Msgr. Ronald Knox, in his book, The Belief of Catholics, notes a very important point which separates Catholics from Protestants in our approach to the contents of the Christian faith. What is this point? That “a proper notion of the Church is a necessary stage before we argue from the authority of Christ to any other theological doctrine whatever. The infallibility of the Church is, for us, the true induction from which all our theological conclusions are derived.”
Christians naturally want to know what our Lord taught and seek to obey his commandments. But how do we know what they are? From reading the Bible, most Protestants will say, it’s all set out there. But we know that the text of Scripture is often far from clear and that although public revelation ceased with the death of the last apostle, still the application of this revelation to subsequent theological or moral questions can give rise to differing interpretations. For this reason Christ established a living Church, to teach, guide and sanctify us. It is from her that we learn what we are to believe and what we are to do. As the First Vatican Council of 1870 put it:
Further, all those things are to be believed with divine and Catholic faith which are contained in the Word of God, written or handed down, and which the Church, either by a solemn judgment or by her ordinary and universal teaching [magisterium], proposes for belief as having been divinely revealed.
The implications of this are crucial. A new convert, for example, may well be, and usually is, convinced of many of the truths of the Faith quite apart from the question of the authority of the Church. In fact, this is often what attracts someone to the Church in the first place. But at some point a potential convert must step back and realize that it is the infallibility of the Church upon which the whole structure of belief rests. We believe what the Church teaches and we believe all that the Church teaches and we believe because the Church teaches it. Otherwise we get the too familiar notion of the “cafeteria Catholic,” one who picks and chooses, who stands in judgment on the Church’s doctrines. We should note, of course, that the First Vatican Council speaks of what is taught “either by a solemn judgment or by her ordinary and universal teaching,” the word universal being key here. For the Church does have a sophisticated taxonomy of what is called the theological note to be accorded to each of her many utterances over the centuries; the upshot, however, is that what one may call her settled teaching is not up for grabs. It is not something Catholics may disagree about. To do otherwise, whether it be a failure to accept Catholic teaching on economic justice or sexual morality or any other doctrinal or moral point, is deficient and ultimately self-contradictory.
It is self-contradictory because such a convert would profess his faith while at the same time taking exception to the very basis of that Faith, namely, the teaching authority of the Church. To take an extreme and certainly unlikely hypothesis, even if someone accepted each and every item of Catholic belief for reasons of his own, but failed to acknowledge his obligation to accept the Church’s teaching authority as such, he would fall short in his approach to the Catholic faith.
I remember well on my own journey the clarifying moment when I read for the first time St. Irenaeus’s famous dictum, a dictum that is such a strong and clear witness to the faith held by the early Church:
For this church [i.e. the church of Rome] has a position of leadership and authority; and therefore every church, that is, the faithful everywhere, must needs agree with the church at Rome; for in her the apostolic tradition has ever been preserved by the faithful from all parts of the world. (Adversus Haereses, iii, 1)
Of course this is only one of numerous declarations by the Fathers and other early ecclesiastical writers regarding the central position of the papacy in Christ’s Church. But the second-century Irenaeus was particularly well placed to make it. He was a bishop and had worked in both the Greek and Latin-speaking portions of the Church, he was of the last generation who knew some who themselves had actually known the Apostle John, and in his statement Irenaeus puts the accent on the crucial point, the authority of the Church. This is what ultimately must be accepted by a Catholic, whether a new convert or a cradle Catholic first becoming aware of the theological basis of his religion.
It is surely good if we see the beauty and coherence of the individual doctrines of the Faith, how they accord with truths both supernatural and even natural. But we must recognize these truths as a theological structure that is supported by an acceptance of the Church’s teaching authority itself, the foundation upon which all her doctrines rest. As Msgr. Knox further wrote, “It is through the Church that the Catholic finds out what he is to believe…,” whether a new Catholic or one baptized decades ago as a tiny infant. This is what gives us as Catholics a security, a comfort, an assurance – qualities certainly needed in a world growing ever more tumultuous and confused.
