The Catholic Church
What connects you and I at Our Lady and St. Joseph’s with the Apostles and Mary in the Upper Room in Jerusalem (Acts 2:1 ff)? Surely, nothing does; after all, two thousand years and many thousands of miles separate us.
Well, this is true; but it is not the whole truth.
To begin with, the faith that you and I have in Jesus unites us with Peter, John, Mary and all the others who were present in the Room. This is because, as a result of His death and resurrection, Jesus now lives outside of time at the right hand of his Father in Heaven (Cf Matt 25:31ff).
Secondly, we are united with the Upper Room because, despite the great distance between our church and Jerusalem, we are joined together as members of the Body of Christ: the Catholic Church.
What does this mean? How is such a unity possible?
If the Catholic Church was a human institution then it would be a nonsense to talk of it uniting people who lived in different times and places. After all, that would imply a union between people who were dead as well as alive; between people who lived on different sides of the earth – and that is clearly impossible.
However, the founder of our Church was not a man; it was God. In the Old Testament, we see God make preparations for the foundation of the Church. During His earthly ministry, God in His Son, Jesus, actually founded the Church. Both the preparation for, and the foundation of, the Catholic Church took place in several steps. Let’s see how:
Preparation
When sin entered the world through the Fall, God did not abandon Mankind. Instead, he preserved in the hearts of Men a desire for communion with Him. From the beginning, therefore, ‘in every nation anyone who fears [God] and does what is right is acceptable to God’ (CCC 761)
The formal preparation for the Church began when God promised Abraham that he would be the father of a great people. This act of preparation was also a foundation because in His promise, God was not only prophesying the foundation of the Catholic Church but founding the Nation of Israel. (CCC 762)
Founding
Jesus began the founding the His Church when He began His public ministry, that is to say, when He began to preach the good news (L). How does this represent the first step in the foundation of the Catholic Church? To find out, we simply turn to Matthew 28:18-20 where – just before His ascension to Heaven – Jesus gives the Apostles the ‘great commission’:
‘Jesus came up and spoke to them. He said, “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, make disciples of all the nations; baptise them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to observe tall the commands I gave you. And look, I am with you always: yes, to the end of time.”’
Jesus’ next step was to give His Church the structure that He knew it would need in order to be able to preach the good news:
(i) The Appointment of the Twelve Disciples: Peter, Andrew, James the Great and John, Bartholomew, Jude, Judas Iscariot, James the Less, Thomas, Matthias, Matthew and Simon
(ii) The Appointment of Simon Peter to be the leader of the Twelve, with the power to forgive sins (Matt 16:16-19)
(iii) The granting to the Twelve of the right to forgive sins (Matt 18:18; John 20:22-23)
(iv) The re-affirmation of Peter’s duty to lead the Disciples (now, the Apostles) (John 21 15-18)
Jesus did not cease to guide His Church in its organisation once His earthly ministry had finished. After His ascension, the new Church found that it needed to create a new priestly order to help the Apostles in their ministry. St Luke describes what happened next in Acts 6:1-7:
'… the Hellenists made a complaint against the Hebrews: in the daily distribution their own widows were being overlooked. So the Twelve called a full meeting of the disciples and addressed them, ‘it would not be right for us to neglect the word of God so as to give out food; you, brothers, must select from among yourselves seven men of good reputation, filled with the Spirit and with wisdom, to whom we can hand over this duty. We ourselves will continue to devote ourselves to prayer and to the service of the world.’ The whole assembly approved of this proposal and elected Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, together with Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolaus of Antioch, a convert to Judaism. They presented these to the apostles, and after prayer they laid their hands on them.'
So, we have looked at how God made preparation for, and then founded, the Catholic Church. You may have noticed, however, that I have been talking about events that took place in time and in particular places. I have not yet looked at the Church in its mystical aspect; how it is the Body of Christ. I shall do that now.
In his letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul wrote that in Christ ‘we are all parts of one body’ (4:25). The way in which we become members of the Body of Christ is by our baptism. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that, ‘baptism incorporates us into the Church. From the baptismal fonts is born the one People of God of the new Covenant, which transcends all the natural or human limits of nations, cultures, races and sexes: ‘for by one Spirit we were all baptised into one body. (1 Pet 2:5)’
St Peter, then, shows us how you and I at Our Lady and St. Joseph’s are one with the Apostles and Our Lady in the Upper Room in Jerusalem. Jesus Christ unites us. As St. Paul says,
'You have stripped off your old behaviour with your old self, and you have put on a new self which will progress towards true knowledge the more it is renewed in the image of its Creator; and in that image there is no room for distinction between Greek and Jew, between the circumcised and uncircumcised, or between barbarian and Scythian, slave and free. There is only Christ: he is everything and he is in everything.'
(Colossians 3:9-11)
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