The Four Marks

Words to Know

Catholic — from the Greek katholikos, according to the whole, or universal. The first writer known to call the church catholic is Ignatius, a bishop of Antioch, in a letter written early in the 100s.¹

The four marks — the four words the Creed uses for the church: one, holy, catholic and apostolic. They are in the Creed that your church ties to the Council of Constantinople in 381. Your Catechism calls them essential features of the Church.²

Magisterium — the teaching office of the pope and of the bishops in communion with him. Your Catechism says that the task of interpreting the word of God with authority has been entrusted to it alone.³

Apostolic succession — the teaching that the bishops follow the apostles in an unbroken line, and that the pope, as bishop of Rome, holds the place of Peter.⁴

Start with the words you say standing up.

Every Sunday, after the homily, you stand and say the Creed. Near the end of it you say that you believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. Millions of people say those words on the same morning, in many languages. It is one of the oldest things you do.

You say them about a church that says it is mine. So it is fair to ask what I said about it.

Here is something you may not have been told. In all four accounts of my life, the word your Bibles translate church comes up in only two passages, and both are in Matthew (Matthew 16:18; 18:17). The word is ekklesia. It means an assembly, a gathering of people called together. The World English Bible translates my words to Peter that way: on this rock I will build my assembly (Matthew 16:18).

What I talked about, over and over, was something else. Mark sums up my preaching as the Good News of God’s Kingdom (Mark 1:14). I taught you to pray for that kingdom to come, on earth as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10). I said it belonged to the poor (Luke 6:20). I compared it to a seed, to yeast, and to a feast thrown open to the poor, maimed, blind, and lame brought in from the streets (Luke 14:21).

A priest of your own church, a scholar named Alfred Loisy, put the whole problem in one sentence in 1902: Jesus announced the kingdom, and it was the Church that came. He wrote it in the Church’s defense. Six years later he was excommunicated.⁵

I am not going to tell you that the people in your parish are bad people. Many of them are the kindest people you know. Your church has fed, nursed and taught the poor on every continent for centuries, and I will come back to that, because it matters. The question is not whether there is good in it. There is a great deal. The question is whether the four marks it chose to define itself are the ones I set down. Let me hold them next to my own words, one at a time.

The First Mark: One

You were taught that unity is a sign of the true church. I prayed for unity. I never enforced it.

The night before I died, I prayed for my friends, that they may all be one (John 17:21). I meant it. I had just told them how anyone would recognize them: By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (John 13:35). Unity, for me, was love that other people could see.

When my own friends tried to enforce unity, I stopped them. John came to me pleased with himself: Teacher, we saw someone who doesn’t follow us casting out demons in your name; and we forbade him, because he doesn’t follow us. I said: Don’t forbid him … For whoever is not against us is on our side (Mark 9:38–40). The man was not in our group. He was doing my work. That was enough.

Now watch how one was actually achieved.

In 325 the emperor Constantine called the bishops to Nicaea, paid their way, and sent the losers of the argument into exile.⁶ Then, on the 27th of February, 380, the emperor Theodosius and his two fellow emperors made one form of the faith the law. Their edict, addressed to the people of Constantinople, ordered every people under their rule to hold the faith of the bishops of Rome and Alexandria. Those who did, it said, could take the name catholic Christians. Everyone else it called demented and insane, and it promised them punishment, first from God and then from the emperors.⁷ Five years later, at Trier, a Spanish bishop named Priscillian was beheaded. Other bishops brought the case. The charge in court was sorcery, but the quarrel was over his teaching, and he is usually remembered as the first Christian put to death by a Christian ruler over what he taught.⁸

Read that again. The word you say in the Creed, catholic, became a legal name, defined by emperors, with a penalty for being on the wrong side of it.

That is not the unity I prayed for. It is the unity of an empire, the kind you get by force. Mine was the kind the world would see, and believe.

The Second Mark: Holy

You were taught that the church is holy, and that holiness reaches you through its priests. I carried holiness out to the people the priests kept away.

In my day holiness had a building and a staff. There was the Temple, there were the priests, and there were rules about who was clean enough to come near. A man with a skin disease had to live apart and cry, “Unclean! Unclean!” as people passed (Leviticus 13:45).

I touched him. Being moved with compassion, he stretched out his hand, and touched him (Mark 1:41). A woman who had been bleeding for twelve years, unclean by the law the whole time, touched me in a crowd, and I called her Daughter (Mark 5:34). I ate with tax collectors and sinners, and when the experts complained, I sent them back to their own scripture: learn what this means: “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice” (Matthew 9:13).

And I forgave people myself, on the spot, with no priest and no penance. A woman came into a dinner and wept on my feet, and I said to her, Your sins are forgiven. The men at the table muttered, Who is this who even forgives sins? I said to her, Your faith has saved you. Go in peace (Luke 7:48–50).

Your church built a different system. In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council required every Christian, man and woman, old enough to know right from wrong, to confess every sin to their own parish priest at least once a year, and to receive communion at Easter, or be barred from the church while alive and refused Christian burial when dead. The same council declared that the bread and wine are changed in substance into my body and blood, and used the word transubstantiated to say it.⁹ Holiness now came through a priest.

And the priest was set apart. In 1139 the Second Lateran Council declared that marriages made by priests were not marriages at all.¹⁰ Peter, whom you call the first pope, had a wife. The gospels mention her mother, whom I healed in their house (Mark 1:30–31). Paul says Peter took his wife with him on his travels (1 Corinthians 9:5).

I am not telling you that the people who take vows are not holy. Many of them gave their whole lives to the poor. I am telling you that I never made a class of holy men to stand between you and God. I spent my life going around that kind of thing. The tax collector who stood far off and could only say God, be merciful to me, a sinner! went home right with God, and the man of religion did not (Luke 18:13–14).

The Third Mark: Catholic

You were taught that catholic means universal: one church for the whole world. I sent my friends into the world with nothing in their hands.

When I sent my friends out, I told them: Take nothing for your journey—no staffs, nor wallet, nor bread, nor money (Luke 9:3). They were to stay in whatever house took them in, eat what they were given, heal the sick and say that God’s kingdom had come near (Luke 10:7–9). That was how my message was meant to reach the whole world: carried by people who had nothing and depended on strangers.

Now look at how universal was actually built.

For more than eleven hundred years, from 756 to 1870, the popes ruled land in Italy as kings, with cities, taxes, armies and prisons.¹¹ For centuries they backed their claim with a document in which the emperor Constantine handed the bishop of Rome the city of Rome and the western empire. It was a forgery, written long after Constantine. A scholar named Lorenzo Valla proved it in 1440, partly by showing that its Latin was not the Latin of Constantine’s day.¹²

In 1452 a pope gave the king of Portugal permission to conquer non-Christian peoples and reduce them to perpetual slavery. In 1493 another pope drew a line down the Atlantic and granted the lands beyond it to Spain.¹³ The universal church had claimed the world, and the people who already lived in it were not asked.

The popes lost their kingdom in September 1870, when the Italian army took Rome. In 1929 the pope’s secretary of state signed a treaty with Mussolini, and the papacy became a state again: Vatican City, the smallest country in the world, with its own flag, and with ambassadors the pope sends to other nations.¹⁴

The kings of the nations, I said, lord it over them. But not so with you (Luke 22:25–26).

The Fourth Mark: Apostolic

You were taught that your bishops stand in an unbroken line from my apostles, with the pope in the place of Peter. I told my apostles that none of them was to stand over the others.

I said it as plainly as I said anything: You know that they who are recognized as rulers over the nations lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you, but whoever wants to become great among you shall be your servant (Mark 10:42–43).

I said it about titles, too: don’t you be called ‘Rabbi,’ for one is your teacher, the Christ, and all of you are brothers. Call no man on the earth your father, for one is your Father, he who is in heaven (Matthew 23:8–9).

The letter that carries Peter’s name understood it. It speaks to the leaders of the churches as a fellow elder, and tells them to lead not as lording it over those entrusted to you (1 Peter 5:1–3). A fellow elder. Not a monarch.

The history of the church in Rome bears that out. Your church keeps a list of popes that runs back to Peter. But the oldest letters tell a different story. Near the end of the first century, the church in Rome wrote to the church in Corinth as a body, in its own name, with no bishop named. Some years later Ignatius of Antioch wrote letter after letter telling churches to obey their bishop. In the one he wrote to Rome he never mentions a bishop of Rome. Many historians, among them a leading Catholic historian of the popes, think Rome was most likely led by a group of elders, and that a single bishop over the city appeared only in the 100s.¹⁵

The rest was built later. Over the centuries the popes took the title pontifex maximus, the high priest of Rome’s old gods. In the years I taught, that title belonged to the emperor Tiberius.¹⁶ And on the 18th of July, 1870, two months before he lost Rome, Pope Pius IX and the First Vatican Council declared that when the pope defines a teaching on faith or morals ex cathedra, from the chair of Peter, he cannot be wrong.¹⁷

That is eighteen centuries after me.

What Your Church Kept

Now, in fairness, look at what your church kept.

It kept my judgment scene where you can see it. Your Catechism lists the works of mercy, and the bodily ones come almost straight from my list: feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and the imprisoned.¹⁸ Compare it with what I said: I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in (Matthew 25:35).

In 1891 a pope wrote that workers had a right to a wage they could live on and to form unions of their own.¹⁹ Your bishops taught the world the phrase a preferential option for the poor.²⁰ Francis of Assisi gave away everything he had and went to live among the lepers. Dorothy Day fed the hungry of New York for nearly fifty years. Óscar Romero, archbishop of San Salvador, spoke for the poor against the soldiers who were killing them, and on the 24th of March, 1980, he was shot dead while saying Mass. Your church has named him a saint.²¹

On the poor, your church has often been very close to me.

So the question is not whether I am in your church. I am in the food line in its basement, and in the clinic run by its sisters, and in a great many of its people. The question is which part stands on top.

Look at the four marks again. One. Holy. Catholic. Apostolic. Every one of them describes the institution: its unity, its sacred power, its reach, its chain of command. None of them is the poor. None of them is forgiving your enemy. None of them is the stranger, or the servant at the bottom of the table. The things I said most often are inside your church, but they are not its marks. The marks are the things it would not give up.

You can be in full communion with your bishop and walk past every person I told you to stop for. I told you what I would ask at the end, and it was not which church you belonged to: because you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me (Matthew 25:40).

What You’ll Hear Back

If you show this to someone you love, they will have answers ready. They were given them, the same way you were. Here are the six you will hear most, and what is underneath each one.

“Jesus gave Peter the keys. ‘You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.’”

They mean Matthew 16:18–19. Start with where it is. The same scene is in Mark, the earliest gospel, and in Luke. In both, Peter says that I am the Christ, and in neither is there a rock or a key (Mark 8:27–30; Luke 9:18–21). Only Matthew has them.

Then read five verses further in Matthew. The same Peter tries to talk me out of the cross, and I say to him: Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me (Matthew 16:23). The rock was not a man who could not be wrong.

Then turn two chapters on. The power to bind and release, which your church reads as Peter’s, I gave to all my disciples, in the same words (Matthew 18:18).

And your own greatest teacher was not sure that the rock was Peter at all. Near the end of his life, Augustine wrote that he had often explained the rock as me, the one Peter confessed, and he left his readers to choose which reading was better.²²

Whatever the rock was, I said nothing about Rome, or successors, or a chair. And the Peter of the letter called himself a fellow elder.

“The Church gave you the Bible.”

The books were written, copied and read for generations before any council voted on them. The first list that matches your New Testament exactly, all twenty-seven books, comes from Athanasius, a bishop of Alexandria, in 367. Councils in North Africa listed the books in 393 and 397. Your church listed the same books at the Council of Florence in 1442, but it defined the list as a matter of faith, with a curse on anyone who refused it, only at the Council of Trent, in 1546, in its argument with the Protestants.²³ That is fifteen centuries after me.

A council can recognize what is true. It cannot make my words true by voting on them. Love your enemies (Matthew 5:44) did not need a bishop’s approval to be what I said.

“Tradition is the word of God too.”

Your church teaches that Tradition and Scripture are to be received and honored with the same loyalty and reverence.²⁴

I had a sharp word about tradition once. I said it to religious teachers of my own people, in an argument inside my own tradition, and you should not hear it as a sentence about Jews. It is a sentence about what happens to any religion: you set aside the commandment of God, and hold tightly to the tradition of men (Mark 7:8), making void the word of God by your tradition, which you have handed down (Mark 7:13).

Your own church has shown you that its teaching can change. For most of its history it taught that the state may put people to death. In 2018 it changed its Catechism to say that the death penalty is inadmissible.²⁵ Your church calls this a development of its teaching, not a reversal. Still, it is a change, and it was right to make it. A tradition that can change is a tradition that can be tested, and I gave you the test: By their fruits you will know them (Matthew 7:16).

“This is my body. You can’t have him without the Mass.”

I did say it. I took bread at a supper with my friends, Judas among them, gave thanks, broke it, and said: This is my body which is given for you. Do this in memory of me (Luke 22:19).

I am not going to argue with you about what happens to the bread. I will tell you what the first people who did this were scolded for. The earliest account of the Lord’s supper is in a letter Paul wrote to Corinth, some twenty to twenty-five years after I died. It was a full meal, in a house. And Paul was angry, because the people who had plenty ate first, and the poor arrived to find nothing left: One is hungry, and another is drunken. He told them that this was not the Lord’s supper at all, and asked whether they meant to put them to shame who don’t have enough (1 Corinthians 11:20–22).

The supper was where the hungry were fed, at the same table as the rich. A Mass that leaves the hungry outside the door has kept the bread and lost the supper.

“Mary is the Mother of God. You can’t love the son and ignore the mother.”

Honor her. I did. She said yes: Behold, the servant of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word (Luke 1:38).

That she is the Mother of God was settled early, at the Council of Ephesus in 431, and that was a statement about who I am. But notice what has been said about her since, and when. That she was conceived without sin was defined as dogma in 1854. That she was taken body and soul into heaven was defined in 1950, the one time since 1870 that a pope is generally agreed to have used the power to speak without error.²⁶

And notice what she said herself. Her song, in the first chapter of Luke, is about the poor: He has put down princes from their thrones, and has exalted the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things. He has sent the rich away empty (Luke 1:52–53). When a woman in a crowd once called out a blessing on my mother’s womb, I answered: On the contrary, blessed are those who hear the word of God, and keep it (Luke 11:27–28). My mother heard it and kept it. Honor her by singing what she sang.

“Outside the Church there is no salvation.”

In 1302 Pope Boniface VIII put it in writing: it is altogether necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff.²⁷ Your church has softened that since. As early as 1863 Pius IX taught that people who are not to blame for not knowing the true religion can be saved. In 1964 the Second Vatican Council taught that people who, through no fault of their own, do not know me or my church, but seek God with a sincere heart and try to do his will, can be saved.²⁸

Good. Now read the only scene in which I described the sorting of the nations. No one is asked which church they belonged to. They are asked whether they fed the hungry and took in the stranger (Matthew 25:31–46). And remember the man my friends tried to stop, because he did not follow us (Mark 9:38–40).

If You Were Raised in It

You were probably baptized before you could speak. You may remember your First Communion, the clothes and the photographs, and the first time you knelt and told a priest your sins. Some of you loved it, and still do. Some of you left because of what men who held its titles did to children, and what other men did to hide it. The pope himself has written of both, the abuse and the silence that let it go on.²⁹

Nothing here asks you to be ashamed of where you came from, or to hate the people who raised you in it. Many of them showed you my face better than any argument could.

It only asks you to do what I asked of the lawyer: How do you read it? (Luke 10:26). Read my own words for yourself, without waiting for permission. If you still go to Mass, listen for them in the gospel reading, and notice which parts of the hour are mine. If what you find does not match what you were told, you are allowed to notice. That is not leaving me. It may be the first time you have heard me.

Check It Yourself

Read Matthew 16:13–23, then Mark 8:27–33. Write down what is in Matthew that is not in Mark.

Read Matthew 18:15–20. Notice who is given the power to bind and release.

Read Mark 10:35–45 and 1 Peter 5:1–3. Write down what each one says about leaders.

Read Mark 9:38–40. Write down why I would not let John stop the man.

Read 1 Corinthians 11:17–34. Find what made Paul angry about the Lord’s supper.

Read Luke 1:46–55, the song of Mary. List who is lifted up and who is pulled down.

Read Matthew 25:31–46. Count how many of the questions are about which church you belonged to.

Look up your own Catechism, paragraph 2447 (it is free online), and set its list beside Matthew 25:35–36.

The Short Version

• Catholic means universal. The Creed’s four marks, one, holy, catholic and apostolic, are tied to the Council of Constantinople in 381.
• The word your Bibles translate church appears in only two passages of the gospels, both in Matthew. What I preached was the kingdom.
• One: I prayed for unity, and stopped my friends from enforcing it. The empire enforced it: in 380 catholic became a legal name, with penalties for everyone else.
• Holy: I touched the unclean and forgave on the spot. Yearly confession to a priest was required from 1215, and priests’ marriages were declared invalid in 1139. Peter was married.
• Catholic: I sent my friends out with nothing. The popes ruled land as kings from 756 to 1870, leaned for centuries on a forgery, and gave Portugal and Spain papal grants over other peoples’ lands.
• Apostolic: I said it shall not be so among you. Rome had no single bishop until the 100s, and the pope was declared infallible in 1870.
• Your church kept the works of mercy and the preferential option for the poor. On the poor it has often been very close to me.
• The four marks describe the institution. None of them is the poor, the enemy, the stranger or the servant.
• The rock is only in Matthew, five verses before Get behind me, Satan, and binding and releasing went to all the disciples.
• The canon was defined as dogma in 1546. Tradition can change: the Catechism changed on the death penalty in 2018.
• The first Lord’s supper Paul describes was a meal, and the rich were rebuked for leaving the poor hungry.
• Mary’s song is about the hungry filled and the rich sent away empty.