A City Set on a Hill Cannot Be Hidden

The Perpetual Visibility of the Catholic Church Under the Pope

Shortly before the Ascension, Our Lord said to the disciples, Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world. Since this is a divine promise, it has been not only kept, but superabundantly kept, and so Christ remains with us in more than one way. He is substantially present wherever the Blessed Eucharist is consecrated and preserved. As regards His divine nature, He is present with the Father and their Holy Spirit in the soul of every person on earth who is in a state of grace. By His power, He is as intimately present to the whole earthly Church as the head is to the body, and so He keeps her in being until the end of time. This last manner of presence gives rise to what is called the indefectibility of the Church.

Theologians debate the details of this indefectibility. But all of them agree that it embraces at least three things: the faith, the sacraments, and the hierarchy.

(1) The faith delivered once for all to the saints (Jude 3) is preserved in every age. While every believer has his part to play in this work of preservation, the principal place belongs by divine decree to the bishops, the successors of the apostles. As St Irenaeus of Lyon declared in the second century, the bishops who succeed to the apostles and to the sees that they founded have been granted “the sure charism of the truth”. These bishops maintain this faith not only by their public preaching and writing but also by the documents to which they are publicly pledged: above all, Holy Scripture, but also the creeds and definitions of the councils and the popes.¹

(2) The seven sacraments, likewise, are preserved by Christ until the end of time. He causes them to be in every age the unfailingly efficacious means by which God is glorified and human beings are both set free from sin and sanctified for eternal life within the kingdom of heaven. God doth not give the Spirit by measure, says St John the Baptist, speaking of baptism and the Son of God (Jn. 3:34). We can understand this to mean, among other things, that however many people have already received grace through baptism and the other sacraments, Christ can always give more grace; and this He does, whenever those who receive them put forward no hindrance.

(3) Thirdly, the hierarchy of bishops in union with each other, and united to St Peter and his successors as their earthly head, has been preserved by Christ since His Ascension and will remain intact until His return at the end of time. As the word ‘hierarchy’, literally ‘sacred rule’, implies, these bishops have the right to govern the Christian people, and the baptised have the corresponding duty to obey their bishop in sacred matters. The New Testament asserts this duty in clear words: Obey your prelates and be subject to them (Heb. 13:17).

We should note that these three elements of indefectibility are not only preserved, but preserved within the Catholic Church. The doctrine of indefectibility does not simply state that some people on earth will always be professing the true faith, administering valid sacraments, and possessed of episcopal orders. It states that the Catholic Church will always be professing the true faith, administering the sacraments, and structured by the episcopacy and the papacy. And the Catholic Church is an empirically identifiable organisation, by which I mean that it can be distinguished from other societies by the application of criteria accessible to the senses, even by a person without faith. From this point of view, the Catholic Church is no different from the Southern Baptist Convention, FIFA, or the Locomotive Club of Great Britain.

The criterion by which we may identify the Catholic Church is the papacy; she is the society governed by the man who succeeds to St Peter, according to the norms in force at the time of the succession. In this way, the Church in 2026 is one and the same society as the body of disciples that witnessed the Ascension on Mount Olivet almost two thousand years before.

Where the Catholic Church differs from the Southern Baptist Convention or FIFA is that it has a divine promise of perpetuity; which means, since it is a visible society, perpetual visibility.

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