The Early Papacy by Adrian Fortescue

Author:Adrian Fortescue [Fortescue, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781586171766
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2010-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

6

Communion with Rome

Third thesis: To be a member of the Catholic Church, a man must be in communion with the Pope. This follows from what we have already said about papal jurisdiction. If the Pope has jurisdiction over all members of the Church, they must all be in communion with him.1 It follows from the still more radical principle that members of the Catholic Church necessarily are in communion with one another, as we have explained. If this is admitted, and it is admitted that the chief bishop is certainly himself a member, then our thesis follows as a matter of course.

The necessity of communion between all members of the Catholic Church is the fundamental point on which every Anglican, however High he may be, must and does differ from us. Once more, let Catholics always remember this first point of all. The Anglican invariably tries to avoid or ignore it and to turn the discussion to the papal claims. It is a pity that sometimes his Catholic opponent allows him to drift away from the essential question. The visible unity of the Church of Christ is the root of all our belief, after the existence of God, the claim of Christ as our teacher, and the fact that Christ did found a Church. All else (including the papacy) we believe because the Church of Christ teaches it, relying on his promises to her. But we cannot get any further toward knowing what the Church teaches till we know what the Church is. The whole principle of believing the teaching of the Church goes by the wayside, if we admit the possibility that the Church may consist of a group of separate communions, all teaching something different. In this case you have to take the greatest common measure of the teachings of various churches picked out arbitrarily. All idea of divinely given authority, divinely guided teaching, depends on the first concept of all, namely, one united Church in communion with herself throughout the world. Unhappily, here the extreme High Anglican is as remote from us as any other Protestant. That is why his whole position is wrong and impossible. He copies our rites; he adopts most points of our faith; he uses our language. But he does not have the foundation on which all these things rest. He is no nearer to us really, not one whit more Catholic, than the Evangelical or the frank Protestant. We can leave all the rest as of secondary importance till we have convinced him of the one vital issue: the visible unity of the Church.

First, then, a few texts to prove that the Fathers down to 451 believed in unity of intercommunion between all members of the Catholic Church are essential. It was their direct obvious test whether a man was a Catholic or not, just as it is ours today. Schism meant to them what it means according to the plain sense of the word: breach of visible communion; and they said, as we say, that the schismatic is no Catholic.

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