“For, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.
For the scripture says, “No one who believes in him will be put to shame.” For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all, enriching all who call upon him. For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
Behind the dogma, the popes, and the supposed red tape of Catholicism.
One of the things I find interesting about being Catholic is how complicated people sometimes imagine our faith to be. From the outside, the Catholic Church can look like an enormous institution standing between a person and Jesus Christ. There are popes, bishops, priests, councils, doctrines, dogmas, traditions, canon laws, sacraments, and two thousand years of history.
To some, it looks like red tape.
A religious system full of requirements that must somehow be navigated before a person can reach God.
And I understand why someone might see it that way.
But the longer I live the Catholic faith, the more I find myself returning to something remarkably simple.
Jesus Christ is Lord. He died for our sins. He rose from the dead. And through Him, we have the hope of eternal life.
That's it. That's the heart of everything.
Not because the rest of Catholic teaching is unimportant, but because everything else begins and ends with Him.
We Already Have a Profession of Faith
Every Sunday at Mass, Catholics stand together and profess the Creed.
We believe in one God, the Father almighty.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God.
We profess His Incarnation, His suffering, His death, and His Resurrection.
We confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
There it is.
The Christian faith, professed openly, week after week, by ordinary people in ordinary churches all over the world.
You don't need to understand every theological controversy of the fourth century to begin believing it.
You don't need to have read every Church Father, defended every Catholic doctrine, or memorized the Catechism.
You begin with faith in Jesus Christ.
And the Church gives us the words to profess that faith together.
What About All the Rules?
This is where I think people sometimes misunderstand Catholicism.
They see the teachings of the Church as obstacles placed between themselves and Jesus.
But the Church does not exist to make Christ harder to reach.
She exists to proclaim Him, preserve what He taught, and lead people into communion with Him.
The sacraments are not bureaucratic requirements invented to complicate salvation. They are gifts of grace.
Confession is not a wall separating us from forgiveness. It is an encounter with Christ's mercy.
The Eucharist is not another religious obligation added to Christianity. It is Christ giving Himself to His people.
And Sunday Mass?
For all the complexity people associate with Catholicism, the ordinary Christian life is beautifully straightforward.
Believe what we profess. Worship God. Receive His grace. Repent when we fall. Love God and our neighbor. And keep following Jesus.
This does not mean salvation is something we accomplish by showing up at church or reciting the correct words.
Salvation is God's gift, won for us by Jesus Christ. Faith must be living, not merely spoken.
But neither does it mean that following Christ needs to become an endless intellectual obstacle course.
The Church Is Not the Competition
I spent plenty of time asking questions about Christianity.
Why this Bible? Why these books? Why bishops? Why priests? Why the sacraments? What did Christians believe before there were printed Bibles, denominations, or the theological arguments we have today?
Those questions matter.
And I still enjoy studying them.
But I have also come to appreciate something about the Catholic Church that is easy to miss when we spend so much time debating her.
She has been handing on the same central profession of faith for centuries.
Christ died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.
Every Sunday, we return to that mystery.
And when I walk into Mass, I am not being asked to solve two thousand years of Christian history before I can worship God.
I am invited to worship the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.
To hear His Word.
To receive His grace.
To be nourished, again and again.
Simple Does Not Mean Shallow
There is a difference between a simple faith and a shallow one.
The Creed can be professed in a few minutes, yet its mysteries can occupy a lifetime of prayer, study, and contemplation.
We can spend years trying to understand the Resurrection, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, or the promise of eternal life.
And we should keep learning.
But we should never confuse the depth of Christianity with an impossibly complicated entrance into it.
A child can genuinely believe in Jesus Christ without understanding everything the Church teaches.
And a theologian who has spent fifty years studying the faith still kneels before the same mystery.
Neither saves himself through the amount he knows.
Both depend entirely on the grace of God.
Come to Mass. Profess the Faith. Live It.
Sometimes I think we Catholics can make our own faith seem more complicated than it needs to be.
We get caught up defending every doctrine, answering every objection, and explaining every historical controversy.
There is a place for all of that.
But the purpose of apologetics is not to win an argument about the Church.
It is to help someone encounter Jesus Christ and the fullness of the faith He gave us.
In the end, our invitation is remarkably simple.
Come to Mass on Sunday.
Listen to the Gospel.
Profess the Creed.
Pray.
Receive the sacraments as you are prepared to receive them.
Let Christ change your life.
And when you fall, repent and return to Him.
The Church is not a maze we must escape to find Jesus.
She is the home in which we are taught to know Him, love Him, and follow Him.
The faith is simple enough to begin today and deep enough to spend eternity discovering.
And perhaps that is the beauty of Catholicism.
We do not have to understand everything before we begin.
We simply have to begin, trusting the One who has already come looking for us.
Living on Faith — Wednesday Formation