On the Universality of the Church

Chesterton writes a number of beautiful pieces which can be said to demonstrate what is meant by the "universality" of the Church. Of all errors that non-Catholics make in thinking about the Church, probably the worst is that they imagine it to be merely sectarian. Every time I am pressed to think about the sects and rifts in Protestantism, I am reminded of a conversation I had years ago with a Korean exchange student. Though she was at least nominally Christian herself, she had a very simple view of Christianity, having come from a culture with a short Christian history; and she was bewildered by the Christian divides, so clothed with European ideas. To her, they were foreign oddities, and she commented on them with the same indifferent curiosity as I might comment on contemporary Korean politics. She could not understand why there was a Baptist student group, and a Reformed student group, and Methodist and so on, each with its different activities, and each eager to remain exclusive from the rest; yet all these groups claimed to be "Christian." She had asked members of these groups, and all she could understand is that it had something to do with history and some slightly different beliefs; she knew the different beliefs, mind you, like infant baptism and the rest, but she had no positive idea why any of it was important. But you could tell she accepted this puzzling fact in much the same way she accepted the fraternity system: it was simply some aspect of a foreign culture to which she was an outsider.

I can easily see someone else making this conversation an argument for a "Bible-based" Christianity -- one that eschews these sectarian divides in favor of a lowest-common-denominator evangelical belief. But it wasn't her bewilderment about the divides in Protestant Christianity that struck me -- I must confess I have the same bewilderment -- but what she went on to say about the Catholic Church. Her simple intuition grasped that it was not just another one of these divided groups; whatever it was, it was something very different. From talking to members of the Protestant student groups, she understood that each believed the others to be Christians, but for small reasons, they just weren't the "right" sort of Christian. But all she could grasp from asking them about Catholicism is that they didn't like it. She wasn't sure if Catholics were Christians, and had no idea what we believed, or why these other Christian groups disliked us so much. So she was curious to know what we did believe. So I attempted to cross that language-barrier, and to communicate in simple English the ideas that defined the Catholic Church; I am afraid all I really communicated was an affirmation that she was correct, and that there was more than one doctrine that defined and set apart the Church.

I'm relating this little story as an example of what the "catholicity" of the Church means -- that it is something that transcends language, culture, and time. I have recently read a curious number of independent personal accounts of Protestants with historical interest becoming Catholic after seriously pondering the question, if St. Augustine or some other Father suddenly came back and walked the earth, where would he go to church and what would he recognize as the Church? Try as the Reformed might to claim Augustine, I don't think any one of them in good conscience could say Augustine would attend their church. And there is something almost comical trying to imagine St. Augustine at a "contemporary" church service: trying to sing a hymn to electric instrumentation while reading the words from a projector screen. No, he would be emphatically Catholic; and whatever he found in the modern Catholic Church that was strange to him, there is no doubt that he would know it at once to be his spiritual home.

And these two images, that of my Korean friend and that of St. Augustine, converge precisely to illuminate the universality of the Church. In short, I can only say it like this: Protestantism is part of a culture, and the Catholic Church is outside culture. This is emphatically not a sectarian boast; you might very well believe it to be a bad thing that my religion does not mingle with culture. But it is a fact that it does not; and it is a fact that every Protestant sect does. It is an undeniable fact that the Protestant Reformation could not have occurred outside of Europe, and certainly not before modernity. The most obvious example of this is that all of it rests on personal reading of Scripture, something that takes for granted both the fact of universal (or nearly universal) literacy, and the lack of expense in printing and binding books, both of which are the result of the printing press and both of which are positively confined to the modern world. If you but remove those accidents of modern society, you remove the backbone of Protestantism. It may be true that something remains, in the sense that there is more to Protestant Christianity than reading the Bible, but it certainly would be spineless. And just as Protestantism cannot adapt itself to a time or place without widespread books and literacy, so any single Protestant sect cannot adapt itself to a culture or language that does not share its singular philosophy. It has been argued to me that our modern notion of free will and fate does not, in all its detail, precede Augustine; whether that is true or not, it is certain that many societies have had and still have no notion of it whatsoever. But without such language and such ideas, Calvin's philosophy could never even begin to be anything but a foreign obstacle to such a culture. Every piece of Catholicism can survive without Augustine, and therefore without Augustine's philosophy, but Calvinism cannot and did not exist at all without Calvin; there was the Catholic Faith before Augustine, but there was no Calvinism before Calvin.

So I get to my point: there is no doctrine, nor person, nor philosophy, nor culture, nor language, nor anything else alone that defines the Catholic Church. She is what She is, no matter the philosophical or social landscape; and She will still be Herself, when all the world is different. And that is what is meant by the universality of the Church; it might better be called immortality.

Anyway, here is Chesterton in one of his many beautiful passages about the universality of the Church.

The Church is not merely armed against the heresies of the past or even of the present, but equally against those of the future, that may be the exact opposite of those of the present. Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists. Thus, when the world went Puritan in the seventeenth century, the Church was charged with pushing charity to the point of sophistry, with making everything easy with the laxity of the confessional. Now that the world is not going Puritan but Pagan, it is the Church that is everywhere protesting against a Pagan laxity in dress or manners. It is doing what the Puritans wanted done when it is really wanted. In all probability, all that is best in Protestantism will only survive in Catholicism; and in that sense all Catholics will still be Puritans when all Puritans are Pagans.

Thus, for instance, Catholicism, in a sense little understood, stands outside a quarrel like that of Darwinism at Dayton. It stands outside it because it stands all around it, as a house stands all around two incongruous pieces of furniture. It is no sectarian boast to say it is before and after and beyond all these things in all directions. It is impartial in a fight between the Fundamentalist and the theory of the Origin of Species, because it goes back to an origin before that Origin; because it is more fundamental than Fundamentalism. It knows where the Bible came from. It also knows where most of the theories of Evolution go to. It knows there were many other Gospels besides the Four Gospels, and that the others were only eliminated by the authority of the Catholic Church. It knows there are many other evolutionary theories besides the Darwinian theory; and that the latter is quite likely to be eliminated by later science. It does not, in the conventional phrase, accept the conclusions of science, for the simple reason that science has not concluded. To conclude is to shut up; and the man of science is not at all likely to shut up. It does not, in the conventional phrase, believe what the Bible says, for the simple reason that the Bible does not say anything. You cannot put a book in the witness-box and ask it what it really means. The Fundamentalist controversy itself destroys Fundamentalism. The Bible by itself cannot be a basis of agreement when it is a cause of disagreement; it cannot be the common ground of Christians when some take it allegorically and some literally. The Catholic refers it to something that can say something, to the living, consistent, and continuous mind of which I have spoken; the highest mind of man guided by God.

Every moment increases for us the moral necessity for such an immortal mind. We must have something that will hold the four corners of the world still, while we make our social experiments or build our Utopias. For instance, we must have a final agreement, if only on the truism of human brotherhood, that will resist some reaction of human brutality. Nothing is more likely just now than that the corruption of representative government will lead to the rich breaking loose altogether, and trampling on all the traditions of equality with mere pagan pride. We must have the truisms everywhere recognized as true. We must prevent mere reaction and the dreary repetition of the old mistakes. We must make the intellectual world safe for democracy. But in the conditions of modern mental anarchy, neither that nor any other ideal is safe. just as Protestants appealed from priests to the Bible, and did not realize that the Bible also could be questioned, so republicans appealed from kings to the people, and did not realize that the people also could be defied. There is no end to the dissolution of ideas, the destruction of all tests of truth, that has become possible since men abandoned the attempt to keep a central and civilized Truth, to contain all truths and trace out and refute all errors. Since then, each group has taken one truth at a time and spent the time in turning it into a falsehood. We have had nothing but movements; or in other words, monomanias. But the Church is not a movement but a meeting-place; the trysting-place of all the truths in the world.

G.K. Chesterton, from "Why I am a Catholic" from Twelve Modern Apostles and Their Creeds (1926)