Catholic in Name Only

magisterium, Vatican

And you,” he said to them, “who do you say that I am?” “You are the Messiah,” Simon Peter answered, “the Son of the living God!” Jesus replied, “Blest are you, Simon son of Jonah! No mere man has revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father. I for my part declare to you, you are Rock, and on this rock I will build my church, and the jaws of death shall not prevail against it. I will entrust to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you shall declare bound on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you declare loosed on earth shall be loosed in heaven (Matthew 16:15-20).

In a recent article titled “The POTUS, Remote Evil, and the Inevitable Collapse of Complicit Catholicism” I discussed the difficulty souls have in admitting to their complicity in evil, complicity wrought by voting for politicians who openly promote legislation that is anti-life and anti-family; votes procured on the promise of financial gains to the said voters.

In response to that article I received a communication from someone very dear to me, the body of which read as follows:

I very much enjoyed your article. The way you ripped the Catholic Church I’m guessing you are Catholic in name only because you stand for everything right when the Catholic Church promotes the opposite.

The message closed with expressions of affection and with encouragement to keep writing. I am certain that all was meant in love and affirmation, and so it is that I respond to these thoughts only with the kindest sentiments.

That is to say that this dear person did not understand that, from my perspective, to say that one is Catholic “in name only” is a terrible judgment against someone who is truly attempting to live a Catholic life. To explain why this is the case, one must begin at the beginning—by defining the terms.

Catholic is not a denomination. It seems to me that the whole concept of non-denominational religious sects, such as have been popping up everywhere, is often a reaction to the corruption of mainline Protestantism, which perhaps, in their dwindling current state, are more correctly referred to as legacy sects. Non-denominationalism seems to be a distancing from legacy sects that have gone down darker and darker alleys.

That’s the way the world of denominations—the world of religious sects—works. Denomination, in the Latin de nominem, that is, about the name, is just that. It is a means of differentiation by which a particular sect can be categorized. But catholic is not a name; it is but an adjective. And the Church is not a sect—a section—it is the whole: catholic.

The word catholic means universal, the same in every age and in every land; unchanging; the fulness of truth. It is an attribute of God and only an attribute of any human institution in as much as said enjoys the charism of the guidance of the Holy Spirit, through apostolic succession, to protect the deposit of faith, the defense of which is the task of every believer. The Catholic Church does not produce catholicity; it embraces it.

The work of advancing the deposit of faith has been under a full-court press from dark forces since the very day Christ handed over the keys to the kingdom. It is the faith that is catholic, the same in every age and place. It is the Catholic Church that attempts, with varying degrees of wholeness, to support that faith in any particular era and place and to do so always while under attack—from enemies without and enemies within, the latter being the more insidious.

Perhaps the point can best be made with an analogy. I love the American Constitution. Unlike the deposit of faith, it is a human work, and yet has elements of divine wisdom embedded within it. The American political parties are plagued by corruption. Washington D.C. is a bed of corruption. Federal bureaucracy is, in many instances, nothing short of horrifically corrupt.

If I vehemently call out this corruption, am I an American “in name only”? If I call out my own country’s flaws and point to the roots we have forsaken, am I wasting my time? Is the country’s name itself somehow bound to the current state of corruption? Should I renounce my citizenship in protest, or should I cling to my roots and work with all my force to bring my country back to those principles upon which it rose to greatness?

For many, the answers to the above questions would be, “The U.S. was never great! It has been evil from the beginning, as has been the Church!” We live in an age characterized not by loyalty, but by divorce, and by that I mean so much more than just spousal divorce, horrific as that is. We are a generation of victims—of whiney, chronocentric, adolescent, finger-pointing quitters. Ours is the tear-it-all-down generation. We are the educated, the self-righteous enlightened.

In an authority-be-damned age, we need to understand what Christ meant by “binding” and “losing”. To be sure, what he did not intend to create was some sort of political football—some sort of religious/philosophical yoyo. There is a difference, of course, between Church disciplines and Church doctrines. Disciplines, such as fast days and holy days, are somewhat arbitrary and can be changed. Of doctrines, on the other hand, it can be simply said: Once bound always bound. Truth is not arbitrary and is unchangeable. The doctrine of infallibility affords no right of retraction; doctrine can’t be loosed once bound. This point is absolutely critical to the understanding of what differentiates the Church.

If you are a disciple of the philosopher Hegel, you will laugh at the concept of unchangeable truth, for Hegelian truth is that thing synthesized anew by every generation or half-generation or half-wit. For you, there is no objective reality because all is relative. Hegel, who, despite his anchorless philosophy, still claimed belief in a higher power, was perhaps the most non-Catholic man that ever lived. Denying objective reality is an exercise in insanity.

Most, perhaps all, non-Catholic sects are firmly built upon the notion of a personal right to scriptural interpretation. Nothing is bound; nothing loosed. Catholic biblical scholar Jeff Cavins left the Church and for many years served as a Pentecostal minister. Concerning his return to the Church, he said simply, “I got tired of being my own pope.”

So it is that the doctrinal foundation, of each individual non-Catholic community, is the collective scriptural interpretation of that community; therefore, the chosen community name not only designates logistically a group of people who worship together but unavoidably includes their collective interpretive will as well. For any Catholic community to operate in that manner—and yes, some do—is, simply put, non-Catholic and uncatholic.

Catholic parishes also differentiate by names, but that differentiation is only for logistical purposes and is most often simply the name of a saint chosen to be an intercessor for the parish. A Catholic parish’s name is not a name that in any way denotes anything innovative about the substance of that community’s faith.

How can faith communities be non-denominational when they have a denominator? Names like Fountain of Life Church or New Life Family Worship Center become the default denomination. Admirably, such names are sometimes an effort to distance the community from the corruption of long-standing Protestant communities named by or after their founders—something which, in and of itself, is anti-scriptural (1 Corinthians 3:4). The Simpsons television series hilariously lampooned the entire notion of denominations with their “First Church of Springfield” which was a part of “The Western Branch of American Reform Presbylutheranism”.

There is only one truly non-denominational faith. The adjective catholic was historically used quite liberally to describe things that were universally true in every age and time. Growing up, many of my Protestant friends recited exactly the same creed as we did, and they would say, “We say in our creed that we are catholic, but it’s catholic with a small c”. Their small c was, of course, no different than the small c in the word catholic in our creed, and their plethora of varying beliefs were not catholic regardless of the size of the c.

While I don’t want to put words into the mouth of my interlocutor above, the verbiage seems to suggest that it is surprising that I remain in the Church when the corruption has gotten so bad, the implication seeming to be that the faith is irreplaceably damaged along with the name and that the relative instances of apostasy are permanent.

But there is no name to damage, only a perceived name. There is only the faith: the unchanging, immutable faith; ours to protect and ours to lose, whether under attack by a corrupt papacy, a corrupt episcopacy, and priesthood, a corrupt laity, a corrupt government, a plethora of reductionist denominations, or my own personal corruption.

The faith was first named “The Way”, after the man who called himself “The Way, the Truth, and the Life.” After that, it was simply “The Church”, followers of The Way as guided from the beginning by the Apostolic successors. The adjective catholic came to be applied by way of differentiating it from a plethora of pretenders, heterodox splinters, and sects that began immediately following Christ’s death—long before the explosive Protestant dissent of the late middle ages.

The marks of the Church are still the same: one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. Our unity lies in our profession of the same faith, and we are holy to the degree that we avail ourselves of the graces of that faith. The faith is catholic because truth, like the source of all truth, is unchanging, and apostolic because it was entrusted to the apostles by Christ, and their succession was established already in Scripture.

Many people that I love and admire have left the Church in pursuit of what they believe to be greener pastures. But I have no particular interest in any pasture; only in the Shepherd. He has done a marvelous job of delivering an infallibly wonderful faith to my heart. His Holy Spirit has taught me to understand that infallibility is not something owned by an individual or group of individuals in any given era; it is the infallibility of the unchangeable.

Yes, there is an insidious leakage of dissidence from the current episcopacy, but you don’t need to look too far through history to know that pride has always supplied us with progressives: spiritual innovators. And we have a loose-lipped pontiff who seems to not have a firm grasp on the havoc wrought by his meandering unclarity, and like some pontiffs before him, history may not be as kind as are his contemporaries.

Speaking of which, it is undeniable that a majority of contemporary “Catholics” do not hold to the tenants of the faith, particularly as they pertain to moral theology. But they are Catholic in name only, and apostates don’t define the faith; the faith defines apostacy. We have gone through other egregious eras. Either the faith will rebound or this is the end. Either way, I’m ready; bring it on.

As long as even one soul holds the faith, the Church remains and will do so to the end of time. In the words of G. K. Chesterton, “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” Chesterton went from youthful agnosticism to membership in the Church of England, and finally to the Roman Catholic faith, where the great savant, literary genius, and inveterate seeker found the answers to his quest.

I am small and insignificant. I cling to things that are larger than life. Ours is the Faith of Peter and Paul, Augustine and Aquinas, Francis of Assisi and Francis Xavier, G. K. Chesterton and Fulton J. Sheen, Teresa of Avila and Teresa of Calcutta, Pius X, and John Paul II. We play the long game. Ours is not a safety in numbers game; trends and polls do not determine the truth.

If I were to be the last standing catholic Catholic, stand I would. The faith is mine to lose, and I shall die clinging to it with all my might.

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13 thoughts on “Catholic in Name Only”

  1. Pingback: Eucharistic Worship Outside Mass, Group Hopes for a Catholic Parish with Anglican Traditions, and More Great Links! - JP2 Catholic Radio

  2. Pingback: THVRSDAY EDITION – Big Pulpit

  3. If a person’s spirituality is truly Christ-centered, why does a label matter? There are Christ-centered people in many denominations, and in many factions of the Catholic Church. If you are a Catholic who is accused by someone of being Protestant, Sola Scriptura, not Catholic enough, or Catholic in name only, is that important?
    I get this often: but I know who my Savior is.

  4. I liked your article very much. So much that is true there. I read many of the articles on this site and comment from time to time. I am not a cafeteria Catholic. I accept ALL the teachings of the Church albeit some are difficult to follow and to accept. Jesus told us that it would be difficult and a narrow path. As the late great British actor Richard Burton told an interviewer before he died that to live the Catholic Faith was very difficult, but to die a Catholic – what a gift!

  5. Centurion_Cornelius

    HA!

    Struck a few chords here, I see. Wow! Politics, nuke war, Islam…

    “…in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti…”

    Pretty straight-forward. I must have been reading it all wrong.

    Keep up the great work, Jerome German!

    1. Is today’s Catholic Church the same as the founding church, the Jerusalem Church? Doubt it!

  6. Conservatives have an unfortunate habit of calling their opponents traitors. In politics it’s “you’re not a real American!” Here, it’s “you’re not a real Catholic”! (I might add, in the spirit of this site’s apparent true inclinations, the Trumpist accusation of “RINO (Republican in Name Only)”! We saw this in its treatment of Mitt Romney when he voted for Trump’s impeachment.)

    Many who post here are in fact good examples of “cafeteria Catholicism”. They do not really follow Catholic teaching on immigrants, the poor, a working wage, nuclear war, global warming, or anything in the Faith that is inclusive as opposed to exclusionary. They give lip service to some of these teachings but in practice reduce them to empty abstractions as opposed to guides to action.

  7. How do you reconcile your position with the actions of the current pope, who is reaching out to include all faiths (including those who do not believe in God or Jesus) under the guise of saving the earth?
    https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2021/10/04/francis-faith-leaders-climate-change-cop26-241554
    Even CCC 841 claims that Muslims share in our salvation, despite the fact that they do not accept Jesus as the Son of God.
    How do you interpret the warnings in Revelation 17 and 18?
    How do you feel about the wall sculpture in the Pope’s Audience Hall, which depicts Jesus rising out of a crater from an atomic explosion (according to the sculptor)?
    Is this the faith found in Bible scriptures?

    1. I’m glad medieval Catholics didn’t have nuclear bombs. They would have incinerated the planet, thinking they were (literally) blasting their enemies, both inside and outside the Church, to Hell, while blasting themselves into Heaven.

  8. an ordinary papist

    When the apostle said he was not one of us. Jesus replied with the caveat “Do not stop him, for whoever is not against you is for you.” Luke 9:50 The CC was destined to propagate by
    root division, not spiral up to the heavens like a bean stock. The blossoms on that tree of life
    were designed to scatter seeds, not unlike the sower, in all directions. Hopefully, you won’t
    be the last authentic Catholic [ catholic ] – and your own worse pope.

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