What Are You Looking For? Part 1: The Nicene Creed

I Believe in One...

I Believe in One…

            Now that we have taken a look at that last “I believe” statement, we’re going to look at each mark of the church individually.  The first mark is the she is One.  To be one is to be united.  To be united in thought, teaching and action.  Unfortunately, all anyone has to do is look around to see that the Body of Christ struggles to be one.  “’The sole Church of Christ [is that] which our Savior, after his Resurrection, entrusted to Peter’s pastoral care, commissioning him and the other apostles to extend and rule it…This Church, constituted and organized as a society in the present world, subsists in (subsistit in) the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Pete and by the bishops in communion with him.’” (CCC 816)  That’s what Jesus intended, and until the 1500’s, that was the way it was.  Not so today. 

Today in America, even in the Roman Catholic Church the wounds to unity are seen.  There is a lack of unity of thought and action among our own body.  Especially regarding social issues like right to life issues and contraception.  We hear the “what” of the teaching, and immediately reject it.  We don’t take time to discover the “why” of the teaching.  In my own life, I have found that if I disagree with a teaching of the church, it’s because I don’t understand the “why”.  Invariably I also find through investigation of whatever topic it may be that there are church documents dating back to the first century that deal with the very same issues that we face today.  There’s nothing new under the sun.  And it’s safe to say their teaching wasn’t any better received in ancient Rome than it is in 21st century America.  But our own divisiveness wounds unity, and therefore wounds the witness of the church in the modern world. 

500-ish years ago one of the greatest wounds to unity occurred in the form of the Protestant Reformation.  It’s a wound from which we still haven’t recovered.  Prior to the Protestant Reformation, everyone was Catholic.  Then people were forced to choose a side.  Most people were simple peasants, not well educated theologians who could reason out which side to be on.  Today, most of us are what our parents were, whether Baptist, Methodist, Assemblies of God, or whatever.  And they are what their parents were, and so on.  So much time has passed that while, in general, people are aware of the fact that there are differences in thought, teaching and action between Catholics and Protestants, most could not accurately describe what those differences are.  Or why they should matter.  After all, we all believe in One Lord, one faith, one baptism. 

As a former Protestant, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my Protestant brothers and sisters.  It was there that I learned how to pray and how to read and study the Bible.  It was there that I found salvation and was baptized.  I have learned much from reading the books of the great Protestant theologians of our day.  Just as I have learned much from going back in time to the writings of the great theologians of the early church.  I have found that a simple internet search for the writings of St. Polycarp or St. Ignatius of Antioch or any of the other early Church Fathers has unlocked a treasure trove of material to help me better understand the Christian Faith we all profess to believe.

Our unity, both with the Catholic Church and within the Body of Christ matters to Jesus.  It matters so much that when he was in the Garden on the night he was betrayed, as he looks down through the long centuries to our world today, he prays to the Father, “I pray not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me.  And I have given them the glory you gave me so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one that the world may know that you sent me and that you loved them even as you loved me.”  (John 17: 20-23 NABRE) When we are one, the world will believe.  Lord, may we come to be one.