Jesus Christ is the universal man, the summit and definition of what human being is. He is the properly catholic being. Life with him means communion with all mankind. He is now forming us into catholic beings, people who are defined, by participation in him, by fellowship with every other human being. The Christian life – the apprenticeship we serve – opens us out from our present incurved state to bring us into relationship with every other living thing. This means that the Christian life and faith is intrinsically about catholicity, thus ecumenism, the reconciliation of every household and community with every other, is what the gospel is. In the apprenticeship of this Christian life we learn to reach out to the whole of the rest of the Church, indeed to the future completition of the Church, when Christ shall be all in all.
You are only a catholic as you strain towards reconciliation with all other churches, and treat them not only as wayward and sometimes willfully disobedient, who you must mourn and pray for, and mention in your intercessions that precede every eucharist. But you must also treat them as those who have some part of the gospel, and some ‘portion’ of Christ and so as those you must learn from and submit to. Being catholic certainly means being under the authority and Magisterium of the Roman Church, treating its teaching with respect and being formed by it. But you must also be under the authority of every other part of the church (no matter how abusive that authority sometimes is), and everywhere look for Christ and ask to be renewed and reformed by him.
I am not a Roman Catholic, but an Anglican, a Reformed Anglican (‘catholic evangelical’ for convenience). The term ‘reformed’ can only refer to the catholic church and so to the determination together that the Church must repent and be disciplined, reformed and renewed by Christ its head. But I think it is right always to wonder whether I should be more ‘Roman’, whether I should convert to ‘Roman Catholic’. Of course this is not a comfortable place to be. Of course this means many contradictions. You may change my mind on this. Of course.
