Why the Church?

The only political fact that everybody can agree on in this era is that the political world is turbulent and toxic. It has become close to impossible to make a coherent and meaningful political statement in the public square, largely because the nature of each individual’s relationship to their nation has become unclear. To even list the fundamental privileges and responsibilities of a citizen cannot be done today without controversy. I’m not going to tackle that issue in this article, but I do want to discuss a parallel issue within Catholicism: what is your relationship to the Roman Catholic Church? If we think of the Church as a society and each Catholic person as a citizen, then what does that citizenship entail? What role should the Church be playing in your life, and ought you pledge any sort of loyalty to the Church, as you are asked to do for your country?

The degree to which God allows us to participate in His grace is beautiful. When we say that “God is relational,” we refer both to His Triune nature and to the relationship that He seeks with His Creation. That second part means, in practice, that God often puts the ball in our court when it comes to the building up of His Kingdom on Earth. Most Catholics have a pretty solid grasp on this idea – God never violates the free will that He gave us, but when we do take a step towards Him He runs a thousand strides towards us. The stickier part of our cooperation in God’s grace is the communal aspect.

An important anchoring point to hold onto when thinking about the Faith is that ours is a salvation religion. This means that God’s presence in our lives is a healing presence and that every death can be followed by a resurrection. We experience this regularly in our personal lives, but the most dramatic fall-and-rise is that of our entire species. There’s no need at this time to review the fall of man story from the third chapter of Genesis, but what happens right after the fall of man points to why our participation in the salvific grace of God is communal, not just individual.

As humanity continues to fall out of relationship with God from the Cain-kills-his-brother-Abel story forward, humanity becomes increasingly scattered. After he kills Abel, Cain is banished from the land and becomes “a restless wanderer upon the Earth.” This scattering continues throughout the next several chapters and culminates in the eleventh chapter of Genesis with the Tower of Babel story. Here, humanity’s attempt to literally and spiritually climb to the level of God results in the crippling of the people’s ability to communicate and the scattering of the entire species across the Earth. The first eleven chapters of Genesis, sometimes called the “primordial history,” explains to us that when we separate from God we separate from each other.

Throughout the rest of the Old Testament, individual people – the Lord’s Prophets – are each called to convey approximately the same message to communities: fix your relationships with God (try real hard not to practice idolatry) and with each other (obey the Law). The repent-and-return-to-the-Lord part and the un-scatter-humanity part go hand in hand. Eventually, the Second Person of the Trinity enters into the human condition and becomes the one person around whom humanity shall un-scatter. The initial group of people who gravitate around Christ are Mary, the twelve apostles, and the other women who follow and fund the Lord’s earthly ministry. These people and those who subsequently gather around them become God’s One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

When we are initiated into the Church, we are un-scattered from each other and from God just as the first Christians were when Christ called them from their various homes and boats. Like those scenes in action-adventure movies when each member of the cast of heroes stands up, steps forward, and puts their hand in the middle of the circle saying “I’m in,” as they agree to embark on the dangerous quest, the Church gathers humanity together as she gains new participants in her mission. The mission is of course the building up of the Kingdom of God. When you recite the Nicene Creed at Mass, you’re renewing your “I’m in.”

As the “source and summit” of the Catholic Faith, the Eucharist is a beautiful demonstration of how the life of the Church brings us simultaneously closer to God and each other. The act of literally consuming the full body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ obviously pulls us closer to God, but also consider that the celebration of the Mass is the event that literally gathers the parish community together in a room. Furthermore, when we celebrate the Eucharist, we are united in a special way with the communion of saints, even joining the voices of heaven in songs of praise! When Christ promised that “when two or three are gathered in My name, I am there among them,” He underscored this point that to commune with humanity is to commune with God, and to commune with God is to commune with humanity.

As the Cross has a vertical beam and a horizontal beam, your spirituality is both vertical (of your relationship with God) and horizontal (of your relationship with the rest of humanity). Scripture teaches us not to think of these as two separate parts of our faith, but as two fundamentally intertwined realities. Therefore, the Church cannot be merely the building in which you practice your religion, or merely the community that happens to include the people who think most similarly to you. Your “citizenship” in the Church is not an addition to your faith, but rather the way in which you have a faith at all. The word “religion” comes from the root “re” meaning “again” and the root “ligio” meaning “connection” (like “ligament”). That to which we reconnect is simultaneously God and humanity, and your participation in the life of the Church is how you pursue these necessarily linked reconnections. The Roman Catholic Church is how we un-scatter.