Being Catholic

What does it mean to be Catholic.  For most it means that one is a member of the Catholic Church, believes what the Church teaches, and does what Catholics do. But the most radical sense of being Catholic is to view the created world as a sacrament of the divine, that is, as something that both points to and makes present God's saving grace.

We believe that Jesus is fully human and fully divine.  In Jesus, God took on our humanity and made it his own. In this way the humanity of Jesus reveals his divinity. It also changes our understanding of the relationship between the Creator and his creation. In the humanity of Jesus -- his flesh and blood -- he reveals and makes present his divinity, and all creation is raised to a new dignity by virtue of God's self-revelation. This becomes especially apparent when we consider the church.

The faults and failings of the church are all too apparent, and its humanity is certainly evident in the people who belong to it. Yet Catholics believe that despite its limitations the church has been chosen and made holy by God to be a sacrament of Jesus Christ, to embody his person and mission and to both point to him and make him present in the work that it does in his name.

It is for this reason that Catholics believe that bread and wine at Mass become the Body and Blood of Christ, that pouring water on a child's brow in baptism renders her a new creation in Christ, and that a young couple's marriage vows transforms their intimate love for one another into an expression of God's love for us all.  The ordinary is in fact extraordinary when transformed by God's saving grace.

To view the world in this way -- to see the world of people and things as capable of revealing God and to understand that God's grace can fill even secular realities -- to regard all things as potentially holy is what it means to be Catholic.   And because we are Catholic we live and act in particular ways.

How we treat one another and especially the least among us, what we profess and hold to be true, how we pray and worship, the questions we ask, are measures of the grace we have been given and of our faithfulness to God's call in our lives, and as such, they are the ways in which we are meant to transform the world.