The Church is catholic and apostolic

In the Creed we profess not only that the church is one and holy but also that it is “catholic” and “apostolic.” The word “catholic” may have had a different meaning for the faithful of the fourth century than for today. The problem here is that the church that is in union with the Bishop of Rome usually calls itself “catholic” as a proper name for those who belong to it. Catholics are “non-Orthodox,” and “non- Protestants,” just as we might call those outside the Catholic communion “non-Catholics.”

In the fourth century, however, there was a strong consciousness that there was only one church, one body of Christ, to which all faithful Christians belonged. The division of Catholic and Orthodox had not yet occurred, nor indeed the division from those churches of the East that refused to accept the Council of Ephesus (431), nor those who refused the Council of Chalcedon (451), the “Oriental Orthodox.”

Likewise, the divisions caused by the mediaeval reformation in the West were still over a thousand years in the future. For the Council of Nicea, the church was one, and, consequently, universal, and thus “catholic,” the Greek world meaning, literally, “throughout the whole (world).” That the church is “Catholic” was a consequence of its oneness.

Universality of the church

This idea still exists today, but it has been battered by the divisions that have since taken place. Before the Vatican II Council, the Roman Catholic Church had a very strong sense of its unity in the face of the divisions that existed. This was so to the degree that some said that in order to be saved one had to belong visibly to the Catholic communion.

In the United States, in the 1940s, Father Leonard Feeney, a member of St. Benedict’s Center in Boston College, took a rigid stand that to be saved one must belong to the visible Catholic Church. This opinion was condemned in a response of the Holy Office on Aug. 8, 1949.

In the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church did not compromise its faith that there is one universal church, professing that the one church of Christ “subsists in the Catholic Church” (“Constitution on the Church,” 8, a clarification of this statement was issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith on June 29, 2007).

However, the church gathered in council did look at the roles of the churches not in communion with herself, and even non-Christian religions, and found in them varying degrees of the elements of salvation. This is especially true of the Orthodox churches, with whom the only problem seems to be the break in ecclesiastical union itself.

As Catholics and as members of the universal church, our faith is that God wishes the salvation of all and that through his grace, he is bringing all people to salvation through various means and levels of knowledge and awareness. The church’s mission, which she has received from our Savior (Mt 28:19-20) is to proclaim the good news of Christ’s teaching, from which all salvation flows, throughout the whole world.

Apostolicity of the church

Closely connected with this is the apostolicity of the church. How do we recognize the church of Christ? It is the one which proclaims the Gospel of Christ, received through his apostles. One way in which apostolicity has been understood is through the succession of bishops. This was explained in the Second Vatican Council in the Constitution on the Church, § 20.

There the church says, “Amongst those various offices which have been exercised in the church from the earliest times the chief place, according to the witness of tradition, is held by the function of those who, through their appointment to the