Shameless Popery: Treating Jesus as a King Without a Kingdom

Shameless Popery: Treating Jesus as a King Without a Kingdom: One of the most important points to understand about Catholicism is that the truth of the Catholic Church flows from the truth of Jesus Christ. Her status is inexorably tied up with His. I've been reading John Allen's book-length interviews with Archbishop Dolan, A People of Hope. I'm excited to do a full review of it soon (it's a superb book), but I wanted to go ahead and highlight something that Abp. Dolan said, because I think it illustrates this point neatly:

Just as most people missed the divine in Jesus because of his humanity, so do most people miss Jesus in the Church because of our earthiness, because we are clumsy, we are sinful, we are awkward. But this is how Jesus continues to radiate his grace and mercy, through the Church. That’s the leap of faith today. I think Father Ron Rolheiser says it well: We want a king without the kingdom; we want a shepherd without the other sheep; we want a father, with us as the only child; we want a general without an army; we want to believe without belonging.

There are two points to make about this: first, that the success of the Church flows from the success of Christ; and second, that we need to change our thinking about salvation.

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Read on...Joe's post sums up so succinctly why we need Jesus's Church, and the fact that the decision is not up to us!