I may well have been the only person to utter those words when attending a worship service at a Missouri Synod church with my mother.
When we say "catholic" in the Apostles' Creed, we mean it in the Greek sense--kata holos, literally, "around the whole," or "the whole church." We don't mean an entity known as the Roman Catholic Church, in other words, but the "universal church" throughout the world and through all times.
That is a distinction with a significant difference, yet, even though we knew better, we were hesitant to use the word "catholic" since we Lutherans had been anti-Roman Catholic for decades, and, under those circumstances, "holy catholic Church" just didn't sound like something we wanted to say.
There were quite a few things we didn't do because they were "too Catholic." As one example, we have many churches in our denomination that are named for St. Paul or St. John, but almost none named for the Mother of Our Lord.
You can search the national church directory of my denomination and see churches named after St. Ansgar, St. Olaf, and St. Sebald, but you'll find nary a Mary. Why? It seemed to us that Mary was a Roman Catholic, and we would have nothing to do with them, or her.
Since Vatican II, the situation has changed dramatically, to the point that, in the 1970's, we Lutherans changed the way we had been saying the Apostles' Creed. We started saying we believed in "the holy catholic church."
The theologian, Paul Tillich, had written about what he called "the catholic substance" and the "protestant principle." He defined the "catholic substance" as the tradition of the church--the hymns, vestments, liturgies, church year, statues, saints, and the assorted "smells and bells."
Good Lutheran that he was, Tillich defined the "protestant principle" as, essentially, "justification by grace through faith." For Tillich, "protestant principle"--salvation on the basis of Christ alone--trumped "catholic substance," but "catholic substance" was still an important dimension of the Christian experience.
Think of a tapestry, with all its richness and texture. That's the "catholic substance." The bright scarlet thread running through the tapestry is the "protestant principle"--better yet, the "Christ principle"--which proclaims God's gracious acceptance and love for sinners. The whole tapestry is, or should be, in the service of helping this scarlet thread to stand out.
There are all kinds of catholics. There are reformed catholics, and Greek catholics, and Anglican catholics, even, after a fashion, "baptist catholics," and, of course, Roman catholics. Nearly all of these "catholics" have contributed something to the "catholic substance" of the faith.
We Lutherans have contributed theological and biblical scholarship, and a boat load of great music. Anglicans added a "third way" tradition between Roman Catholicism and protestantism. The Reformed have added their own theological distinctiveness and contributed to a vital "low church" tradition.
Saying you believe in the "catholic church" expresses no particular affection for any particular institution--if it did, anti-institutionalist than I am, I'd be against it. What you're actually saying is that you acknowledge the community of faith through history and you claim your place in it. This puts a person in solidarity and continuity with every Christian who has ever lived, or will ever live.
Our culture is determinedly individualistic. Living an individualistic life is not a bad thing necessarily so long as one doesn't delude themselves about the influence of relationships, or willfully place one's self outside the communal dimensions of life.
No, I do not agree with Pope What's-his-face who said, in 1320, that anybody outside the church is lost, mostly because, in my view, he had a conflict of interest. In fact, I'm still trying to figure out how a person even gets outside the church. Even if you never set foot inside one, somebody in it has probably said a prayer for you at some time or other, and if someone in the "holy, catholic church" prays for you, you're in, as far as I'm concerned.
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