course, the Catholic Church!" Others who are not Catholic might say, "Well, the one Church!" They mean, by their words, that wherever there is the name "church," it is the church of Christ. Yet, others may find the question completely irrelevant. They might think, "Which church is there where believers don't pray?" None! Therefore, all churches serve their purpose and so belong to Christ. "What's your problem?" they ask. Those who are more informed may answer this way: "Well, I know for sure which one it is not; it is not the Catholic Church because their pope is the antichrist. Moreover, in the Middle Ages, some popes lived scandalous lives, and even now today in the United States, there have been many scandals in the Catholic Church. All those things cannot be in the Church of Christ!"
Before we go any further, since you are a "hard core" Catholic and may be offended and even silenced by this last argument, I will offer you a few points. Tell them this:
One. Those scandals have nothing to do with the Catholic faith; they are scandals that permeate our whole society today, both in and out of the churches. People find themselves involved in them not because they are Catholics or Christians or Muslims, etc., but because they live in a society with the problem. The Catholic Church is only being singled out because of celibacy, which is the real point under attack. Both the celibacy of her priests (with no families to support) and their honesty over the centuries have contributed to the Church's considerable wealth, which is really what the scandalmongers are after. Other churches have the same situations but no money to go after and, therefore, no drama. Remember, we are looking at the big picture, one that spans the life of the Church over 2,000 years and not just the past 50 or so years.
Two. The focus of all the media noise about the Catholic Church involves 3 to 4 percent of the Catholic priests in the United States, which has a "staggering" 6 percent of the Catholic Church membership in the world. So there are 96 good priests for every 100 in the United States that no one has said a thing about!
Three. As for the scandals of some popes in the Middle Ages, ask critics how they know about them? There was no CNN or Fox News in the Middle Ages to do investigative journalism; there was hardly any journalism at all. The Catholic Church was the source of almost all written material at that time because, as we know, modern education practically came from the Catholic Church. So how did today's world know about these popes? Historians, in order to reconstruct history, need written records. Without any written records, we would never have known anything of those popes today. Even archaeologists don't discover the morals of the past, only structures. And from those, the archaeologists make some deductions. But the Catholic Church itself wrote its own dirty history. This is the only way those scandals came to be known-even up to our time. Why did the Church do this? Because honesty-not sinlessness-is the mark of the community of Christ. And again, how many popes, out of 266 to date, were guilty of transgressions? Less than 20, over a period of 2,000 years! Some were not even clergy by vocation. They had simply maneuvered for the temporal power that the papacy represented in Europe at the time.
Let's put aside any superficial objections to our quest and proceed to the depth of our subject. We can organize our reasons into three groups to help us deal clearly and thoroughly with the topic, which is how do we know the Catholic Church is the church that Christ founded. We can group them like this:
1. Ordinary historical and social reasons
2. Scriptural reasons
3. Extraordinary historical and social reasons
ORDINARY HISTORICAL AND SOCIAL REASONS
Historical Reasons
History simply means going back in time. So let's go back in time. A Jewish historian named Josephus Flavius, who lived from 37 AD to about 100 AD, was a bright and strict scholar of history. Having lived during the rising of the "Christian phenomenon" and being a strict historian of his time, he wrote about this phenomenon. He did not write for apologetic reasons, for he was a Jew by religion and always remained so. He wrote about the followers of Jesus because he saw Christianity develop as he was growing up. He ultimately ended up in Rome, where he was able to observe what happened to the new Christians-from Jerusalem to the center of the Roman Empire. He became an important source of the history of the time because he offered an independent account. Much of what we can say using the ordinary historical reasons in support of the Church that Christ founded can also be found in his accounts-though not exclusively.
We know that a man named Jesus lived in Palestine and died around the year 33. For the general public, He was a political agitator and an impostor, but for His followers, He was the Christ (i.e., the anointed one of God). He lived and preached with a group of twelve men, who constituted the nucleus of His followers after His death. The most outspoken of this group were two men, one called Peter and another called Paul, who became a follower after the death of the man Jesus. These twelve men were a serious cause of division among the Jews of the time because they claimed Jewish traditions but for apparently non-Jewish reasons. Because of this, they were not treated well by the Jewish authorities, and indeed some were killed. However, this did not stop them-on the contrary.
Peter left the Middle East and was in Rome by the year 42 or 43. Rome was the capital of the Roman Empire and, therefore, all important business had to end up there. Paul would soon end up there too, but for a different reason. He would be there for prosecution because the supreme court of the time was held there. By the year 70, both Peter and Paul were certainly dead in Rome, both having been martyred. This simple history is enough for us to establish that the Church of Rome is the Church of Peter and Paul, who had been the leaders of the followers of Christ. These two men knew of no other church of Christ up to the time of their death-only the Church of Rome. Catholics are the only Christians today who identify with that Church of Rome.
What has been described here is pure and simple history that any historian, even non-Christian, is able to trace using the secular tools of history as a discipline. In conclusion, note that this is the Church that was nurtured by both Peter and Paul, who died in Rome for Christ. Peter had personal knowledge of the Savior because he lived with Him and the other Apostles. The rest of the twelve contested neither the leadership of Peter nor his interpretation/understanding of Christ, upon which he set the Church on its course. Let it be noted here, that if for any reason Peter misunderstood Christ, in such a way that he put Christ's Church on a wrong course, none of us here today can ever correct it. Why? First, we have no way of knowing how else it could have been; second, it is too late. We can't disown 2,000 years of the phenomenon called the Church. No one can reinvent it. Can you imagine the millions of martyrs, from 34 AD to today, who have died for this Church as Peter understood it and built it? Would God leave them to have died in vain? This is a good place to say that if Peter was wrong, God has no choice now but to honor it as Peter made it, for He would not take us through another 2,000 years of reinventing a new Church. The mercy and compassion that we know of God will not put us through that. Too late! But, of course, we believe that God would not leave us in such serious error for all this time. His mercy and compassion would not allow it.
Social Reasons
Now, we'll explore the social reasons, of which there are two: the influence of the Church in the world and its numbers.
The Church's Influence: Education-Technology
About the history of education in the world, one can quickly say that education came from the Catholic Church. It is a stereotype, of course. Some may have grounds to contest the assertion that the Church founded modern education. For example, the great ancient Greek philosophers were not Catholics. However, after the Church of Christ arrived on the world scene, wherever education was, the Church was also there, and vice versa. It can safely be said that the Church continued the legacy of the ancient non-Christian scholars who existed before it. It took up all the knowledge and kept it relevant to the continuously changing world through the centuries. The oldest centers of learning in Europe today were all established by the Catholic Church, some as early as the 1300s. From these came modern civilization. This torch that was carried by the Catholic Church is not identified today as such. The quest for knowledge has become secularized and even appears to be opposed to the Church at times, but it is an undeniable historical fact that this Church has been at the source of modern knowledge. Even in the distant past, those scholars who contested the Church had first been to Church schools, after which they "grew horns." Only a Church of Christ could mean so much to all humanity for all time.
We should not, however, ignore the great eastern civilizations and religions, which existed long before Christianity. Hinduism and Buddhism existed centuries before Christianity, with Hinduism being the much older of the two. What we say of the Catholic Church being the beginning...
