The Raft on the Tiber

I’d like to establish a kind of working definition that we can use as we go on from here, and then extend that definition just a wee bit.

It’s been said many times that a covenant is the same thing as a contract. That’s not quite right; or rather it’s not quite complete. A contract is simply an agreement between two parties. In the ancient world, looking at a covenant as nothing more than a contract by another name misses the most critical theological component. A covenant carries a great deal more weight.

D.J. McCarthy, a scholar who studied covenants extensively and is considered a foremost authority, defines covenant this way:

Covenants were a means by which the ancient world took to extend relations beyond the natural unity of blood. – “Covenant in the Old Testament: The Present State of Inquiry.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly

It should be noted that this definition is not strictly biblical in nature, but spans the ancient world. In the ancient world, a covenant was an oath used to create an extended brotherhood between individuals or an alliance of tribes. It’s an oath of fidelity.

We Catholics see the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as a family, with Mary as the queen mother. With the use of covenants, God has gradually extended His family. God’s covenant with Noah formed a household of extended families. His covenant with Abraham formed a tribe. His covenant with Moses formed a nation. These are blood oaths in that they extend beyond the ties of blood to form something larger.

Now, here’s the interesting part for the moment. What if we extend this idea of covenant as blood oath to the modern world, and look at it from a very Catholic point of view. What’s Latin for oath? The answer is “sacramentum,” whence we get the English word – SACRAMENT.

This blood oath is repeated at every Catholic Mass when the priest says:

Take this, all of you, and drink from it: this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me.

[You can Google McCarthy and get lots of people citing his work. I’m not going to link them as most are theologians discussing things at a level that is only interesting to another theologian. I’m also not qualified to argue this point, so anyone interested in going deeper can check Scott Hahn’s book A Father Who Keeps His Promises]

What do we mean by the “marks of the Church”? What exactly are they?

Odds are fairly good that if you’ve has ever attended a Catholic Mass they’ve already encountered the marks of the Church. You may not have realized it, but these marks are part of our profession of faith.

The marks of the Church are:

The Church is one
The Church is holy
The Church is catholic
The Church is apostolic

They probably seem a bit more familiar now.

Why are they important? The marks of the Church form a basis upon which a great many misunderstandings get their start. I’ve been questioned or accosted by Protestants of various stripes that have taken exception to each element. They can be stumbling blocks for anyone thinking of converting – regardless of how high or low a church they’re coming from. I know this from personal experience. It was this one line in the creed that held me back from my own conversion for several years.

The questions generally come across in some variation of the following:

“What do you mean by ‘one true church?’”
“How can a human institution be holy?”
“What do you mean by ‘catholic’? Is this different than ‘Catholic’?”
“The Catholic Church doesn’t have any more association with the apostles than any other church on earth.”

See what I mean about confusion?

For the next few posts I’m going to try to define each one of these marks.

[As a side note, I’m not doing these four in the same way I did the Papacy posts from late last year. I’m going to post these as I write them instead of writing them all first and posting one at a time. I have a sneaking suspicion that it will end up easier in the long run.]

The more I’ve worked on the Marks of the Church posts, the more difficulty I’ve had getting them to come out correctly and with any amount of brevity. I think it best to start things off a little differently than I had originally planned. I want to post a preface to the main discussion first. Hopefully, this preface will lay the groundwork for what comes next, and thus make what follows a bit easier to get into.

There are two fundamental things to consider. First we need to think of faith.

We’re going to take a look at the unity of Catholicism in this post. This is one of the four marks of the Church professed each Sunday in the Nicene Creed. The object of this particular mark is a perpetual unity in faith and communion.

There are two things to consider up front, without which any discussion of the holiness of the Church will founder from the outset. First, we’re discussing the holiness of the Church herself, not the holiness of individuals. Second, what do we mean by “holy” anyway?

We’re going to look at this in something like a systematic way. First, we’ll get into what “catholic” really means. Next, we’ll get into the biblical foundations by skipping back and forth between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Finally, we’ll touch on some quotes by the early Church to see how far and how fast this idea of catholicity spread. You could literally do a dozen pages on this subject and only scratch the surface, so anything done on a blog is going to be too short and very shallow.

So, to begin, what do we mean by “catholic”?