So what IS the Universal Church?

We have to begin by saying that there was a time when the Catholic Church WAS the Universal Church. Originally, the word "catholic" meant "universal" - and most people still think it means that - but when the term was coined by St. Ignatius of Antioch, it was really a kind of compound word he created to mean "the whole Church," and he used it, not in the sense of including everyone who called themselves Christian, but in an exclusive sense, to mean the mainstream, orthodox, Church, as opposed to the heresies on the fringes. So it always meant the TRUE Church, as opposed to the heresies.

Having said that, with the Novatian schism (temporarily) and then the schism after the Council of Chalcedon in 451, everything changes, because now it is possible to be Christian, but not Catholic. In other words, it's possible to be within the Universal Church (the mystical Body of Christ) but not in the Catholic Church (the true Church). The documents of Vatican II clarify how this is possible, without compromising the fact that the Catholic Church is THE Church, and yet allowing that non-Catholic Christians may find salvation outside of the Catholic Church - but only because, and to the extent that, their expression of Christianity remains like, and therefore "subsists" under the umbrella of the Catholic/True Church. I won't go into more detail about that because it gets pretty complicated, but you can read up on that on your own if you want to. The point is that there IS such a thing as non-Catholic Christians. You already knew that, but there is a lot of nuance required to explain it.

So at first, my producer was reluctant to have me say or imply that the Catholic Church is not the Universal Church. But of course it can't be. To be super blunt about it, the Catholic Church is a subset of the Universal Church. Even before Chalcedon, when the legalization of Christianity led to a lot of people joining the Church for the wrong reasons (networking, to imitate the emperors, political favors, etc.), St. Augustine criticized the "fakes" - those members of the Church whom we might call nominal Christians (in name only), and he imagined this idea of a Church within a Church. For him, the Catholic Church was the bigger circle, and the true Christians made up an "invisible" Church, which was a subset of the Catholic Church. This idea would eventually evolve into the Protestant concept of a visible and invisible Church, but again, the point there is that the visible Church is the bigger circle, and within that visible Church, is a subset - a remnant - of real Christians. So for example, some Protestant groups use this to explain why not everyone is Calvinist, or Baptist. As if to say, the other Protestants (and may be even some Catholics!) are in the visible Church, but only our denomination is the invisible Church. And of course, the implication of that is that it is only those in the invisible Church who are saved.

So there are problems with the concept of an invisible Church as a remnant, in distinction from the visible Church, and yet it has to be true that the mystical Body of Christ, the Universal Church, is not the same as the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church is a subset of the Universal Church - the difference (or one difference) from the Protestant version of this is that we are not saying that only the inner circle is going on to salvation - though to be fair, we are saying that if you don't want to risk going to hell, you're much better off within the inner circle of the Catholic Church.

Therefore the question of who is Christian, is a bigger question than who is Catholic. There are Christians who are not Catholic - some of these have valid sacraments (especially thinking of the Eucharist) and many do not. So there are differing degrees of likeness to the True Church (which of course you know, I would define as the historic Church, might I say, the ORIGINAL Church, which is the Catholic Church). Some of these non-Catholic Christians have apostolic succession, and therefore a valid ordination, but most do not. Some of them even rebaptize people who have been validly baptized and by doing so commit an act of schism of against the Church and blasphemy against God (see my video and podcast episodes on rebaptism for the details on that).

SO these are the issues in the question of the Universal Church. Coming up next, I'll post the original version of the script for this part of the latest episode, and then for comparison, what the producer asked me to change it to.

Please share your thoughts!

Jim