Conversations: The Four Marks of the Church

In this episode, Father Graebe discusses the four marks of the Church and what we hear every Sunday in the Creed: One. Holy. Catholic. Apostolic.

How is the Church one when there’s so much division? How is she holy when there’s so much evil within? We’ll discuss what these marks really mean, why they matter, and how they challenge us.

Set in a lounge in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood, these evenings are built to provide a perspective that maybe you haven’t heard before, or something to think more deeply about.

Thanks for listening. Please follow us for future topics. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

In this episode, Father Gravy discusses the four marks of the church and what we hear every Sunday in the Creed. One, holy, Catholic, Apostolic. How is the Church one when there's so much division? How is she holy when there's so much evil within? We'll discuss what these marks really mean, why they matter, and how they challenge us. Set in a lounge space in New York's Tribeca neighborhood, these evenings are built to provide a perspective that maybe you haven't heard before, or something to think more deeply about. Please visit higherword.org to see media from the event and consider sharing this episode with a friend. It helps others discover HigherWord.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

Well, thanks everyone. Great to see such a robust turnout. Um, old friends, new friends, uh let's have a little fun this evening. We're gonna talk a little theology and maybe have some good questions and discussion afterwards. We won't take up too much time, but I thought it'd be fun to kind of throw this out there: the four marks of the church. Probably something that I think it's safe to bet most people have not given too much of it any thought to. The four marks of the church, we recite in the Nicene Creed, right? Towards the very end, when we talk about the church, I believe in one holy, Catholic, and apostolic church. Those are the four marks. Okay. And we've all said those words hundreds, thousands of times in our lives. But have we ever stopped to think about what they mean, why they're there, what impact, if any, they do make or should make in my life. And I think it's worth delving a little bit into because they are eternally relevant and especially timely. So I'm just gonna sort of touch on each of those four marks and then try to bring it together and open it up for some good questions and discussion. So think of this as a talk as sort of four quarters of a gain, all right? I might fall behind by halftime, but I'll try to bring it home for the win. Okay. So there we go. I'm so glad someone got that. Okay. So these marks are identifiers. They're what help people to recognize what the church is. Jesus established the church as a visible institution so that people could could see it, know what it is, and come on board with it. They're like a beacon, a lighthouse, that are there sending out this signal that this is the one true church established by Jesus Christ for all time. And each one plays an important role, and they're all interrelated. So let's start with the first one. We say that the church is one. We hear Jesus say this in the gospel. I pray that they may be one as we are one, as he's talking to his heavenly father. The church is one in doctrine, in worship, in government. We all believe the same thing, we all worship the same way, we're all governed by the same hierarchy. And when we say that's related, what we mean is that what we know about God, what he has revealed about himself, allows us to worship him properly, to give him the worship that we owe him as creatures to our creator. But what we know about him is safeguarded by the shepherds he has put in place to maintain that purity of faith so that that doctrine is not corrupted or adulterated. You look at other Christian denominations, by and large, that have separated themselves from that one true church, and there's an enormous amount of confusion. Plug in the denomination. What do they believe? Well, it depends on who you talk to, right? Everyone kind of becomes their own authority. There's no doubt or ambiguity about what Catholics believe. People, even Catholics, may dissent from it, but it's very clear what the church teaches. There's a magisterium, there's the catechism, there's the papal office, that teaching authority that has perdured for the last 2,000 years. And we believe that the Holy Spirit protects and guides the church in maintaining that oneness of belief, that uniformity. Not because we're trying to be rigid or you know all in just some automaton locked step, but because this is we believe this is what God has revealed, and we try not to deviate from it. And this is where the Pope and the bishops in communion with him are the visible source of that unity. That's why we consider the papacy a gift. He personifies that oneness. All of us are united in communion with that apostolic succession, which we'll talk about in a moment. And this is the source of a lot of confusion. Can the Pope teach wrongly? Yes, he can. Many of you, I'm sure, are familiar with the term infallibility, and this is widely misunderstood out in the general world. You know, people think that everything the Pope says cannot be wrong, is incapable of error. That's not true. The charism of infallibility is very specific and very limited. It means that when the Pope, in a formal, solemn act confirms a teaching that has always been believed, on a topic of faith and morals, he cannot teach wrongly. We believe the Holy Spirit protects him from ever doing that. The two great examples of a Pope teaching infallibly concern Marian dogmas, the Immaculate Conception, which was infallibly proclaimed in 1854, and the Assumption of Mary, which was proclaimed in 1950. These were not novelties. The Pope did not wake up that morning and say, I think the Virgin Mary was assumed into heaven. These had been believed since the earliest church. You have early doctors and saints of the church teaching this, feast days that go back almost 2,000 years. The Pope simply said, like with a rubber spam, yes, this is what we believe, it is not possible that this is wrong. Perscinding from that very narrow category, can a pope just teach things that are not true? Yeah. And there are examples of that. And that's where we as Catholics need to be very judicious in saying we know what this means. We know when the Pope is teaching the faith that has been handed on from the apostles, and we know when he's not properly representing that. And we can adjudicate between those two poles. All right. We don't just take everything that a Pope says as gospel truth. We always give a deference and respect, but we admit that sometimes he can be perhaps a little sloppy theologically. And it's good to be aware of that and be able to call it out when we see it for what it is. But all of this ties in into the oneness of faith, united in our creed, united in the worship that we give, the one mass, and united in the government, all of us united with our bishops, united with the Pope in this communion of faith. Okay? So that's the oneness. How about holy? Now that's going to be a little head scratching. Many people will look at the Catholic Church and say there are a lot of unholy people in the Catholic Church, and I'm going to be the first one to raise my hand, right? I'm a sinner in need of redemption. And I hope every one of us would say the same thing. When we say the church is holy, we don't mean that every one of us is holy, that we have a halo around our head, that we're going to be in a stained glass window. We say the church is holy for two reasons. The one and most important is that our founder is holy. God in the flesh, Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity. The Catholic Church was founded by God Himself. He is holy, which is why the Church, His mystical body, his bride, is holy. And his Church makes us holy. We, all of us, sinners, are able to be sanctified, to be made holy by the means of grace offered us only through the Catholic Church that comes through the sacraments that Jesus has given us. It's so important that we not think of the church as some like institution. It is an institution, but it's not like the FBI. It's not just some cold bureaucratic entity. It is the living, present, mystical body of Jesus Christ active at work among us. You may have heard me use this example before. It's a little silly, but I do think it makes the point. If any of you, I'm sure many of you have, read the Harry Potter books or seen the movies, all right. Do you remember Voldemort with the whore crookses? All right, do you remember how many of them there were? Okay, that's good, right? There's seven. And I always wondered, I don't know J.K. Rowling. Um, but if if I got a chance to sit down to lunch with her, I would ask her if that was purposeful. Because when I was reading this, however long ago, I thought I was like, hey, number seven should like jump out at us. Voldemort kind of lived on through these whore crookses, right? Jesus Christ lives, he is present in, he continues his presence among us through the seven sacraments, through which he continues to do what he did during his earthly ministry. Right? He feeds us in the Eucharist. He heals us in anointing of the sick, he forgives our sins in the sacrament of confession. Jesus is alive and present among us through his church, above all, in his sacrament, which is the church. That's his rise on death. That's the reason why it exists. And sacramental grace helps us, weak and fallen sinners, to become a little bit holier by his help. And we see that above all in the saints, like the all-stars of our faith, of the church, the ones who did it the best. Right? That's why we watch the All-Star game or go to the Hall of Fame. Like these are the best who ever played the game. That's what the saints are. There was one writer, I'm forgetting who it is, but they said the two glories of the Catholic Church are her saints and her art, which includes her architecture and music and all of it. The saints personify holiness and culture embodies it. And we see that so powerfully in the heroes of our faith. It's like this is this is the best that the human person can achieve by fully availing himself or herself of the grace that God offers us. And that is the lifeblood of the church. There's one early church writer who had the famous quote that the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians. In every land, when Christians have been persecuted, it leads to this huge springtime of faith and devotion. And yes, persecution is horrible. But we see how that holiness, that radical dedication and self-availment of the grace that comes through the sacraments in the church, have this ripple effect that spills down to you and me. And we know that we all need that. We know that we are all sinners. As I mentioned at the beginning of the second quarter, all of us would not put ourselves forward as the poster child of holiness. But it's the grace of the church that keeps us in the game. Many of you might know the famous uh English Catholic writer Evelyn Waugh, right? Um Brideshead Revisited would be his most popular novel, um, which is excellent. And I think he has better ones, that's for another literary discussion. But um, Evelyn Waugh, if you don't know, he was a he was a convert to Catholicism and was uh an infamous curmudgeon. Like he was just really a miserable person, like he just sort of hated people. All right. Um one uh interviewer asked him, How do you how do you write so marvelously? He said, I put the words down on paper and pushed them around a little bit. Like he was just very um brusque. And he was doing an interview towards the end of his life. He died on Easter Sunday, I think it was 1966. This was shortly before his death. And a writer said to him, or the interviewer said to him, you know, you are a famous Kappa convert, um, but you you're you yourself would admit that you're you're just a miserable person. How do you reconcile those two things? And he said, Oh, if I weren't Catholic, I'd be so much worse. And I think that's true, right? Like for all of our faults and foibles and our sins, right? Everything we bring to confession every time. Like, if it weren't for the grace that we get from the sacraments of the church, like where would any of us be? And so that's what we hold on to, right? We're all works in progress, and it's the grace of the holiness of the church that keeps us going. And we see that from the very beginning. Look at the apostles, right? I mean, the gospels don't spare anything, they don't sugarcoat. The passion was not their finest hour. Judas betrayed, Peter denied, Thomas doubted, they all ran away. And yet, except for Judas, poor soul, um, they're all saints in glory. And that gives great hope to all of us who keep striving to avail ourselves of that. No matter how many times we fall, we can never think that we're hypocrites. We're weak and we're fallen. And as long as we want to be better, that's all God asks. It's when we're obstinate or just give up that then we become a Judas and a lost cause. So that's the holiness that the church provides for us. How about Catholic? All right, sorry, there was no halftime show. All right. Uh where's the Wu-Tang climb when we need it? All right. Um, the word Catholic means universal. In Scripture, Jesus says at the end of the gospel, go therefore and baptize all nations. This is something so distinct. Again, that mark, that sign about the Catholic Church. It is for every people and nation and race and tribe and tongue. Every single human person is called to be a part of the church of God. And this is different from the old covenant, which was specific to Israel. It was this people. That's one of the, I think we talked about this, touched upon it at a previous higher word talk, the scandal of specificity. That God had preserved this one people to hold on to that revelation, that there is one God. And they held on to that until the Messiah came. And then the floodgates opened and he expanded it to the whole world. But you still have, you see a lot of that sectarianism, right? The most obvious example would be the Church of England, like it's baked into the name. Explore this country. We forget, you know, England was Catholic for a thousand years. But we don't have national churches. We are the ultimate global institution. It's the oldest institution of the world. And there's something so beautiful about that common humanity. All these things about like what brings us together, what brings us together is God. It's Jesus praise that they may be one as we are one. To have everyone come into the fold. If any of you have ever attended a Mass in St. Peter's Square, you see this in full display. The United Nations has nothing on us. That's like good for trying. But you stand there in St. Peter's Square, like we look at watch a YouTube video of any papal announcement when a new Pope is elected, and you see flags waving of every country on earth. It's unbelievable. And if you've traveled extensively, you you know this feeling. I can't tell you what it's been like to be in the middle of New Delhi or Seoul or Cape Town, and you find the local Catholic church and you're just immediately at home. There's nothing like it. And you feel that connection. It's like this is these are family members whom I just haven't met yet. Right? The brothers and sisters in Christ. And again, I mentioned how they're all in interconnected. This is this is the oneness. We believe the same thing. We worship at the same Mass. We have the same Pope who's Christ vicar on earth. And I really think that's a foretaste of heaven, right? When you read the book of Revelation, it's it's like when all the saints come marching in, like we will spend all eternity just doing this. You know, I always leave a higher word event thinking, like, oh, I wish I got to speak more to that person, or I saw that one there and I wanted to catch up. But we will have forever to do that. And I think that's what our Catholic faith is all about, right? All of us just in love with our God that spills over into our love for each other. And these events, I really think, are a little trailer of what's waiting for us in eternity. So that's that's the Catholicism. There's no tribalism. We're all in this together, in this one faith that unites us. All right, bringing it home. This is the uh the anchor in the relay race. Apostolic. This is a big one. Jesus says, You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church. St. Paul writes in the letter to the Ephesians, we are built on the foundation stones of the apostles. They are the founding blocks of the church on which we stand. We are apostolic in our origin, in our teaching, in our succession. Briefly to touch on those, in our origin, Jesus entrusted the church to his apostles. The 12 apostles, it's no coincidence, it replicates and repurposes the 12 tribes of Israel, the founding of the new covenant. We are apostolic in our very beginning. We come from the apostles. We are apostolic in our teaching. If Peter and Andrew and James and John walked in here tonight and for some misfortune had to listen to my talk, all right, they would say to themselves, that's the faith. That's the faith we heard from the master. They would recognize it as what they themselves were given and handed on. And that's true of every authentic Catholic church. I won't say this is true of any mass you could go to in New York City, but hopefully for most of them, if the apostles walked in and watched what was going on and heard the homily, they would say, Yep, that's it. That's right. I recognize it, and that's true. We believe everything that the apostles passed along to us. And they passed it along in two ways. Some of it they wrote down. We call that scripture. Every book in the New Testament has apostolic origin, either written directly by an apostle, the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of John, the letters of Paul, or someone who was a close collaborator of an apostle. So Mark was St. Peter's assistant, Saint Luke was Paul's assistant. Every book in the New Testament is apostolic. But we don't believe only what they wrote down. Martin Luther was wrong. It's not sola scriptura, it's not scripture alone, it's also what they passed. On by word of mouth. We call that tradition. Scripture and tradition as the two channels or fonts of what Jesus revealed to us. Sometimes our separated brethren will challenge us Catholics about one of our beliefs and say, where is that in Scripture? And sometimes you see Catholics trying to do these like theological gymnastics to, you know, square the sermon. It's not in Scripture. It was not written down. That doesn't mean it was not revealed to us. It was. It was passed down faithfully by word of mouth from Peter and Andrew and James and John down to you and me today. And so we hold to that, we are apostolic in teaching. And that teaching develops over 2,000 years. The more we pray about it and reflect upon it, and the brightest minds in the history of the world delve into it, we understand it more fully. It grows more into itself. Think of like an embryo in the womb, right? Everything's there from the beginning, but it grows more into itself. What it can never do is change. Just like a human embryo can never become a rhinoceros, the Catholic Church can never contradict itself. It can never be the case that, well, for a long time we believed X, but now we believe not X. That would mean that the Holy Spirit misled the Church on something really important for a really long time. And if that can be true of any teaching, it can be true of any teaching. That's where we say that could never happen. And anyone who promotes that or proposes that or advocates for that is teaching falsely and needs to be corrected and rejected. So we are apostolic in our teaching. And then further than less, that we're apostolic in succession. We believe that every bishop in the world, every true bishop in the world today is a direct successor of the apostles. That's an unbroken line to guarantee Christ's continued presence in the world. It's only from bishops that we get priests, and from priests that we get the Eucharist, which is what the church is. If there's no Eucharist, there's no church because there's no Jesus. So Protestant churches that, you know, they're not properly called churches. There's no Eucharist, there's no true priesthood. And we safeguard this so carefully, you might know when a bishop is consecrated, there are three bishops who consecrate him. Because, God forbid, one of them, let's say, was invalidly ordained, and might not even know that. We cannot take the risk of breaking apostolic succession. Because then that's that's gone forever. Every priest he ordains is not a real priest. Every mass that priest says is not a real mass. Like this stuff is hugely consequential. And so that's why we don't just double it, we triple it. To make sure that this is a valid bishop who will exercise valid ministry, to make sure that it's a true church with a true Eucharist. Where does this leave all of us as we approach the finish line? All right, before the buzzer sounds. These four marks of the church are not just, I hope, interesting theology and help us to know our faith a little more, so that next, you know, on Sunday, when we recite the creed, we might say those words a little more robustly. And by the way, in the gospel this Sunday, we hear the names of the 12 apostles, so even better to bring it all together. But there's a practical element to it. We are called to live out these marks in our own life. The oneness, to believe, do I believe everything the Catholic Church teaches as divinely revealed by God? We don't pick and choose. And if there's anything that I'm not fully um understanding of, that's okay. It's good to question, it's good to go deeper. It's not good to doubt. It's not good to say, I don't think this is true. It's good to say, I believe it's true, but I'd like to know why, and understand it more fully and deeply. Holy. Am I working on my own holiness? Am I trying to be better, to be closer to Jesus, to take my own spiritual life more seriously? And am I concerned about the holiness of others? Helping my friends, my family, my coworkers, my boyfriend, my girlfriend, my fiance, whatever, to come closer to Jesus and his church. What a great challenge and responsibility that is. Catholic, do I have that worldview? Do I see myself as my primary identity, as a member of the Church of God, as a member of the Catholic Church, that that's what's first and foremost. I'm not first and foremost, you know, a New Yorker or American or a Knicks fan. Those are all good. All right, but I'm first and foremost so privileged to be a part of this ultimate community in communion with God and with his holy people, brothers and sisters in Christ. And lastly, apostolic. Do I have that same mission that the apostles had? The word apostle means sent. They were sent out from that upper room to the far corners of the world. They went out from that little room in Jerusalem, they went to Egypt and India and Rome and Greece and Spain because they had a burning fire for the salvation of every soul. You and I are not called to that same explicit missionary work, but do I at least have that same concern for and desire for the salvation of every soul? Am I on fire with the faith and willing and able to share it with those in my life? Not in a preachy way, not standing on the street corner and spouting out. But when you're in love, you can't help but share it. How many times do we talk about a great book we're reading or some TV show we found that's streaming that we're really into? It just naturally comes up and we want to tell others about it. Well, what about our faith? Which is way more important than any of that? Are we willing and able to say, hey, this is some new devotion I discovered, or some saint I learned about, or some beautiful church I visited, just to open that conversation, to break that ice, to share that face, and maybe, maybe, that's the little crack in the door that someone needed to be able to allow God's grace to come flooding it. Because at the end of the day, you and I are called to be marks of the church. You and I are called to be that deacon, that sign that helps lead people to the God who created them for himself for all eternity. And if we try to step into that role more fully and purposefully, then we will be fulfilling that apostolic role for which we were made, more fully joining the oneness of the church, becoming holier along the way, and helping build up its Catholic identity. And that would be a mission very well served. Thank you.