What’s Different about the Catholic Religion?

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 11, 2012

I’ve argued repeatedly that the key to Catholicism, in comparison with every other religion on earth, is its authority principle. That is, only the Catholic Church claims that it is an infallible custodian of Divine Revelation, such that in every age it can preach Jesus Christ “the same yesterday, today and forever” (Heb 13:8). Thanks (once again) to Fr. Saward’s anthology of The Spiritual Tradition of Catholic England, we find that the great G. K. Chesterton expressed the same thing in his wonderfully inimitable fashion, with particular reference to Protestantism:

At the moment when Religion lost touch with Rome, it changed instantly and internally, from top to bottom, in its very substance and the stuff of which it was made. It changed in substance; it did not necessarily change in form or features or externals. It might do the same things; but it could not be the same thing. It might go on saying the same things; but it was not the same thing that was saying them. At the very beginning, indeed, the situation was almost exactly like that. Henry VIII was a Catholic in everything except that he was not a Catholic. He observed everything down to the last bead and candle; he accepted everything down to the last deduction from a definition; he accepted everything except Rome. And in that instant of refusal, his religion became a different religion; a different sort of religion; a different sort of thing. In that instant it began to change; and it has not stopped changing yet.

[This is taken from The Well and the Shallows, one of Chesterton’s last books, regarded by many as his best collection of essays.]