What is it about the Catholic Church that makes it unique among all the other Christian churches? Is it belief in Jesus? No, they all have that. Is it its apostolicity? No, the Orthodox have that. Is it valid sacraments? No, the Orthodox have that as well. What about unbroken, unchanging teaching? No: the Church has taught different things in the past. So what’s unique? I’ve asked myself this question a lot lately. But going back to the Apostle’s Creed, the earliest of the Christian creeds, I read “I believe in … the holy catholic church”. So that’s it, then? Not quite.

Names can tell us a lot, but they don’t tell us everything. How many countries are there, for instance that are called, “Democratic People’s Republic,” which are anything but? There are also churches that call themselves the “Church of God,” but that doesn’t serve as proof that it is, in fact, God’s church. In the case of the Catholic Church, then, it seems sensible to do a little etymological research. The word “catholic” comes from the Greek καθολικός (katholikos), which means “universal”. The word itself echoes Christ’s commission to make disciples of all nations: he charged the Church with a mission that is universal in scope. (cf. Matt. 28:19) The word “catholic” appears again in the Nicene Creed as one of the four marks of the Church: “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic”. But as this mission has carried those who called themselves Christians to every corner of the earth, the question of how they should approach other cultures has arisen.

In Canada, for instance, during the unfortunate period of our history when the Church was involved in the residential school system, students were given European names to replace their indigenous one. But are we called to bring our faith to others or our culture? Are the two mutually exclusive? Our faith tells us that it should be spread amongst the nations, but it does not specify in what manner, which has led to all sorts of atrocities such as this.

One individual who I’ve come to admire ever since I read of him is the Jesuit Matteo Ricci. A controversial figure to some, he set out to preach the Gospel in China, where there was (and still is) a culture quite different to that of his European homeland. To meet the people he came to serve, he donned Confucian robes, walked among the intelligentsia of his new country, and learned where they were coming from. In doing so, he discovered that the land he had encountered was not quite so foreign to the Gospel as one might think. After all, it’s no secret that Christianity and European culture are so desperately entwined with one another that he endeavoured to separate the kernel of the Christian message from its cultural attire. To what extent he did this, I will not say here, as I have much still to learn about this man’s life, but I do believe it is an activity worth emulating in our work as a Church.

In his shorter work on the sacraments, Louis-Marie Chauvet talks about sacraments as symbols (in the proper sense, i.e., participating in the reality to which they point), and places them in ritual action. In order for ritual action to have any meaning, it must be intelligible. That is why Catholics can attend adoration, and see something more than a consecrated host in a monstrance is because that is a symbol intelligible to us. For the same reason, that is why some don’t see any meaning in coronation ceremonies, and why a fist bump is a friendly expression in one country and an hostility in the next. Because while a symbol participates in a reality, it must also point towards it. How strange it is, then, for there to be “Roman” Catholics in a country in which a Roman has never set foot!

Why is Christianity losing followers in the West? People have posited many reasons for this trend, and many of them are valid. However, I would argue a further point: Christianity is not simply losing people because they disagree with her teachings, but because its expression doesn’t speak to them. What’s interesting is that it’s not as if spirituality itself is dying: there are far more New-agers in the West now than ever before! The question for the New Evangelisation, then, is just like the question of evangelisation in general: how does one get Christianity to speak to people in their own contexts, European or otherwise? How do we attempt to, like Matteo Ricci, separate the kernel from what clothes it, and slip it into something different that is more recognisable to others? This is the trouble with the universality of the Church, which I believe is Catholicism’s most unique trait, despite how often we have failed to cultivate it. For on the one hand, we are meant to conquer far off lands like the Romans, but we are not meant to conquer like the Romans did, imposing anything more than the idea of Rome and what is good and true about it. This is the task of evangelisation and inculturation, as I see it, and until we realise that, we are perhaps not quite as catholic as we would like to think.