My dear Roman Catholics,

You have to love your church or else you’re not really in one.

I say that Christ is for us. He is my righteousness. All the striving of human hands, all the pious resolutions, all the white-knuckled moral rigor, cannot raise a single sinner from the dead. The verdict that acquits—spoken once for all on the hill outside Jerusalem—reaches us today from beyond ourselves, a word like light breaking the long, dark spell of our guilt. This is the bedrock: justification remains wholly extra nos, outside of us, the finished work of another—Christ crucified, Christ risen. We are clothed in His righteousness, not our own.

But a word that raises the dead does not leave the grave unshaken. The Spirit who joins us to the risen Lord never leaves the justified believer solitary. That declaration from beyond the grave is the very life of the one who uttered it. “I have been crucified with Christ… and Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20) is as real now as Calvary was then.

The same Spirit who binds us to Christ inevitably binds us to Christ’s people. Scripture speaks of that bond not as a sentiment but as fruit—“faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6); “we know we have passed from death to life because we love the brothers” (1 John 3:14). The one made right with God is drawn into communion with those likewise reconciled. We do not drift alone through the pews, sealed off by invisible partitions of self-interest and private belief. We are members of one body, each living nerve-end connected to the same Head, feeling the pulse of the same blood.

This means that persistent disdain for the local church—a refusal to love, serve, or suffer alongside Christ’s body—exposes a deeper question: have we truly been joined to Christ at all? Loving the church does not justify us, but the justified will not stay aloof from her. The apostle who insists we are “justified by faith apart from works” (Rom. 3:28) also insists that “we, though many, are one body in Christ” (Rom. 12:5) and that “the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’” (1 Cor. 12:21). Faith without love is not merely defective faith; it is a contradiction, an impossibility. The verdict that sets a sinner free binds him to a living body, or it binds him to nothing at all.

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Our intuition must be trained

Why do Roman Catholics seem to love their church with a devotion rarely seen among Protestants? Why does the sight of a monk—head bowed, beads sliding through his fingers as he prays for strangers—strike us as more Christlike than the ball-capped Protestant stocking shelves in a disaster relief warehouse? Are our instincts wrong?

Intuition is a God-given faculty, but it is also a lens shaped by our upbringing. When you walk through a cloister and see habits, candles, and a rhythm of prayer punctuated by concrete acts of mercy, the scene itself tutors your imagination about what holiness “looks like.” Step into a Protestant disaster-relief warehouse—fluorescent lights, forklifts, volunteers in jeans and work gloves—and the ambience feels prosaic by comparison. It is easy for the heart to mistake the aura of sanctity for the substance.

Yet Jesus’ own tests of Christlikeness cut deeper than vocational garb or institutional setting. “By their fruits you will know them” (Matt. 7:16) measures the tree by what it gives to others, not by the shape of its branches. The parable of the sheep and the goats puts the criterion starkly: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner—deeds any lay believer can perform as readily as a monk. Paul’s portrait of the Spirit’s fruit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control—names no ecclesial brand (Gal. 5:22–23).

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Do not love what is hateful

Roman Catholicism impresses at first as an edifice of marble logic. Thomism, its shining façade, arranges act and potency, esse and essentia, according to a geometry so flawless it dazzles the eye and persuades the mind that coherence itself is truth. The invitation to enter feels generous, yet the threshold conceals a condition: surrender your native speech, adopt the scholastic dialect, and every objection you meant to voice is already dissolved into a syllogism that anticipates it. One walks the halls of the Thomasine palace like a dreamer in a mirrored gallery; each corridor returns you to the same premise, until at last you cannot decide whether you are following logic or merely your own reflection.

But behind the acoustics of that rational perfection, centuries of muffled cries reverberate in the stone. Once the Church discovered that metaphysical precision could shelter any conclusion, it pressed the technique into doctrine. Devotion swelled first; dogma followed like a notary fixing a seal. When late‑fourth‑century homilists began swooning over Mary’s perpetual virginity, the Gospels’ blunt “brothers” of Jesus threatened to spoil the ardor. Jerome’s lexical scalpel excised the scandal by making adelphos “mean” cousin—though Koine Greek already had anepsios and never confused the two. Some contemporary Catholic apologists appeal to Hegesippus, Epiphanius, and the Proto-evangelium of James, though these are either late, apocryphal, or both. The exception became rule overnight, not because Scripture demanded it but because love of the cult could not bear contradiction.

Thus emboldened, imagination outran memory. Medieval England cherished a feast of Mary’s sinless conception; Scotus found a metaphysical loophole; three centuries of sermons embroidered the loophole into a banner; Pius IX swung the banner into a thunderbolt, and exegetes scurried back through Luke’s salutation to squeeze a single participle, kecharitōmenē, into a prenatal absolution. The feast predated Scotus, appearing earlier in the Byzantine calendar, but it was Scotus who gave it its scholastic rationale as “preservative redemption.” No matter that Gabriel’s words addressed a woman already gravid: the syllogism had decided, and Scripture must now echo its verdict.

The Assumption stretched the method to pure audacity. No apostle spoke of it, no grave was empty save Christ’s, the earliest tales—homilies by Juvenal of Jerusalem (5th c.) and John of Damascus (8th c.)—are confessed fables. Typology did the heavy lifting. If the Ark of the Covenant vanished, surely the living Ark must soar higher; if Enoch and Elijah were translated, how not the Theotokos? Fitness replaced fact; the rhyme of symbols was promoted to history.

While syllogisms fluttered skyward, another engine clanked below. For unbroken centuries—from the bull Ad abolendam in 1184 to the final Valencian auto‑da‑fé in 1826—Rome choreographed torment as liturgy. Manuals of the Holy Office specified how high to hoist a suspect until ligaments tore but bones did not snap, how many teeth to loosen before agony dulled defiance into confession. The smoke of heretics rose through European dawns as faithfully as the Angelus. Béziers—twenty thousand souls—was reduced to carrion in a single afternoon because papal envoy Arnaud Amalric preferred indiscriminate purity to patient discernment. “Kill them all; God will know His own.” The phrase lingered longer than the stench. (Yes, secular courts were savage—but the Church claims to be the Body of Christ.)

Spanish inquisitors improved the craft, marrying sacrament to strangulation. In those vaulted chambers, a linen toca was thrust down a prisoner’s throat; water followed until the chest convulsed; reviving signaled another pour, a baptism in reverse. Streets outside blossomed with pageantry: scarlet crosses on penitents’ tunics, drums rolling as the condemned processed toward the stake under tapestries of the Virgin who, according to fresh dogma, had never known sin’s taint nor death’s decay. Families could purchase a merciful garrote before the flames were lit—a lesser agony priced on a sliding scale of indulgence. Thus charity found its fiscal register while theology found its proof: the very spectacle, they said, testified to the Church’s maternal solicitude, cauterizing error for the good of souls.

Scholar‑saints were not spared. Jan Hus travelled under imperial safe conduct, only to feel the pyre breathe against his heels; Savonarola’s ashes fed the Arno because his zeal shamed a corrupt pontiff; Bruno’s tongue, gagged with iron, could not cry that the universe might be larger than Aristotle allowed. Galileo, at least, was permitted to age under house arrest, obliged to kneel where others burned and whisper that the earth stands still while it hurtles through darkness unhindered by anathema.

One horror, preserved in Foxe’s chronicle, haunts the mind like a night cry. John Hooper, the reforming Bishop of Gloucester, was condemned under Mary Tudor in 1555. The pyre was stacked green so it would smolder; the first spark gasped and died in damp wood, wrapping him in reeking smoke. Hooper stood praying, lips moving soundlessly in the haze, until a second blaze caught. Flames climbed his cassock, licked his beard, and his tongue, swollen by heat, protruded and split. Still he beat his chest with a free hand—“Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!”—until the flesh peeled, his fingers dropped away, and, at last, his charred arm sheared off and thudded onto the embered ground. Forty‑five minutes passed before the combustion reached his vitals. The crowd, we are told, sang psalms to drown the screams; friars declared the spectacle a work of mercy.

The same iron breath warmed the coffers. Purgatory—once a vague hope that mercy might pursue the dead—hardened into a commercial furnace. As soot from burning conversos coated Spanish tiles, pennies clinked into indulgence chests to shorten imaginary years in imaginary flames, licensed by councils that stitched together stray verses as a tailor patches velvet, sure the garment would shine because scholastic gold‑thread described each seam.

All of this—rack‑appeased syllogism, stake‑lit dogma—was not a parenthesis in Church history; it was the Church’s heartbeat through half the Christian era. The institution that now waves away these centuries as past excess is the same that declares itself immune to error when defining faith and morals. Yet the smell of scorched hair clings to its garments; the dialect that rationalized torture still polishes new doctrines to mirror finish, reflecting only itself.

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They mock the idea of a Body of Christ that is not co-extensive with a powerful institution

Let’s go with that, then. If the Roman Catholic Church as an institution has always been the Body of Christ, then:

Christ’s Body prays for its own torture. In the cellars of the Inquisition, His arms are lashed to the rack, and the sinews of His forearms stretch until they snap. His legs are crushed in the iron boot, His fingers broken one by one in the thumbscrew. His flesh is seared with hot pincers, and water is forced down His throat until His lungs burst. The candles flicker in stone vaults as the blood of His Body pools beneath the chair, dripping steadily from His feet, each drop a silent plea for mercy.

Christ’s Body gags on its own tongue. In the mouths of the faithful, once free to preach His name, the Church has placed iron bits. Bruno’s mouth is filled with molten metal; Hus’s tongue swells with heat as the flames blacken his beard. He writhes as His lips char and split, and His teeth clench on the iron gag that keeps His screams from reaching the heavens. His eyes roll back as the smoke fills His lungs, and His head jerks with the final spasms of a nerve severed at the spine.

Christ’s Body strangles itself. It marches through the streets, garroted by its own hierarchy, forced to declare itself infallible while blood pours from its mouth. Its own hands grip the rope, tightening with every dogma proclaimed, until the face of the crucified is purple and swollen, His tongue protruding through broken teeth as His own limbs crush His windpipe.

Christ’s Body drowns itself. In the canals of Amsterdam, in the rivers of Germany, in the frozen lakes of Switzerland, His own hands hold His head beneath the water. Mothers clutch their children as the icy currents close over their faces, and the Spirit within Him thrashes for breath even as His own Church presses down, down, down, until the bubbles stop rising.

Christ’s Body brands itself a heretic. It straps itself to the stake and strikes the flint. The flames rise, and the smell of burning flesh curls into the air. It twists against the chains, its skin blistering and splitting, its screams swallowed by the crackle of the fire. The wood pops and hisses, sending sparks up like the final breath of a dying saint.

This is the Body of Christ the Roman Church claims to be—the Body it has shackled, gagged, strangled, drowned, and burned for centuries. It is a tortured, broken, mutilated Body, whose own limbs have been turned against it, whose own blood has been spilled to wash away the crimes of its own priests.

Is this the Body you love? Is this the Body you would embrace, even as its hands close around your throat, even as its teeth grind down on your tongue, even as its iron boots crack your shins and twist your knees until they splinter like dry wood?

Nor can the indictment be waved aside by the familiar dodge that “the office remains infallible while the men who hold it may sin.” From the moment popes affixed their leaden seals to Ad extirpanda  (1252) and, much later, Exsurge Domine  (1520), the rack, the stake, and the confiscation of goods were no longer private lapses but exercises of the Roman see’s own jurisdiction—the arm turning the windlass wore the Fisherman’s Ring. Discipline is itself a mode of teaching; Augustine, Contra Cresconium 3.51, treats the Church’s judicial sentences as an extension of the pulpit. To condemn men by bull and canon and then call the blood a merely “personal failing” is special pleading of the most transparent sort.

Scripture promises that the shepherd’s voice gathers, not scatters (Jn 10 :4‑5), and the Augsburg Confession locates the Church’s very being in the pure preaching of the Word and the right administration of the Sacraments (AC VII). Where that mark is formally suppressed—where an anathema thunders against the plain Gospel—the Church perishes in that place, no matter how ancient the cathedra. Indefectibility adheres to the Word, not to any single episcopal throne.

Nor is guilt deflected by saying, “These horrors were the sins of individuals.” Acts performed in nomine Ecclesiae and ratified by councils are not peccata personarum but delicta concilii—corporate crimes. When decrees forbid the chalice to the laity, chain the vernacular Bible, or brand justification by faith a heresy, the communion that wields the sword takes on the likeness of the Antichrist who “exalts himself over everything called God” (2 Th 2 :4). To rage against the members is to rage against the Head; to persecute the Gospel is to strike at Christ Himself.

The Roman distinction between an impeccable office and peccable officers therefore collapses at the moment the office baptises the sin. Doctrine severed from life presents not the living Christ but a polished effigy, a dead image whose bronze lips can still pronounce dogma while its bronze hands tighten the garrote. Historical continuity offers no sanctuary: the branch that severs itself from the living sap withers, even if its bark still bears the papal escutcheon.

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That is not the Body of Christ

If the Roman church is not merely a human institution but truly the Body of Christ, then its actions cannot be neatly divided into “human errors” and “divine purity” without fundamentally compromising the analogy. If the institutional Church is the Body of Christ in its visible, hierarchical form, then the acts of its members are, in a real sense, the acts of the Body of Christ.

We dare not confuse the institution with the Body. The Body of Christ is the fellowship of those who cling to His promises in the Word and Sacraments. Yes, they are sinners. But they are also those who suffer for His name, who bleed and die for the Gospel. The Roman Church has often inverted this, solemnly declaring those suffering in Christ to be severed from the body; it has been the persecutor of this very Body, and we cannot call the jailer the prisoner, nor the strangler the strangled. Judas severed himself from the mystical Body of Christ; he didn’t remain a member; there is no paradox here that I must accept whereby the Body of Christ is both persecutor and persecuted!

Christ’s Body on earth must not be equated with the institutional hierarchy of Rome, for to do so is to collapse the Head into the members, confusing the divine purity of Christ with the very human failings of those who claim to act in His name. Roman Catholics fail to account for the difference between Christ’s sinless humanity and the manifest sins of His Church. Christ’s body, though fully human, was without sin. The Church, by contrast, is a Body that still struggles with the remnants of the flesh. The wheat and the tares grow together, yes—but the tares are not to be mistaken for wheat, nor the persecutor for the persecuted.

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Do you love your church?

I cannot step inside that palace, however radiant its marble, knowing what foundations lie beneath. Truth needs no strappado, no lexical contortion, no posthumous insertion of miracles into the apostolic age. Until Rome can look into her own mirrored halls and see, not elegance, but the charred faces of those she immolated for doubting her elegance, her architecture will remain beautiful, immense—and uninhabitable by conscience.

Your intuition must be both honored and disciplined. A cloister’s candles, chants, and beads tutor our imagination about holiness’ appearance; so too does the fluorescent‑lit refugee camp, the mechanic’s garage, the crowded family dinner table. True holiness is feeding the hungry in hidden places as much as chanting in candlelit choirs. The Spirit who raised Christ dwells as surely among relief workers in jeans and work gloves as in monks with rosaries sliding through bowed fingers.

Yet Christ’s summons is no halfway calling. He demanded the rupture of normal life: “Leave your nets,” “let the dead bury their dead,” “hate father and mother” (Matt. 4:19; Luke 9:60; 14:26). His cross‑shaped summons destroys every competing loyalty, drawing the heart into single, blazing devotion. The cross outside of Me creates the life inside of Me—but it is a cruciform life, not a suburban one, a life that sheds comforts and permissions like a serpent shedding skin.

Perhaps we Christians outside your Roman church have too often pitted our doctrine of forensic justification against this radical summons, as though Christ’s demands were mere backdrop to our acquittal. But the gospel is not a legal fiction that leaves us unclaimed. The same word that justifies also drafts us into His mission, His suffering, His all‑demanding love.

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The Church I love

So where then is the Church I love?

It is not an ivory tower of scholastic brilliance, nor a museum of marble devotion, nor a cruel engine of power that once tightened racks and kindled pyres. It is the Church forged in suffering, purified in the crucible of martyrdom, and steadfast in the confession of Christ across centuries. It is the Church of those mocked for the simplicity of their creed, whose knees bent in dank oubliettes rather than vaulted cloisters—a visible fellowship of the faithful that refuses to be reduced to a mere abstraction. To say Christ for us is to confess that no human work can save; to say Christ in us is to live in the Spirit who draws us into communion—“faith working through love”—the very proof we have passed from death to life in the bonds of a living Body.

Yet we Lutherans claim that the Church is present wherever the Word is rightly preached and the Sacraments rightly administered, insisting that this makes the Church a visible reality with clear, identifiable boundaries. We explicitly reject the idea of an invisible Church as a purely spiritual unity that ignores this concrete, sacramental communion.

This position may seem self-contradictory. On the one hand, we deny that the Church can exist as an invisible entity spread across denominations that are not in sacramental fellowship, insisting that true unity requires a shared confession and common participation in the Lord’s Supper. On the other hand, we affirm that members of the same Body of Christ can be found in different denominations that do not share this sacramental communion. This effectively concedes that the true Church exists wherever the Word and Sacraments are present, even if those assemblies are institutionally and sacramentally divided—a position that sounds remarkably like the very invisible Church doctrine we claim to reject.

But there is no contradiction here. Invisible implies nonexistence or mere abstraction, while hidden acknowledges a real, though not fully perceived, unity. Our theologians were concerned that calling the Church invisible risks reducing it to a mere idea, detached from the concrete, sacramental reality through which the Spirit works. The failure of x to commune with y is a sin, not a sign that Eucharistic fellowship is optional.

At 3 a.m. on a Tuesday, the Church exists in a hidden form, her members scattered, sleeping, or alone, yet bound together by the same Spirit who unites them to Christ in Word and Sacrament. This hiddenness is not a disembodied or merely conceptual unity, but a mystical reality that always finds its full expression in the visible assembly where Christ is present to forgive, heal, and sanctify through His means of grace.

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On the Real Presence we love

This leads me to an excursis on the Real Presence. If we are to love the Church where Word and Sacrament are rightly given, it is important to understand why this is so.

From the beginning, God has chosen to reveal Himself not as a distant abstraction but as a living, tangible presence. He formed Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed life into his nostrils (Genesis 2:7). He walked in the cool of the garden, calling out, “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9), not because He needed the answer but because He longed for the nearness of His beloved creation. He spoke to Moses from a bush that burned but was not consumed (Exodus 3:2-6), filling the air with the smell of smoke and the sound of a holy voice. He fed His people with manna in the wilderness, bread that appeared like dew on the ground (Exodus 16:14-15), and gave them water from a rock that followed them through the desert (1 Corinthians 10:4). He rested His glory in the tabernacle, so that even the high priest dared not enter without blood, smoke, and trembling hands (Exodus 40:34-35).

This is not a God who remains in the heights of heaven, content to be the God of philosophers and mystics, but one who descends, who stoops, who enters the dust and blood of real life to draw near to His people. When He made a covenant with Abraham, He did not seal it with mere words but with the blood of animals, passing between the torn pieces as a sign of His unbreakable promise (Genesis 15:9-17). When He rescued His people from Egypt, He commanded them to paint their doorposts with the blood of the Passover lamb, to roast its flesh and eat it with bitter herbs, so that the angel of death would pass over them (Exodus 12:7-13). This was not a mere symbol but a real, physical act that marked them as His own, a tangible participation in their own deliverance.

This incarnational, sacrificial pattern runs through the whole history of God’s dealings with His people. When Solomon dedicated the Temple, the glory of the Lord filled the house so that the priests could not stand to minister (1 Kings 8:10-11). When Elijah called down fire on Mount Carmel, the flames consumed not just the offering but the very stones of the altar, leaving no doubt that God had drawn near (1 Kings 18:38). And when the prophets spoke of the coming Messiah, they did not envision a distant, ethereal figure but a king who would feed His flock like a shepherd and bind up the brokenhearted (Isaiah 61:1-3; Ezekiel 34:23-24).

This culminates in the Incarnation, where the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14), where the God who once passed through the torn pieces of a sacrifice now has His own flesh torn for the life of the world (Isaiah 53:5). He touched lepers, held children, broke bread, and wept real, salty tears. He poured out His blood on the cross, not as a metaphor but as a real, physical act of sacrificial love, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant (Matthew 26:28).

But if this Incarnation were only a momentary event, if Christ’s flesh were now a distant memory, then the intimacy of God’s covenant would be shattered. It would mean that the God who once walked with His people, who fed them and healed them with His own hands, has now withdrawn into the distant heavens, leaving us only with echoes and shadows.

But this is not the case. The real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is the way in which the incarnational, covenantal nature of God’s relationship with His people continues into the present. It is not merely a symbol or a memorial but a living encounter with the same God who has always chosen to be known in the physical, tangible world. It is the final, enduring manifestation of a God who has always chosen to reveal Himself not as a distant abstraction but as a real, enfleshed presence, a God who touches, feeds, and draws near.

This is why existentialism has such power in our modern age. It speaks to a deep human need for real, immediate encounters with the world, for the concrete over the abstract, for the flesh and blood of experience over the thin air of speculation. It is a hunger for reality, for the gritty, tangible stuff of life that shapes our hearts and minds in ways that mere ideas cannot. And this is precisely what the Eucharist offers—a real, flesh-and-blood encounter with the God who entered history, who bore our sins in His own body, and who continues to meet us in the breaking of the bread. Yes, our altar discipline wounds hearts—but it aims to heal truth, not conceal it.

Without this real presence, the most immediate and undeniable experience we have is the brokenness of the world, the undeniable fact of sin, suffering, and death. That would become our final, most impactful experiential knowledge—a world without God, a story without a living protagonist. But the Eucharist refuses to let that be the last word. It is the ongoing pledge that God has not abandoned His creation, that He has not left us alone in the dark, but that He is still with us, still feeding us, still drawing near in the most concrete, intimate way possible.

It is the assurance that the God who once filled the Temple with His glory has now filled the bread and wine with His own body and blood, that the same hands that broke bread on the night He was betrayed now reach out to us across time and space, drawing us into the same divine life that animated Adam’s lungs, called Abraham out of Ur, and raised Christ from the dead.

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Do you see it? The New Jerusalem awaits: its foundations laid in the martyrs’ blood, its walls built by the apostles’ faith, its gates flung open by the roar of the Lion of Judah.