As Catholics, it’s easy to point out how divided Protestantism is, with all of its different denominations. But what about all of the divisions within Catholicism between “conservative” and “liberal” Catholics, Traditionalists, Charismatics, or a thousand other possible splits? As it turns out, the objection that Catholics are just as divided as Protestants isn’t a new one… and nor is the problem of unity within the one Church. So here’s how St. John Henry Newman, Cardinal Ratzinger, and St. Paul responded to this argument.

Transcript:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So this is the second of two videos I’m doing on the theme of Christian Unity because today is Holy Thursday and on Holy Thursday at the Last Supper, Jesus prays for Christian unity in a prayer I don’t think we as Christians give enough thought or attention to on the whole. So that prayer, as I mentioned last week, is in John 17 in which Jesus prays, “I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one even as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they also may be in us so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.”

So Christian unity, as I pointed out last week, is important for evangelization. People are not going to want to convert to Christianity if all they see of Christianity is Christians fighting with one another. That’s something that is glaringly obvious. You can talk to plenty of non-Christians who can confirm it. You can talk to converts who are afraid of converting because of all the infighting, and yet we still ignore it because we don’t want to stop our fighting. Jesus goes on to say or pray, “The glory which thou hast given me I have given to them that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me. They may become perfectly one so the world may know that thou hast sent me and has loved them even as thou hast loved me.”

Now, I pointed out last week that this is in my view, really a death knell for Protestant theology in this sense, that Jesus has called us to unity and elsewhere he calls us to truth. And this is not something that is like, “It’d be nice if you guys had this, but it’s not super important.” It’s like, “No, no, if we are not working for unity, we are not working in accordance with Jesus,” because he views this as essential and essential for the spread of the gospel as we just saw. And at the Last Supper with very few things that he gives us in the scheme of things, the thing he gives future generations is a prayer that we’ll be one. He also gives us something else at the Last Supper, the Eucharist, which is going to be really connected to that oneness, but we’ll get to that.

But he calls us to be one and he also calls us to be united in the truth. And the point I made last week, which I’m not going to rehash anymore, don’t worry, is that you need something like an infallible church. You need some kind of infallibility because if you leave it to people and say, “You guys need to all agree and you need to be united and you all need to have the right answer,” you can leave people alone for 2000 years and they’re never going to all agree. I just was listening to a fascinating podcast about AI alignment fears. This is going to get super nerdy for about 30 seconds. They put top critics and scholars and theorists who are really worried about AI, and I think they spent 18 hours with top critics and theorists who are much more sanguine, who are much less worried about the risks of AI. And they had them talk for 18 hours together and they barely budged their opinions.

They respected one another. They could accurately say what the other side thought and why, but they just did not agree. And so theology is like that, where we just have to talk it out and maybe we’ll agree on this eventually, it’s not going to happen. You’re never going to have a single Protestant denomination that all just agrees one with another. And you don’t have to be Protestant more than 30 seconds to see that. You don’t have to know much about the history of Protestantism to see that. But if you know anything about the history of Protestantism, you can see that it’s fracturing more and more and more and more. And that’s not because they’re just like bad people, it’s because they’re pursuing truth and have given up on unity because they can’t figure out how to have truth and unity.

But if you can trust the church, which Ephesians 4 and plenty of other places in the New Testament point you to, if you can trust that it is, as St. Paul says, “the pillar and foundation of truth,” then you can have unity and truth together in the church because you’re united in the truth. But if you don’t have infallibility, you don’t have anywhere to direct all of those energies towards unity or any answer to settle upon that everyone can agree is the truth. Now, having said all of that, I know I just rehashed the entire last episode, the objection that I anticipate and have gotten is that, “Well, that’s easy for you to say as a Catholic, but look around the Catholic Church. Catholics are massively divided on a lot of issues.”

And on this, I would say, “Correct. That’s right.” And that is a problem to a certain extent. This is also not a new problem. But does this problem invalidate everything I just said about unity in the truth in the Catholic Church? No, but to see why I want to step back and look at the history of this problem and the first place I’m going to go is actually in 1850 because John Henry Newman, now St. John Henry Newman, he was a well-known, very prominent Anglican, was called Anglo Catholic, like an Anglican trying to preserve the Catholic roots of Anglicanism, who in his early forties converted to Catholicism.

And so roughly equal spans of his life were spent as an Anglican and then as a Catholic. And he was a brilliant writer. And in 1850, I think six years after he became Catholic, he wrote a book called Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching. So he’s just trying to say, “Look, I was an Anglican, I get it. I know some problems you’ve got with Catholicism,” and then speaking into those objections. And so in volume one of that, he says, “It’s well known in controversy, when Protestant apologists make arguments against the church, to say that the Catholic Church has not any real unity more than Protestantism for if Lutherans are divided in creed from Calvinists and both from Anglicans and the various denominations of dissenters…” Those are the groups kind of split off from Anglicanism. “Each has its own doctrine in its own interpretation. Yet Dominicans and Franciscans, Jesuits and Janissanists have had their quarrels too.”

And Newman says, we’d go even more than that to say, “At this very moment, the greatest alienation, rivalry, and difference of opinion exists among the members of the Catholic priesthood. So the church is but nominally one.” Meaning one in name only. “And her pretended unity resolves itself into nothing more specious than an awkward and imperfect uniformity.” So that is an interesting objection and Newman is going to point us in the direction of how to answer it, and he’s going to look particularly at two types of divisions, divisions over non-essential issues and dissent over essential issues. But before we get into his answer and before we kind of plot out a course with that, I want to turn the clock back even further because yeah, it’s true, there was a lot of infighting in the church in 1850, but you can go back even further than that to about 50, that is the year 50, and find massive infighting.

And so the first part of the answer we’re going to see is that the kind of unity Jesus is talking about coexists even in the midst of Christian infighting, that there is a kind of unity, a sacramental unity, a oneness in the true church that exists even as members of that church are fighting. And we get this from the pages of scripture, specifically we get this from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. In 1 Corinthians chapter one, verse 10, Paul says, “I appeal to you brethren by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that all of you agree and that there be no dissensions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.” That is what if you’re a Christian you should be praying for, striving for, pushing for. And if you’re settling for something less than that, you are settling for something less than what you’re called to by the gospel.

But then Paul describes the problems in Corinth. He says, “For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there’s quarreling among you, my brethren.” What I mean is that each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or, ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or, ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or, ‘I belong to Christ.’ And Paul responds to this and says, “Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” So the whole idea of denominationalism and factions and all of this, of belonging to a different party that’s a rival to some other party, that’s not what we’re called to as Christians. If you are a part of a church that’s named after somebody that isn’t Jesus Christ, that should be a red flag.

Like everything he says about the party of Paul and Apollos could also be applied to the party of Calvin and Luther and all of that, that kind of denominationalism. But even if you are not in a group like that, you could be like, “Oh, I’m an non-denominational. We just follow Jesus. I’m just the party of Jesus.” Well, Paul called that out in 1 Corinthians 1 as well, that even if you claim to just be the party of Jesus, you’re still dividing Jesus. And so that kind of infighting exists in Protestant denominations, in the Catholic Church, and all the way back into the first century in this church in Corinth. And yet despite this or in the midst of this, St. Paul can say to these same Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 10, verse 17, that because there is one bread or literally because there’s one loaf, “We who are many are one body for we all partake of the one loaf.”

So the Eucharist… And it’s very clear from 1 Corinthians 10, he’s referring here to the Eucharist, which he talks about as a participation in the body and blood of Christ. The Eucharist makes us one even when we are getting on each other’s nerves, even when we’re fighting against each other. There is a kind of oneness that is not of human origin because think about it, Jesus in John 17 is praying for union, which should be a constant reminder that this is not something we can achieve simply on our own. Now, our efforts can help or hinder the cause of unity, but there’s a kind of unity that God can give that we cannot provide for ourselves and we’ll return to that point at the end. But in that sense, no matter how much Catholics may be at each other’s throats, one with another, we don’t want to overlook this true unity we have sacramentally in the Eucharist, that we don’t have with those who don’t have the Eucharist, the kind of unity St. Paul is talking about in 1 Corinthians 10:17 exists between Catholics.

If you’ve got two Catholics and both of them are receiving the Eucharist worthily, even if they’re furious with each other, whether that be a personal squabble, whether that be a theological dispute, whether that be a political problem, whatever it is, there is a unity between those two people that you don’t want to miss. And I think this is something that… Because look, we live in an age in which politics controls everything and it’s really tempting to view everything through left, right, liberal, conservative, Republican, Democrat. And the problem is you can fall into this pattern of thinking, “Oh, the non-Christian, the non-believer, the non-baptized person, the person who doesn’t have the Eucharist who agrees with me on politics is closer to me than the person who is Catholic, in a state of grace, but who disagrees with me on politics.”

And that I would suggest is a problem, that you’re losing sight of the things that create true unity. It’s not political alignment, it’s not voting for the same guy, it’s not even having the same kind of moral values in the political space. There’s something deeper that’s of divine origin, which is this sacramental and divinely given unity. So that’s the first point. I don’t want to overlook that, but now I want to go back to what Newman’s talking about because he’s going to talk about unity on essentials versus non-essentials and disagreements on essentials and non-essentials. As we turn back to Newman, I want to highlight early Reformation Latin mantra that was really… It kind of caught on with Catholics and Protestants like this, and this is a rough English translation. “In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, charity”. So on essential doctrines, it’s important that we be united.

We can’t just agree to disagree about something like the Trinity or about something like, “Did Jesus rise from the dead?” Those are not okay things for Christians to just say, “You do your thing, I’ll do mine.” It’s important the church have one position on this and probably important even to expel members who don’t agree to that position, essential unity. But then the second thing is in non-essential issues, Christian liberty should be the norm, that on things you don’t have to agree upon, there should be plenty of space for safe disagreement. That can actually be a really good way of even moving the conversation forward on things where there maybe isn’t one Christian answer, which is going to be as we’re going to see a lot of life, including a lot of things in the realm of theology.

Third, in all of this stuff, whether you’re talking essentials or non-essentials, it needs to be governed by Christian charity. If you are not approaching this with love, you are an impediment to unity, even if you’re right about everything that you believe in, maybe even especially if you’re right about everything you believe in. Because if you’re right and a jerk, it makes it that much harder for the person to accept the truth. Now, my focus here is on this disunity in the Catholic Church, but as I said, this kind of formulation, “In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, charity,” is something Catholics and Protestants tend to agree on largely.

The problem is within Protestantism there’s no way of even knowing what are essentials and what aren’t essentials. So this is another area where I think it’s a false equation to say Catholics are as disunified as Protestants. So Dr. Doug Beaumont, a friend of mine back in, I want to say like 2012 or something, wrote a piece called Theological Abstrucity, Protestantism’s Glaring failure. Now Doug Beaumont is a former Protestant who was studied under some of the best-known minds in Evangelical Protestantism, and one of the things he came away with is in Protestantism there’s a huge amount of infighting where it’s not just that Protestants don’t agree with one another, it’s that they don’t agree which of the following things should even be considered essential or non-essential doctrine.

So even if we all agree, “Hey, let’s be unified on the essentials, let’s agree to disagree on the non-essentials,” which category does abortion go in? A lot of Christians today would say, “It’s an essential doctrine.” Christianity today in the 1970s was pro-choice until the Catholic Church really pushed the Evangelical movement into a more pro-life direction. Is that something Christians can agree to disagree on? Is it essential or non-essential? Or take Baptism. Baptism is an extremely important doctrine if you’re a Lutheran. It’s a symbol that’s kind of important if you’re Baptist. I’m oversimplifying a little bit in both of those. But how important is it to get baptism right? Is this something we can agree to disagree on or is this something that to be an Orthodox Christian, you have to get this right? Take Communion. There’s massive disagreements over what the Lord’s Supper or the Eucharist means, what the theology is of that.

And this is, as St. Paul seems to point to, a linchpin of unity. So is this an essential doctrine we all have to agree on or should we allow the wide plurality of theologies that we see in Protestantism? Or take Dispensationalism. If you are someone who is a Dispensationalist, the idea of rightly dividing the word of God according to Dispensationalist tenets is a really essential way of understanding Scripture. But most everybody else would say, “This is a non-essential and not even true.” Or take evolution or take free will or take God’s attributes like, “Is divine simplicity real?” Or take the existence of hell. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, I’ve been going A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H. I’m just choosing one from Doug. He has a list of 75 of these. Justification is iūstitia in Latin. He didn’t have an I, so we’ll go with justification.

Can you disagree with forensic justification and be a Christian in good standing or is this an essential doctrine? If it’s an essential doctrine that everyone has to agree on to be a good Christian, there may not be any good Christians before the 16th century. That’s a problem. If it’s not an essential doctrine, what does that mean for these kind of Reformation debates? And the point here being I’m not trying to solve these doctrines, I’m simply holding these up to say to even move forward with the idea that in essentials we need unity, and in non-essentials, liberty, you kind of need a church to be able to tell you which things are… We would use the phrase de fide, matters of faith. That just means these are essential doctrines. This is part of the faith and you need to believe in this, whereas other things are of a lower certainty or a lower importance and you’re given freedom to agree or disagree.

So the Catholic Church is actually uniquely positioned to live out this thing that both Catholics and Protestants want to live out, which is we want to be unified on essential doctrines and we want to give each other breathing room on things that aren’t essential because if I’m left to my own devices to figure out which things are which, you know what’s going to happen? My passion projects, the stuff I’ve been reading about, the stuff I’m just super interested in, that’s going to rise to the top of the list and my personal interpretation of the stuff I’m really passionate about suddenly becomes the essential doctrine everyone has to agree with. It’s no longer, “Do you agree with 2000 years of Christianity?” It’s just, “Do you agree with me?” And that’s a problem, right? And I would suggest that we see this all over the place, both in Protestantism and in Catholicism when we’re not being careful, that you can say, “If you want to be a good Christian, you have to agree with my reading on Genesis.”

“What creed, what counsel says this?” “None. But I’m really convinced I’m reading Genesis right and you’ve got to read it the same way I do.” And this causes in many cases tremendous spiritual damage because I’m forcing someone into a false unity by forcing them on a non-essential to agree with me and to be unified with me and treating myself as the infallible church in magisterium. So this is the roadmap. Catholics and Protestants, broadly speaking, agree with this roadmap, but I would suggest only Catholics actually have a realistic way of moving forward with it because we can distinguish which things are essentials and which things are non-essentials. Okay, so for the remainder of this video, I’m going to basically make three points. I already made the first of them, that Christian unity is divine and sacramental, but second, that turning towards the non-essentials, Christian unity permits disagreement on non-essentials and we’ll get into how we navigate that and why it’s okay that sometimes Catholics are divided on even important issues, that that’s not the kind of thing that Jesus or St. Paul or anywhere in scripture is trying to prohibit.

The third and final point is going to be that church discipline and disunity should be distinguished and that’ll make more sense when we get there and then I’ll end with kind of the call for charity. So that’s where we’re going. So first, “In non-essentials, liberty.” Now I realize I’m switching the order of the Latin phrase, but this is where I think it makes more sense to go because this is what John Henry Newman goes to first because if the question is, “Well, why are Catholics so divided?” His answer is basically, “Well, because we’re human beings, because Catholics and Protestants are cut from the same clay.” In his words he says, “When then in it is said that she, the church, makes her members one, this implies that by nature they’re not one and would not become one.” You don’t need Jesus to pray for unity if Christians are naturally just going to be united.

If everyone, given enough time, just gravitates towards the right answer, then you don’t need to pray for that. It’ll just happen. But that’s of course not how human nature works. Human nature works the exact way we’ve seen Protestantism work for 500 years. People become more and more divided. That’s normal and natural and Catholics are the same kind of creatures. As Newman says, “Viewed in themselves, the children of the church are not of a different nature from the Protestants around them. They’re of the very same nature.” We are as prone by disposition, by nature, by temperament to conflict and division as any Protestant, as any atheist, as anybody else. The only thing that checks that is grace and the role of the church. And so Newman says, “Left himself each Catholic likes and would maintain his own opinion and his private judgment just as much as a Protestant. What’s more than that, he has it and he maintains it just so far as the church does not by the authority of Revelation supersede it.”

Look, you’ve got your own favorite restaurant, your own favorite way of getting from home to work. You’ve got your own way of folding clothes, maybe not the same as your spouse. It maybe causes conflict in your home. That’s not me speaking personally, but I know there are a couples for that’s an issue. “He folds towels differently,” or whatever. You’ve got your own way of doing things, your own beliefs about the best way to do things, your own approaches to all sorts of things in life. And it’s actually one of the things that we tend to really like about life. And Jesus is not, in the name of Christian unity, trying to quash that and the Catholic Church is not trying to quash that. In large realms of life, that thing that you really like, you’re permitted to do that.

And Christian unity is not saying, “We all have to agree on the favorite restaurant.” It’s not saying, “We all have to do things the exact same way,” or, “We all have to the exact same kind of art or the same kind of music.” That is not what the church is trying to do. Now you’ll find people in the church who try to insist on a particular way of doing things and insist that it’s their way or the highway, but that’s th... Read more on Catholic.com