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The question sometimes comes up, whether in reading, or conversation or personal reflection, "Who is a Catholic?" This is not an unreasonable question. Any group of people organized for a purpose need to have enough self-understanding to know what it means to be a member. If we want to know who is an American, we can look to citizenship guidelines. If we wonder who belongs to a certain organization or club, or works for a certain company, or is a member of a particular family, we can find out. The point of knowing such things is not, or should not be, to hold others at a distance or to think oneself better than others; it is rather a question of having a healthy sense of identity.
This is all the more true for the Church, which has been given an all-important mission by its founder. The Church is to be salt and light for the world, and we have it from Jesus Himself that we need to be concerned to see that our saltiness does not lose its flavor and our light does not become darkness. So who is a Catholic? Who are those who can reasonably lay claim to that title?
As it happens, the answer to this question is fairly simple, and has been in place since apostolic times: a Catholic is someone who believes with the Church, who prays with the Church, and who receives and lives the moral vision of the Church. Believing with the Church: We have a Creed, and a clear body of authoritative teaching. This doctrine of ours does not change: it is based upon God Himself, the Unchanging One. Of course it needs to be retranslated into every age and every culture, and so it makes itself present in many different forms, new in every generation. And the Church gains greater insight into these truths as time goes on, so that our understanding of them develops and grows.
But the Creed embodies that faith "once delivered to the saints," and can no more be changed than God Himself can be changed. This is why we still recite a Creed every week that was formulated over fifteen hundred years ago.
Praying with the Church: The Church has in her keeping her greatest treasure, the Divine Liturgy, and it is her solemn and most important task to celebrate that Liturgy, to draw the human race to it, to keep bright and burnished this participation in the saving act of Christ from generation to generation. The Mass belongs to no individual, to no congregation: it is the possession of the whole Church. The liturgy changes outwardly in certain ways over the years, but it does so organically, and the change is always in keeping with its inner essence.
Embracing the moral vision of the Church: Christians are the people of the Way; we live the way of love embodied in the commandments. Every command of Christ is only a signpost toward love, a royal road to the full gift of ourselves to God and to one another. "If you love me," said the Divine Master, "you will keep my commandments." The Church embraces this moral way, founded in the Ten Commandments, completed and taught by Christ, and insists upon it no matter how inconvenient or unpopular it may be in a given time or place.
This people, who pray as one, who believe as one, who live the way of love in unity, is the seed of the new humanity, the Body of Christ, the sign and sacrament of God's presence in the world. To be such is not to be a liberal Catholic, or a conservative Catholic, or a progressive Catholic, or a reactionary Catholic. It is simply to be Catholic, to continue the living witness to Christ in our age.
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