A Catholic's Motive for Evangelization

Catholics cannot pretend not to believe that the great gift of truth that God intends for his Church is, in fact, less than it is. So what does the Catholic Church claim? That, as the much-misunderstood and much-debated document Dominus Iesus ("Jesus the Lord") said, “There can properly speaking be only one church of Jesus Christ because there is only one Christ.” There is only one head; therefore, there can be only one body, in the full theological and ecclesiological understanding of the Church. And what does the Catholic Church say about itself? The Second Vatican Council very deliberately and after much debate said that the church of Jesus Christ subsists in the Catholic Church in a singular way, in a way that is not true of others, except, as we shall see, with respect to the Orthodox. It did not say, “The church of Jesus Christ is the Catholic Church” or, obversely, that “the Catholic Church is the church of Jesus Christ” but that the church of Jesus Christ subsists in the Catholic Church. Do you want to know where the church of Jesus Christ, as Christ intended it, apostolically ordered, and so understood from the beginning, from the first and second and third centuries, from the very constituting and self-defining moments—do you want to know where that is to be found? It is to be found in the Catholic Church. To put it differently, what does the Catholic Church claim? That it is the church of Jesus Christ most fully and rightly ordered through time. So says the great constitution on the church, Lumen Gentium (“Light to the Nations”). It follows that if one believes what the Catholic church says of itself to be true, then he is obliged to enter into and remain in communion with the Catholic Church.
—Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, “That They May Be One: Prospects for Unity in the Twenty-First Century,” Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, July/August, 2003