Why I am a Catholic (Part 1)

The short answer is that I am convinced that Catholicism is TRUE.

I am, of course, aware that many people dispute this (even many who call themselves Catholics). (I hope everyone who does dispute it leaves a comment so I can address each one--there is an answer for every question.)

Let's explore some of the claims of the Catholic Church.

First of all, one must remember that Catholicism is NOT just another Christian denomination. Denominationalism started when groups started breaking away from the Catholic Church. This is not mere opinion, but historical fact. Anyone who accepts the New Testament and believes that Jesus was the Son of God ought to recognize that He intended to, and indeed DID, found a church, the one true church. He founded it on the 12 Apostles with Peter ("Rock") as their head (Matt 16:16-19).

A thumbnail sketch of Christian history

Originally, and for a few generations after the first Christian Pentecost (Acts ch. 2), those who believed in Jesus remained a sect within Judaism. (Gradually over many years, they grew more and more distinct from other Jewish sects, and eventually the "official" Jewish leadership expelled them from the synagogue and they became a separate religion.) Over the years this one group of Jesus' followers (or disciples) spread outward from Jerusalem, and in various places came to be known by various names. Some people called them Nazarenes because they followed the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. In Antioch (in present day southern Turkey), they were first called Christians (Acts 11:26).

The Apostles traveled from city to city and taught the people about Christ and many converted from Judaism and paganism by their oral preaching, and were baptized. The Apostles would frequently train and ordain men to lead these local congregations. (These men were called episcopoi (bishops, or overseers) and presbyteroi (priests, or elders).)

Here and there, a number of errors began to be taught by some of these local leaders. The first big error was taught by the Judaizers, who held that all Christians had to keep observing all the minutiae of the Law of Moses. The Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15:1-35) was called to deal with this question, and many of the letters in the New Testament deal with it extensively.

For the first couple of decades, all teaching was in the form of oral preaching. Nothing that appears in what we today call the New Testament was penned for at least 10 years after the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. No one followed Jesus or the Apostles around taking notes (their memories were much better in those days than ours are today because they didn't have the luxury of cheap books and common literacy--they HAD to remember what they heard). And, as I said, the Apostles would appoint leaders in the towns and cities wherever they went (1 Tim 4:14; 5:22; 2 Tim 1:6) and instructed them to pass this same apostolic teaching and authority on to other men, faithfully and in its entirety (2 Tim 2:2; Titus 1:5).

Eventually all the Apostles died, but their teaching and authority lived on in the persons of the bishops they appointed (Catholics today refer to this as "apostolic succession"). Whenever doctrinal disputes arose, the bishops within the affected area would come together in synods or councils and discuss the matter and sift through the issue to separate what the Apostles actually taught from the novel and erroneous teaching. (This wasn't always easy, since often the dispute wasn't necessarily one of outright error, but might have been just new ways of expressing true apostolic teaching. The bishops' job was to figure this out, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit according to the promise of Christ (John 15:13) and to declare the truth.)

Some errors refused to go away, however. People frequently decided they knew better than the bishops, forgetting that only the bishops (as a body or "college," not individually) had the apostolic authority to declare the true apostolic doctrine. So they went off in their own groups, and their false teachings were known as "heresies," many of which persist in one form or another to this day.

By the end of the First Century (certainly by A.D. 107 or 110 when Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, wrote his letter to the Smyrnaeans) it was apparently common to distinguish between the Christians that followed the bishops' (i.e. apostolic) teaching, and the various groups of "heretics" (those who "take out") by the word "catholic" ("of the whole," or universal). This same apostolic teaching is preserved to our own day in the one Catholic Church.

Next installment: The Bible