Earlier this week Pope Benedict XVI announced that the Roman Catholic church is the “one true church”, and he said that other ecclesiastical communities are not churches in the truest sense, and they lack the “means of salvation”. According to Pope Benedict, the Catholic church is the one true church because Jesus only established one church on earth, and it’s his church because he is the successor to St. Peter, who Catholics recognize as the first pope.
As an ex-Catholic, I cheerfully acknowledge that there is nothing new about this doctrine. Catholics and non-Catholics have heard this from popes for hundreds of years. Therefore, many may dismiss this story as irrelevant old news. But I think it’s worth replying to, for a number of reasons.
First of all, even those who agree that Pope Benedict XVI is the holy father of the only true church should be willing to acknowledge the poor timing of this reaffirmation of this doctrine. Both Catholics and non-Catholics currently face vicious assaults on the Christian faith, however they define it, from both the secular and the Islamic world. The current assault on both the Christian faith and on the traditional values of all Christians is so severe that both Catholics and non-Catholics would do well to find common ground where it exists, not in order to ignore differences, but in order to work together to defend common elements of both our faiths and our values.
Though I am an ex-Catholic, I’ve never been particularly fond of Catholic-bashing, and I understand that the head of any church needs to give his congregants reasons to stay in the church instead of leaving it. One thing we can all agree about is that an empty church is no church at all. If Catholics are comforted by the belief that they attend the one and only true church and that other ecclesiastical communities are not truly churches, I’m glad they are comforted by their belief, but they should be prepared to hear a gentle rebuttal of the pope’s position.
I used to have a friend who argued that the term Roman Catholic is an oxxi-moron, because catholic means universal and Rome is a particular non-universal place. Indeed, the non-universal universal church has an obvious rival, the orthodox Catholic church, which manages to be Catholic without either being Roman or recognizing the pope.
More to the point, my experience as an American Catholic was always that there were two Roman Catholic churches, one composed of devout Catholics and one composed of careless Catholics, careless because they couldn’t care less about what the pope says or what their church teaches. My mother calls herself a Catholic, yet she hasn’t been to a mass since the last time I asked her to go to one with me, which was back in 1974. I’m not criticizing my mother for missing mass, because I don’t attend mass either. Yet, though she calls herself a Catholic, my mother is no more Catholic in practice than a pine tree is. One of the reasons I left the Catholic church is that it consists of a very high percentage of pine tree Catholics. At least 90% of the Catholics I grew up with were such shallow Catholics that their Catholicism was unrecognizable outside the church doors.
I know there are devout Catholics who take their religion seriously and I admire their steadfastness, even though I disagree with them about a boatload of theological issues I won’t mention here. But if the pope is leading the one true church, he is leading the most faithless of all Christian congregations. For example, when Pope Benedict was chosen to succeed John Paul II by the college of cardinals, I, as a non-Catholic was very pleased that the Catholic church had chosen someone who would continue to uphold traditional values of the Catholic church, particularly with regard to marriage and abortion. I actually like Pope Benedict, and I have a fair amount of respect for him. But when one of my careless Catholic co-workers heard he had become the new pope, his response was simply, “That’s a bad choice, this pope’s an idiot.” This point is so important that it’s worth saying it twice. Other than this one true church and papal infalibility bit, I rather like Pope Benedict, and I’m inclined to believe he is both a gentleman and a scholar, in spite of some differences I may have with him. Yet it’s rare to hear anything positive about him from the legions of non-practicing, couldn’t care less Catholics who have very little use for this or any other pope because they have individualized their faith to suit their own secular lifestyle.
Of course, what I’m describing here is not just a Catholic problem; it probably exists in all churches. But a general lack of commitment and a tendency to make up one’s own version of one’s religion is a particularly acute problem among Catholics. Of course, that’s not Pope Benedict’s fault, and I’m aware he’s doing his best to try to deal with the problem of pine tree Catholicism. But there is plenty he can do within his own church to keep busy without lashing out at other Christians.
As for the argument that he is the successor of St. Peter and he is therefore supreme over all Christendom, I have several problems with it. For one thing, for any pope to claim infallible leadership of even his own church because he traces the papacy back to Peter ignores the fact that St. Peter himself was a very fallible human being, both before and even after Pentecost. Galatians 2 says Paul opposed Peter to his face when Peter behaved differently among Jews than among gentiles, yet Peter endorsed Paul’s writings in his own, though no one has ever claimed the apostle Paul was anyone’s pope. Paul had clearly never heard about Peter’s infalibility, his papacy or his supremacy over all Christians, and neither apparently had the Jewish Christians in Acts 11 who incorrectly disputed with Peter about taking the gospel to the gentiles.
In addition, the pope’s argument is precisely the same sort of argument the Jews had with Jesus in John 8, when they argued they couldn’t be wrong because they were descended from Abraham and were therefore descendants of God. Jesus responded not only by saying that they were not behaving as Abraham did, but he even called them children of the devil. I’m not saying any such thing about Pope Benedict. But surely he is learned enough to know that a God who has never automatically passed his election down through generations of the families of the patriarchs of the faith would be unlikely to pass it down through the college of cardinals. I understand that papal infallibility is an article of the Catholic faith. But as I’ve already indicated, if the first pope wasn’t infallible, it’s reasonable to have questions about the others. By the way, anyone who studies Matthew 16:18 carefully will understand that with the phrase “upon this rock I will build my church”, Jesus is saying that his church will be built on the larger rock of the revelation that he is Christ, not on the smaller rock, which was Peter.
Of course, I don’t think Peter ever thought he was the pope, much less an infallible one, but I’m more interested in going on to my final point than speaking further about St. Peter.
With regard to the pope’s claims that only the Catholic church has the “means to salvation”, one might reasonably ask what those means might be, aside from faith in the atonement and resurrection of Christ. All of us who have children know how hard it would be to lose one of them. If all God wanted for us was to have the pope’s blessing, would it be worth his time to allow his own Son to be executed without intervening on his behalf? I should think not. If anything other than the blood of Christ could have purchased mankind’s redemption, Christ would not have come to this earth. Faith in that redemption is not confined to the Catholic church.
Again, I’m inclined to like Pope Benedict, except that I don’t feel the least bit guilty about not reporting to him, and I find the fact that the church in Rome is still trying to insist that only they have the means of salvation rather irritating. The pope’s claim that I haven’t been to a real church since I left his is quite false, and he would know it himself if he had followed me around.
Undoubtedly, some would argue that the claim of Christians that Jesus is the only way to God is similarly irritating. Yet if one believes scripture, as I do, no one else, certainly not the pope, Mohammed, Buddha, Moses, or any other religious figure, can claim a virgin birth, a sinless life, a redemptive death, resurrection and the right to return to judge the living and the dead.
My faith is not in myself or in the pope, but in Christ alone, and Pope Benedict XVI should be asking Catholics to put their faith exclusively in Christ, rather than seeking his blessing or the blessing of the Lord’s mother. His failure to do so is what really ails the Catholic church.
