Why Catholic?

Isn’t the Catholic Church just another denomination among many others? Doesn’t every Christian group get some things wrong? Why does it matter which church I am in as long as I am worshiping God?

Many people make the mistake today in thinking that the word ‘Catholic’ is just the name of another denomination or sect of Christianity such as Methodist, Baptist, or Lutheran. In reality, ‘catholic’ originally was used in Greek to say exactly the opposite. The word ‘katholikos’ actually translates as Global. So when we say Catholic Church, we mean the Global Church that has been around since the beginning.

St. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, is the first person recorded to use the word ‘katholikos’ around 107 AD (About ten years after the books of the New Testament were completed). He states, “Wherever the bishop appears, let the congregation be there also, just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.” Around 258 AD St. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, paints a wonderful image with words, “The Church is a unity; yet by her fruitful increase she is extended far and wide to form a plurality; even as the sun has many rays, but one light; and a tree many boughs but one trunk,… yet in the source itself unity is preserved.” The Blessed John Henry Newman also adds, “Unless the Church, and the Church alone, had been one body everywhere, they (the Church Fathers) could not have argued on the supposition that it was so.” He continues, “She, as St. Pacian explains the word (Catholic), was everywhere one, while the sects of the day were nowhere one, but everywhere divided. Sects might, indeed, be everywhere, but they were in no two places the same.”

There are many Protestant churches now claiming to be non-denominational, but only the Catholic Church is the truly non-denominational Church in the world. We can say confidently that there will not be lots of different Catholic denominations and sects fifty or five hundred years from now. We are by definition ‘anti-schismatic.’ We do not break up or turn into something else for we are the one Church, a Body held together by Christ at each joint.