Why the Catholic Church is the one true Church? Because the Catholic Church alone was founded by Jesus Christ, because she alone received the power and authority to teach all nations in the name of her divine Founder, and because she alone has the title deed to the exclusive jurisdiction over the divine deposit of truth. Because of these three basic facts, clearly recorded in the Bible, Catholics have no alternative but to believe that ours is the one true Church, to which almighty God wishes every person to belong. If we did not so believe, we would be contradicting the plain teachings of Christ, of the Apostles and of the Scriptures, and we would be doing violence to our reason and flaunting the most obvious facts of history. We do not say this because we are proud, arrogant, headstrong, narrow-minded, inconsiderate or lacking kindness, sympathy, friendliness, good will and love for our neighbors outside of the fold. We say it because we are honest and truthful and do not want to engage in the mockery of pretending the contradictory doctrines can be equally true or that creeds established by men are of equal value to the creed formulated by Christ. While we have nothing but good will and love for men of every faith, color and race, we do not engage in the intellectual dishonesty of parroting statements of thoughtless people which violate the most elementary principles of logic. Typical of such current sayings are these: “It doesn’t matter what a man believes.” “ All creeds are equally true.” “Any religion is alright if you are sincere.” All faiths are so many different roads, leading with equal certainty to heaven.” While an indulgence in these sentiments may spare a person the inconvenience and unpleasantness of appearing to disagree with someone of a different faith, they can’t stand scrutiny. They are a hollow mockery and they do violence to the human mind. They frequently serve as a smokescreen, hiding either one’s laziness to think through the problem of religious truth or his unwillingness to disagree with the opinion expressed by a neighbor or friend. Isn’t better, however, to be honest and sincere than to engage in hypocrisy and sham? In parting company with such utterances, we remain in the company of the gentle Saviour, Jesus Christ, who died because He proclaimed the truth. Let us look at the solemn words whereby our divine Savior founded His Church and then clothed it with the power and authority to teach all mankind in His name. The credentials are confined to no one Gospel, but are to be found in all four. The words are simple. Their meaning is unmistakable. It is Christ Himself who is speaking to the Apostles: “ AS the Father hath sent me, I also send you” (Jn 20:21). “All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. Going, therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world” (Mt 28:18-10). These words constitute the evidence of the Church’s divinely appointed mission to teach the truths of Christ to all nations. They constitute the charter which the Church is to present to every generation as the imperishable credentials of her delegation as the duly accredited agency to teach in the name and with the authority of Jesus Christ. That the people hearing this divinely authorized teaching is not to regard themselves free to accept or reject it, is made likewise clear by our divine Master: “Go ye into the whole world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized, will be saved: but he that believeth not, shall be condemned” (Mk 16:15-16). With equal charity, St Luke presents this same insistence of Christ on the duty of the faithful to accept the gospel because of the authority which lies behind it” “ He that hears you, hears me, and he that despises you, despises me; and despises him that sent me” (Lk 10:16). From these clear words of Christ it is evident that our divine Saviour did not follow the procedure imagined many people today – the lackadaisical procedure of merely uttering certain religious and moral truths without establishing any institution to interpret and to transmit them to future generations. The idea that Jesus simply enunciated certain truths, and failed to provide any responsible agency for the transmission of these teachings to all mankind, is not only uncomplimentary to the wisdom of Jesus and to His solicitude for the salvation of all mankind, but it also finds no warrant in Holy Scripture. To have placed upon each individual who was to be born into the world the task of ferreting out for himself from the mists of the historic past the precise teachings of Jesus, and the equally difficult task of interpreting then with unerring accuracy, would have been a procedure which would have foredoomed His enterprise to certain and inevitable failure. The overwhelming majority of mankind has neither the time nor the ability to accomplish so herculean a task. It is to be remembered that not only was the printing press not then in existence, but that even the art of writing was the accomplishment of few. Furthermore, there is no evidence that Christ ever wrote a line, or that He commanded any of His disciples to write. On the contrary, His command to the Apostles was to preach, to teach, in season and out of season. This method renders it possible for the teacher to adapt the presentation of the Master’s teachings to the varied capacities of his bearers to understand. It is the only effective method for the transmission of Christ’s legacy of truth to mankind’ it is the method, as the Scriptures disclose with unmistakable clearness, that Christ actually adopted. This impression so prevalent in non-Catholic circles, that Christ simply uttered certain truths nineteen centuries ago, and then allows every individual to sink or swim in accordance with his ability to ferret out and to interpret for himself the precise meaning of His teachings, finds no support in the pages of the Holy Writ. Hence it is most important that men and women nowadays be brought to realize these fundamental facts of history: 1. Jesus Christ actually founded a Church. 2. He conferred upon that Church the jurisdiction and the power to teach all mankind. 3. The Church which Christ founded and clothed with such power and authority is the Catholic Church. From the above historical facts there follows with inexorable logic the simple conclusion: The Catholic Church is the one true Church established by the Jesus Christ, some have sought to escape from this conclusion by alleging that the Catholic Church in the course of ages ceased to teach the pure truths of Christ, introduced error, and therefore is not today to be regarded as the true Church. But this can be true only if our Savior broke the promise He made to His Church when He said: “ And behold, I am with you all days, even unto the consummation of the world,” and “Upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Mt 16:18). If Christ broke those solemn promises, then we can confidently affirm that there is not today anywhere on the face of the earth the true Church of God. That Christ did not break His pledge is evident from the fact that the Catholic Church is the only institution in Christendom which has come down through the nineteen hundred years teaching the world today the same deposit of divine truth which she taught to the Greeks and Romans, the Medes and the Persians, in the first century. The Church has suffered from kings and emperors. From the days of Nero to those of communist terrorism and persecution in our own; in every land her children have suffered martyrdom for the faith. They have braved the executioner’s sword. They have faced the wild lions in the Roman arena. They have withstood the burning faggots at the martyr’s stake. Neither have they quailed before the firing squads of our own day. The Church has witnessed the despoliation of her property by Henry VIII and the captivity of her supreme pontiff by Napoleon Bonaparte; but she has not surrendered, either for king or peasant, one single jot or tittle of those divinely revealed truths which Jesus Christ commanded her to proclaim to all the nations of the world until the crack of doom. She has withstood the acids of modern unbelief which have eaten so deeply into the traditional fabrics of other faiths; she has refused to surrender to the gilded paganism of the day, and she has never lowered her ethical standards to suit the demands of a pleasure-loving world. She has refused to make compromise with Caesar by surrendering any of her sovereignty in the spiritual domain to the heightened nationalism and imperialism of the day: she preaches “Jesus Christ… yesterday and today, yes and forever” ( Heb 13:8). This perpetuity of the Church, this survival through all the ages, without the surrender of her truths and without ever ceasing to carry her divine deposit of doctrine to all the nations of the world, is the striking evidence that Christ has kept His promise to be with her all days. The Catholic Church today is as truly the Church of Christ as when she first came from the hands of her Divine Founder nineteen centuries ago in Judea. The chart, The Voice of History shows at a glance that the Catholic Church is the only Church in the world today which traces her origin back to Christ. It shows that she alone was founded by Christ, while all other churches were established by men. It brings into such clear relief that even he who runs may see that the Catholic Church with Christ for her founder and protector through all centuries, is the one true Church of Christ on earth. The vertical lines indicate the centuries of the Christian era. The horizontal lines represent some of the larger and more important of the many thousands of religious denominations that have risen during the past nineteen centuries. Those lines indicate the duration of the various sects by beginning at the respective dates of origin and ceasing when they disappeared. The width of the line shows the approximate size of the denomination. Protestantism, it is to be noted, first appears upon the earth in the sixteenth century, in contrast to the Catholic Church, which had been in existence at that time for fifteen hundred years, having been founded by Jesus Christ in Jerusalem in the year 33 AD. This double-barrelled historical fact is shown in the charts, “Christ or Luther,” and the “A Gap of Fifteen Centuries,” both of which will repay careful scrutiny. While the term “Protestantism” had its origin at the Diet of Spires in Germany in 1529, the first manifestation of the movement occurred when Martin Luther nailed his theses to the doors of the church at Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. All the other Protestant denominations were started by various human founders since this that time. Contrast the divine origin of the Catholic Church with the human origins of all Protestant Churches. The Church presents as her title deed to the exclusive jurisdiction over the divine deposit of truth the names of her pontiffs who have ruled the Church of Christ from the days of Peter the Fisherman to her present sovereign pontiff, Benedict VXI. To Peter and his successors Christ gave the keys of His kingdom on earth. The present pontiff has not usurped his jurisdiction and authority: he received both through an unbroken line of succession. What other Church can show the world such a title deed? None other, for none of the Protestant sects goes back beyond the sixteenth century. The chart, table and title deed bring out more clearly and vividly than a volume of thousand pages following historical facts: 1. The Catholic Church alone has Jesus Christ for her founder. 2. She had been carrying on her divinely appointed work of teaching the religion of Christ to mankind for fifteen centuries before Protestantism saw the light of day. 3. All forms of Protestantism are man-made. 4. They are without any divine sanction or approval. 5. Loyalty to Christ demands that one abandon any of these man-made creeds and embrace the religion founded by Jesus Christ for all mankind. Thus it is evident that Christ is keeping the promise which He made to the Church in the first century: “And behold I am with you all days even to the consummation of the world.” The beloved disciple of Christ, St. John, put his discerning finger upon the salient reason why the Catholic church has withstood the fall of empires and the invasion of the barbarians which caused even the mighty empire of Rome to collapse; why she has withstood the religious upheaval of the sixteenth century which shook Christendom to its very foundation; and why she is able to withstand today the acids of modern unbelief and the enervating influence of a gilded paganism , when back in the first century he exclaimed with the prophetic foresight: “For whatever is born of God, overcometh the world: this the victory which overcometh the world, our faith.” Because the Catholic Church was founded directly and immediately by Jesus Christ, and because He has remained with her through the ages, protecting her from error, the Church remains today as she has been throughout the past nineteen hundred years, the one true Church of Jesus Christ on earth.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 23:06:59 +0000
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