March 24, 2011 – Catechism 781-786

I don’t think it is my fault that this idea of one Church keeps coming up.  We just are in the section of the Catechism that touches on this and the fact that it is something I feel strongly about.  Paragraph 782 has some language in it that when I read it, felt very familiar to language you get on the “belief” pages from non-denominational websites.  “One becomes a member of this people not by a physical birth, but by being "born anew," a birth "of water and the Spirit," that is, by faith in Christ, and Baptism” in particular will possibly raise some eyebrows being written in a Catholic Catechism. 

Still, what takes me back to thinking about the One Church and the lack of unity in the modern Christian Church is Paragraph 785.  “"The holy People of God shares also in Christ's prophetic office," above all in the supernatural sense of faith that belongs to the whole People, lay and clergy, when it "unfailingly adheres to this faith . . . once for all delivered to the saints," and when it deepens its understanding and becomes Christ's witness in the midst of this world.  The People are suppose to be prophets, speak for God to the World, and witness to the world what Christ was, is, and will always be and bring the world back to God.  Being a lawyer, I know what happens when witnesses don’t have the same story.  They become untrustworthy and people, the jury, is not convinced.  This is just another analogy about why there must only be one church and cannot be in contradiction to itself.  If the world outside it the jury and we are called by God to convince them that we are right, the Christ is God, that He died for our sins, the God loves us and wants to be with us, are they going to be convinced by witnesses that are telling different stories.  No.  Even non-lawyers have seen enough TV shows and have enough common sense to know that if a jury is given different stories from different witnesses, they will not be convinced.  Now, imagine they hear 30,000 plus witnesses.  The world will not be converted until the Christians are united.  And it cannot be a unity that is only connected based on the fact that Christ in God and came to redeem us.  That is great and I think most denominations would adhere to that, but unity needs to go further in order to convince.  As on the TV shows, the attorneys will dig deeper in order to find out if the witness really saw the same thing as another.  If the unity is only skin deep, the witness will not be able to get those details correct and the case will fall apart.