Ube B.merican
Ecclesiastical IReview
“X

A MONTHLY PUBLICATION FOR THE CLERGY

Cum Approbatione Superiorum

VOL. CXIV
JANUARY—JUNE, 1946

Μακάριοι oî elpijvoiroiol, δη αυτοί viol θεοϋ κληβήσονται
Matt. 5:9

Published by

THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA PRESS

THE TRUE CHURCH AND THE NOTES
OF THE CHURCH
“How do we know that the Catholic Church is the one true
Church established by Christ?” Thus reads question 153 in the
Revised Baltimore Catechism. Upon our ability to answer this
question effectively and accurately depend the spiritual welfare of
our own people and the progress of our missionary effort. As
Catholics we know that the scientifically assured and demonstrated
answer to that question exists in the teaching of our Church.
As teachers, however (and every priest is necessarily and pre­
eminently a teacher), it must be our business to know how to give
that answer. Moreover, we must be able to give it in such a way
that those to whom our teaching is addressed will be able to profit
from it, and may be able to see the God-given evidence that ours
is the true Church of Christ.
The Revised Baltimore Catechism answers its own question
with an appeal to the four marks or notes of the Church. It states
that “We know that the Catholic Church is the one true Church
established by Christ because it alone has the marks of the true
Church.” In answering the two subsequent questions it defines the
marks of the Church as “certain clear signs by which all men can
recognize it as the true Church founded by Jesus Christ,” and
informs us that “The chief marks of the Church are four: It is
one, holy, catholic or universal, and apostolic.” After explaining
why each of these qualities can be predicated of the Catholic
Church, the Catechism terminates this section of Christian Doctrine
with the answer to question 160: “We know that no other church
but the Catholic Church is the true Church of Christ because no
other church has these four marks.”
Thus the Revised Baltimore Catechism expresses itself as fully
confident that the proof from the four marks or notes of the Church
can show “all men” that the Catholic Church is the one true Church
instituted by our Lord. It considers the via notarum as an effec­
tive demonstration, even apart from the via historica, which shows
the identity of the Catholic Church with the organized religious
society to which our Lord’s immediate disciples belonged, and
apart from the via empirica, which deals with the existent Catholic
Church as a manifest miracle of the social order, and thus as a
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“great and perpetual motive of credibility and an unshakeable evi­
dence of its own divine messengership.”1
A great number of distinguished and highly competent modem
theologians have treated the via notarum as a fully and independ­
ently effective argument for the Catholic Church’s position as our
Lord’s own society. In this group we find such authors as Hurter,2
Mazzella,3 Herrmann,4 Egger,5 Billot,6 D’Herbigny,7 Pesch,8
Michelitsch,9 Felder,10 Bainvel,11 Van Noort,12 Zubizarreta,13
Bartmann,14 Berry,15 Brunsmann,16 Tepe,17 MacGuiness,18 Paris,19
1 Vatican Council, Sess. Ill, chap. 3 (DB 1794).

2 Cf. Theologiae dogmaticae compendium (Innsbruck, 1878), I, 262 ff.
3 Cf. De religione et Ecclesia praelectiones scholastico-dogmaticae (Prato,
1905), pp. 639 ff.

4 Cf. Institutiones theologiae dogmaticae (Lyons and Paris: E. Vitte,
1937), 1,427 ff.
5Cf. Enchiridion theologiae dogmaticae generalis (Brixen, 1932), pp.
526 ff.
* Cf. Tractatus de Ecclesia Christi sive continuatio theologiae de Verbo In­
carnato (Rome: Gregorian University, 1921), pp. 135 ff.

7Cf. Theologica de Ecclesia (Paris: Beauchesne, 1928), II, 29 ff.
*Cf Praelectiones dogmaticae (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1924),
I, 285 ff.
* Cf. Elementa apologeticae sive· theologiae fundamentalis (Graz and
Vienna, 1925), pp. 285 ff.

10 Cf. Apologetica sive theologia fundamentalis (Paderborn, 1923), II,
154 ff.
11 Cf. De Ecclesia Christi (Paris: Beauchesne, 1925), pp. 49 f.

12 Cf. Tractatus de Ecclesia Christi (Amsterdam, 1913), pp. 130 ff.
13 Cf. Theologia dogmatico-scholastica ad mentem S. Thomae Aquinatis
(Bilbao, 1937), I, 338 ff.

14 Cf. Precis de théologie dogmatique, traduit par l’Abbé Marcel Gautier
(Mulhouse, France, 1936), II, 204 ff.
15 Cf. The Church of Christ. An Apologetic and Dogmatic Treatise
(St Louis and London: B. Herder Book Co., 1927), pp. 146 ff.
16 Cf. A Handbook of Fundamental Theology, freely adapted and edited
by Arthur Preuss (St Louis and London: B. Herder Book Co., 1931),
III, 409 f.
17 Cf. Institutiones theologicae in usum scholarum (Paris: Lethielleux,
1894), pp. 317 ff.
13Cf. Commentarii theologici (Paris: Lethielleux, 1930), I, 263 ff.
19 Cf. Ad mentem S. Thomae Aquinatis tractatus de Ecclesia Christi ad
usum studentium theologiae fundamentalis (Turin: Marietti, 1929), pp. 74 ff.

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and Schultes.20 There is, of course, no such thing as any one
uniform method of treating the notes of the Church to be found
in the writings of these modem theologians. These men handle
their material in different ways and they manage to achieve strik­
ingly different degrees of effectiveness. Yet, amidst this diversity
of treatment, they all manifest their confidence in the via notarum
as a correct and efficacious apologetical process.

Still other competent theologians, however, have placed no such
reliance on the proof from the notes of the Church. Speaking of
this demonstration, Tanquerey-Bord says brusquely : “Hodie m
Protestantes minime convincit.”21 In a similar vein, Marfin Jugie,
the greatest modem Catholic authority on the doctrines of the
dissident Orientals, insists that the via notarum is of little use in
explaining the Roman Church’s prerogatives to the members of the
dissident assemblies.22 Dieckmann23 and Lercher2425
give the dem­
onstration from fire notes of the Church but show themselves quite
diffident about its efficacy. Cotter does not employ it at all.21
Schouppe,26 Dorsch,27 Straub,28 and Hervé29 use the notes of the
Church together with the argument from the Petrine primacy, the
20 CL De Ecclesia catholica praelectiones apologeticae (Paris : Lethidleux,
1931), pp. 160 ff. The same author showed himself quite critical of the
via notarum in an article in Divus Thomas, I (1914), pp. 57 ff.

21 Synopsis theologiae dogmaticae (Paris, Tournai, and Rome: Desdée,
1937), I, 516.
22 Theologia dogmatica Christianorum orientalium ab ecclesia catholice
Dissidentium (Paris: Letouzey and Ané, 1931), IV, 591.
23 Ci. De Ecclesia tractatus historico-dogmatici (Freiburg im Breisgau:
Herder, 1925), I, 511.

24 Institutiones theologiae dogmaticae (Innsbruck: Rauch, 1934), I, 419L
25 Cf. Theologia fundamentalis (Weston, Massachusetts :
lege, 1940), p. 391.

Weston Col­

28 Elementa theologiae dogmaticae (Lyons and Paris, 1861), I, 186 ff.
27 Cf. Institutiones theologiae fundamentalis (Innsbruck: Rauch, 1928),
II, 637 ff.

28 Cf. De ecclesia Christi (Innsbruck, 1894), pp. 743 ff.
28 CL Manuale theologiae dogmaticae (Westminster, Maryland: The
Newman Bookshop, 1943), I, 374 ff. Hervé also employs the hierarchical
nature of the Church as a quasi note.

J

30 Cf Apologetica (Montreal: Grand Séminaire, 1945), pp. 191 ff.
31 Cf Les notes tie FÉglise dans ^Apologétique Catholique depuis la
Reforme (Gembloux, Belgium: J. Duculot, 1937), p. 342; cf. also the
article by the same author "La 'via notarum’ et ^apologétique contemporaine"
(Angelicum, XVI, Ifjan. 1939], pp. 24 ff.).

32 Cf Les notes de l’église, p. 81.

-

strongest element in the via historica. Yelle and Fournier use the
three methods very effectively.80
Strangely enough, the sharpest attack on the validity of the
proof from the notes of the Church comes from Dr. Gustave Thils,
the theologian who has done the most towards explaining the his­
tory and the various forms of this demonstration. Dr. Thils holds
that, even granting the efficacy of the proof from the notes of the
Church, such a proof is neither simple nor easy, and certainly not
adapted to all the faithful.30
31 Moreover, he shows a serious lack of
confidence in the force of the demonstration itself.
The learned professor from Malines reduces the proof from
the notes of the Church to syllogistic form. The major of this
syllogism is the assertion that our Lord endowed His Church with
certain characteristics which should permit us to recognize it
amidst all the Christian groups. The minor tells us that these
characteristics are found in the Roman Catholic Church. Dr. Thils
holds that, during the course of recent theological history, ecclesiologists have presented the minor premise in three different ways.
Sometimes they have made an absolute assertion, affirming with­
out any restriction that these notes belong to the Church of Rome.
At other times they have given the minor premise in comparative
form, holding that the four notes exist in. the Roman Church more
perfectly than they do in non-Roman communions. Dr. Thils holds
that our theologians present the minor premise in the proof from
the notes of the Church in a negative manner when they content
themselves with showing that the four qualities employed by the
First Ecumenical Council of Constantinople do not exist in religious
societies other than the Catholic Church.32
Dr. Thils passes a very severe judgment on the via notarum.
He claims that its major premise has never been rigorously dem­
onstrated, and that it fails to justify completely its declarations
on the existence, the number, and the nature of the notes them­
selves. He believes that the minor premise, in whatever form it

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may be found, has serious and easily ascertainable shortcomings.
As he sees it, the demonstration from the notes of the Church, taken
as a unit, is a sadly ineffective instrument for bringing people to
realize the status of the Catholic Church as the true Church of our
Lord Jesus Christ.
It is obviously important for us to know whether or not Dr.
Thils has adequately and accurately evaluated the via notarum.
In order to have this knowledge, we must understand something
about the way in which and the purpose for which the proof from
the notes of the Church was originally conceived. With this his­
torical information once gained, we should have little difficulty in
seeing in what way and to what end the demonstration from the
four notes of the Church is manifestly and fully effective.
Catholic theologians began to use the via notarum, in its existent
form, during the course of the sixteenth century. Such is the
constant teaching of Dr. Thils, and such is the evidence from the
history of sacred theology. The precise point of this beginning
in the sixteenth century, however, is unfortunately not too well
set forth in many explanations of the history of the notes.
In the first place, the men of the sixteenth century were by
no means the first to appeal to qualities visible in the true Church
of Jesus Christ as evidence justifying their attachment to that
Church. As a matter of fact, some of the earliest and most effective
of the Counter-Reformation ecclesiologists incorporated into their
own works passages taken bodily from the writings of the Fathers,
indicating visible characteristics of the Catholic Church which
manifested that Church as the society within which every man
who seeks to live as a follower of Christ should dwell. Passages of
this kind were to be found in the writings of Saints Irenaeus,
Augustine, Jerome, Optatus, and Vincent of Lerins.
St. Irenaeus had taught that the true faith, the veritable mes­
sage of our Lord, was to be found in the apostolic Churches, and
especially in the apostolic Roman Church, with which, because of
its "potior principalitas,” every Church which preserved the apos­
tolic tradition was to be united.33 Listing the factors which held
him as a member of the Catholic Church and kept him from asso­
ciation in the conventicles of heretics, St Augustine had spoken of
a "most sincere wisdom” existent within the true Church, an “agree-

33 Cf.

j

Adversus haereres,

3, 3

(MPG,

VII, 848 f.).

B

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287

ment of peoples and of nations,” an “authority, begun by miracles,
nourished by hope, increased by charity, confirmed by age,” a
“succession of priests from the very see of Peter the Apostle . . .
to the present episcopate,” and finally “the Catholic name itself.”34
The “wisdom” found within the Church, in other words the flower­
ing of the divine life of grace within the Catholic society, was pre­
sented as something which should influence Catholics to remain
within the Church. St. Augustine seems to admit that it has no
probative value in manifesting the truth of the Church to non­
Catholics, since these do not believe that it exists in the Church.
The other four factors, however, by their very nature, are such
that they can be seen and appreciated even by those outside the fold.
St. Jerome had used the name and the origin of the Church
as signs of its truth.
We ought to remain in that Church which was founded by the
apostles and which continues to this day. If you ever hear of any that
are called Christians taking their name not from the Lord Jesus Christ
but from some other, as for instance Marcionites, Valentinians, men
of the mountains or of the plain, you may be sure that you have
there not the Church of Christ but the synagogue of Antichrist For
the fact that they took their origin after the foundation of the Church
is proof that they are those whose coming the Apostle foretold.33

St Vincent of Lerins had taught that a man would hold the
orthodox faith within the Catholic Church when he held to en­
tirety, antiquity, and agreement.33 St. Optatus of Milevis had ap­
pealed to the catholicity of the Chflrch in showing “which is the
one Church called by Christ His Dove and His Bride.” Further­
more he makes use of five endowments (dotes) of the Church in
arguing against the Donatists. These five endowments, which the
Donatists themselves admitted as adornments of the Church, were
the Cathedra, Angelus, Spiritus, Fons Signatus, and the Sigillum.
The Cathedra is the See of Peter, and the true Church is the one
in communion with the legitimate successor of the Prince of the
Apostles.37
34 Cf. Contra epistulam Manichaei quam vocant fundamenti, 4 (CSEL,
XXV, 196; MPL, XLII, 175).
33 Dialogus contra Luciferianos (MPL, XXIII, 181 f.).
33 Cf. Commonitorium 2 (MPL, L, 640).
37 Cf. Contra Parmenianum Donatistam, 2 (CSEL, XXVI, 32 ff, MPL,
XI, 941 ff.).

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Furthermore, when we say that the scholastic argument from
the notes of the Church originated during the sixteenth century,
we by no means imply that the theologians of the sixteenth century
were the first to teach that the four qualities enumerated by the
First Ecumenical Council of Constantinople are to be found in the
Catholic society and in no other. This doctrine had been a common­
place in Catholic ecclesiology since the thirteenth century. St
Thomas Aquinas had listed four conditiones of the Church, unity,
holiness, catholicity, and a firmness due to its divine foundation
and to its apostolicity.38 He insisted that these conditiones be­
longed to the Catholic Church alone. The fourteenth century
ecdesiologist James of Viterbo had indicated no less than ten
factors contributing to the “glory” of the true Church.3® These
ten qualities, he said, could be reduced to the four conditiones set
forth in the Creed of Constantinople. The fifteenth century Cardinal
John de Turrecremata had designated these same four qualities,
not only as conditiones but as proprietates, as pertaining to the
Catholic Church and to no other religious society.40 Thomas Netter
of Walden had appealed to these four qualities in his arguments
against the Wyclifites, but had relied mainly on demonstrations
from the Church’s unity, catholicity, and apostolicity.41
Despite the fact that the Catholic ecclesiologists of the six­
teenth century were not the first to appeal to visible qualities in­
herent in the Catholic Church in defending her status as the true
Church of Jesus Christ, and despite the fact that they were not
tire first to teach that the four* qualities enumerated in the Creed
of Constantinople are actually properties of the Catholic Church,
they were the originators of the via notarum. The demonstration
from the notes of the Church is something far more radical and
specialized than a mere appeal to the Church’s visible qualities.
It is a triumphant refutation of one specific attack on the Church,
an attack which began with the Protestant Reformation.
What distinguished the Protestant groups from the various
38 Cf. Expositio super symbolum apostolorum (Mandonnefs edition of
the Opuscula omnia [Paris: Lethielleux, 1927]) IV, 378 S.

39 Cf. De regimine Christiana
Beauchesne, 1926]) pp. 100 ff.

(Arquillière’s critical edition [Paris:

40 CL Summa de Ecclesia (Venice, 1560), chapters 6-19, pp. 7’ ff.

i1. CL Doctrinale antiquitatum fidei Ecclesiae Catholicae (Venice, 1571),
I, 190 ff.

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'

289

heretical societies which had preceded them, and what fashioned
them into the most formidable adversaries that have ever been
ranged against the Church of God, was one ingenious thesis in the
field of ecclesiology. Earlier heretical societies had gone their own
individual ways and held their own individual tenets, separating
themselves, theoretically at least, as thoroughly from other errone­
ous assemblies as from the true Church. It remained for the Luth­
erans, and for Calvin, and for their followers, to concoct and to
adopt a scheme which would give plausibility and consistency to
die spectacle of doctrinal variety itself. That scheme was the
hypothesis of a twofold church, the one visible and the other in­
visible. The Protestant theory of the notes of the church was an
essential part of this scheme. The Catholic demonstration from
the notes of the Church, the via notarum, provided the evidence
which showed the error of this basic Protestant contention.
Both the Lutherans and the Calvinists insisted that the true
Qiurch of Christ was basically an invisible society. By the term
“the true Church of Jesus Christ” both these men and their
Catholic opponents understood the group which was the recipient
of our Lord’s promises, the assembly which He and His disciples
called the Ecclesia. The true Church was the body of men against
which the gates of hell would not prevail. It was the Kingdom
of God, within which our Lord was to remain forever. It was the
Church of Christ, and the men who did not belong to it were to
constitute a loosely organized church of Satan, the “world,” gath­
ered under “the prince of this world,” to fight against our Lord and
His followers.
It was the contention of the Lutherans that this true Church
consisted of men and women in the state of grace.42 The Calvinists
held that only the predestined belonged to it.43 Both parties, in
42 Cf. The Confession of Augsburg, “They [The Lutherans] teach that
the one Holy Church will remain forever. Now this Church is the congre­
gation of the saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the sacraments
rightly administered." Bettenson, Documents of the Christian Church (Ox­
ford University Press, 1943), p. 295.
41 Ci The Westminster Confession' of Faith, “The Catholic or universal
Church, which is invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect . . .
The visible Church which is also Catholic or universal under the Gospel,
consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion,
together with their children. (Bettenson, op. cit., p. 348).

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other words, taught that in order to be a Christian, in the sense
in which this term is used in the Acts of the Apostles, in order to
be a true disciple or follower of Christ and to be in His company,
it was not primarily requisite to live in any organized religious
society at all.
There was nothing particularly new about these contentions.
They had been the stock in trade of various heretics from the time
of Montanus down to the days of Wyclif and Huss. What made
the Reformation heresiarchs’ attack on the true Church more
dangerous than previous onslaughts had been was that none of
them attempted to identify his own organization with this imagi­
nary invisible Church. The Reformers were anxious to put up a
concerted fight against the Catholic Church, and they found the
instrument for this campaign in their own theory on the notes of
the Church.
That theory, as elaborated by the Lutherans and adopted by
the Calvinists, was embodied in die assertion that the true Church
existed wherever the Gospel was preached sincerely and the sacra­
ments were properly administered.44 The just and the predestined
were depicted as being free to enter into any visible religious
society wherein these two characteristics could be found. Such
societies were presented as being fit assemblies for Christians,
organizations within which the followers of Christ could unite to
work for their common interests. The sincere preaching of the
Gospel and the proper administration of the sacraments were thus
the Protestant notes of the Church.
The sincere preaching of the Gospel, according to Reformation
theory, demanded accuracy only in the statement of essential or
primary doctrines of Christianity, and allowed error and disagree­
ment on accidentals. The determination was made by a sort of
“greatest common factor” method. The teachings on which Pro­
testant religious groups agreed were, ipso facto, elevated to the
status of primary Christian doctrines. Matters on which they dif­
fered automatically became designated as accidentals.
The Protestant notes of the Church thus became the foundation
of a kind of religious “tolerance.” No individual Protestant as­
sembly could claim to constitute the Church of God in its own
44 CL Calvin’s Institutio Christianae religionis, Lib. IV, cap. J, n. 9
(Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1874), II, 207.

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right. Each one claimed for itself and recognized in others only
the pretension to be an apt and fitting dwelling for men and women
who were Christians by virtue of die life of grace or by predestina­
tion. Thus the Protestant notes of the Church do not claim the
prerogatives of the visible Catholic Church for any heretical re­
ligious organization. Rather they are part of a system which
claims these gifts for an unorganized body of men and women,
for those in the state of grace or for the predestined.
In opposing this error through the use of the real via notarum
the Catholic theologians of the sixteenth century took cognizance
of those religious truths which their Protestant opponents accepted.
The Reformers recognized the early Saints, the Fathers and the
Doctors of the Church as true disciples of Christ. They claimed to
follow the teaching of the early Church. Most important of all,
they accepted the Bible as God’s word. With this in mind the
Catholic controversialists worked to draw from the Scriptures,
and from ancient patristic and conciliar writings all that they could
find to show that being a Christian in the proper sense of the term,
being a true disciple or follower of Christ, being in the company
of Christ, meant belonging to the visible society which our Lord
had organized around Himself, the society within which He still
lives and rules and which we know as die Roman Catholic Church.
John Driedo stated the central issue of the sixteenth century
religious controversy clearly and accurately. Echoing the words
of St Augustine he says that “there is an ancient controversy be­
tween the heretics and the true Christians about where the true
Church of Christ is and with whom it dwells.”45* He notes that
there are two different Churches opposing one another, each one
claiming that it wishes to remain in the faith of our Saviour, to
abide by the evangelical and apostolic teachings and to possess the
Christian religion. The issue is between two Churches. If the
claim of one of these groups is justified, that of the other is not.
If one of these really is the Church of Christ, and actually possesses
the qualifications it claims to have, then the other is the body, or
at least belongs to the body which is set against the Church of
Christ, and which fights in some way under the direction of the
prince of this world.
45 Cf. Driedo’s De ecclesiasticis scripturis et dogmatibus, Lib. IV, cap. 2
(Louvain, 1533), p. 503. Driedo uses an adaptation of the words of St.
Augustine’s De unitate Ecclesiae, cap. 2.

9

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Driedo sets out to prove that “the true Church of Christ is
with those who remain in that Church which was founded by the
apostles, which began to grow out of Jerusalem, spreading to all
nations, and which endures to this day.”46 He advances ten
sententiae to demonstrate this proposition. The ten sententiae
center around the evidence that the true Church of Christ is an
organized body, containing both good and bad men in this world,
that it is apostolic, and necessarily connected with the See of Peter,
that it is united in one sacrament of faith, and that its status as
the group within which our Lord dwells can be demonstrated
through an appeal to the scriptures. Driedo’s proof, as stated and
explained under the heading of his ten sententiae, is perfectly
cogent. It is capable of showing a man who acknowledges the
existence of a group which has the right to the name of Christian
that this group is nothing more or less than the visible Catholic
Church. Driedo organized his demonstration well, but made no at­
tempt to hinge his teachings on any definite number of character­
istics existent within the Catholic Church.
Ruard Tapper, on the other hand, appeals explicitly to the
classical passages from St. Augustine and St. Vincent of Lerins
in demonstrating that “the Church in which we have been bora
again to Christ, in which we have received the sacraments, and
in which we have been instructed from our earliest years is that
true Catholic Church outside of which there is no salvation."47
Like Driedo, Tapper teaches that this claim can be verified through
an examination of the scriptures. For Peter Soto, unity is die
great sign of the true Church. Soto insisted that the true Church
of the Christians is indubitably the one which existed long ago “in
the apostles and disciples, to the number of about a hundred, who
were gathered in Jerusalem after the ascension, and who there
received the Holy Ghost.” The ones who remain in that unity
constitute the body of the Christians. The others, those who have48

i
i

48 Cf. Driedo, op. cit., p. 527. ’

47 Ci. Tapper’s Oratio secunda, De Ecclesiae unitate, et quod vera Christi
Ecclesia est apud nos Catholicos, in the Opera omnia (Cologne, 1582), PP332 ff. Tapper calls the "notes’’ taken from Vincent of Lerins “signa
certissima.” . :

|

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left it, are joined with the antichrist described in the First Epistle
of St. John.48
John Hessels appeals to the authority of St. Irenaeus, and uses
the Catholicity of the Church, and its apostolicity, as signs showing
that the visible Catholic Church is the Church of the Christians.48
49
In his Demonstratio methodica, the great Thomas Stapleton uses
universality, perpetuity, and conspicuous clarity as notes of the
true Church.50 In the later book, the Relectio scholastica, he offers
a somewhat different listing. Here the notes are antiquity, succes­
sion, universality and unity.51*
Christopher Holiwood taught that the Catholic Church could
be shown to be the true Church of Jesus Christ by the fact of its
status as the historically demonstrable continuation of the apostolic
society.82 In a later edition of 'his book he indicated five signs or
marks which rendered the exclusive claim of the Church evident.
These five marks were faith, morals, extension in place, extension
in time, and glorious works.83 Nicholas Sander had listed six notes,
the Church’s depth and sublimity, its splendor and clarity, its ex­
tension, its duration, its unity, and its constancy.54
Suarez named ten properties of the Church by which a man
could demonstrate its status as the true Church of Jesus Christ,
even apart from those other arguments which certify the correct­
ness of its faith. These ten notes were the Church’s catholicity, its
duration, the agreement of peoples and nations, its unity, its holi­
ness, its apostolicity, the gift of prophecy and of miracles, the
48 Cf. Assertio Catholicae fidei circa articulos confessionis nomine illus­
trissimi Ducis IVirtenbergensis oblatae per legatos eius Concilio Tridentino
(Cologne, 1555), sectio de Ecclesia. The sections and the pages of this
edition are not numbered.

49 Cf. Brevis et Catholica symboli apostolici explicatio (Louvain, 1562),
pp. 30T ff.
50 Cf. Principiorum fidei doctrinalium demonstratio methodica (Paris,
1579), pp. 104 ff.

51 Cf. Principiorum fidei doctrinalium relectio scholastica et compendiaria
(Antwerp, 1596), pp. 70 ff.
82 Cf. De investiganda vera ac visibili Christi Ecclesia tractatus, (Antwerp,
1619), p. 25. Holiwood used the Latinized form of his name, Christophorus
a Sacrobosco, as a signature for his book.
83 Cf. op. cit., pp. 75 ff.
54Cf De visibili monarchia Ecclesiae (Louvain, 1571), ρ. 793.

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ordered government of the Church, its legitimate use of the sacra­
ments, and its legitimate use of Scripture.55 Gregory of Valenda”
and Adam Tanner57 considered as notes of the true Church the
four properties attributed to the Church in the Creed of Constan­
tinople and two others, the order existent in the Church, and its
visibility. St Robert Bellarmine, reminding his reader that the note
of the Church leads to a conclusion “evidently credible” rather
than “evidently true” for those who do not accept the Scriptures as
God’s word, employs no less than fifteen of these marks.58 These
are the Catholic name, the Church’s antiquity, its uninterrupted
duration, the number and variety of its adherents, the succession
of its bishops from the apostles, its agreement with the faith of the
apostles, the union of its members, the holiness of its teaching, the
efficacy of its teaching, the holy lives of its great teachers, its
miracles, its prophecies, the admissions of its enemies, the dreadful
fate of those who oppose it, and finally the temporal felicity of its
protectors. St Robert, however, taught that these demonstrations
might be arranged around the four marks of unity, holiness,
catholicity, and apostolicity. Thus he lent the pressure of his in­
fluence towards the tendency to limit the number of notes to these
four.
Earlier in the sixteenth century both Michael Vehe59 and Cardinal
Stanislaus Hosius60 had designated these four properties as notes
of the Church. This manner of listing the notes soon triumphed
over the more complicated methods. John Wiggers took pains to
show that the various elements in St. Augustine’s celebrated argu­
ment for the Church could all be explained in terms of the four
properties set forth at Constantinople,61 and Francis Sylvius argued
5ï Cf. Opus de triplici virtute theologica, fide, spe, et charitate (Lyons,
1621), p. 177.
58 CI. Commentarii theologici (Ingolstadt, 1603), III, col. 184 ff.
57 CL Theologia scholastica (Ingolstadt, 1627), III, col. 156.
68 Cf. De controversiis Christianae fidei adversus huius temporis haereticas
(Inglostadt, 1586), I, ccd. 1338 ff.
59 CL Assertio sacrorum quorundam axiomatum, quae a nonnullis nostri
seculi pseudo prophetis in periculosam rapiuntur controversiam (Leipdg,
1535), Tract. I, cap. 2. The pages of this edition are not numbered.
80 CL Confessio Catholicae fidei Christiana, in the Opera omnia (Cologne,
1584), pp. 29 ff.
61 CL Commentaria de virtutibus theologicis, fide, spe, et charitate (Lou­
vain, 1689), pp. 120 ff.

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295

that all arrangements of the notes could be reduced to this one.®2
Later in the seventeenth century the brothers Adrian and Peter
van Walenburch used another set of four notes, unity, miracles,
the diffusion of the Church and the perpetual succession of teachers
within it,®3 but after their time the demonstration from the notes
of the Church was, for all practical purposes, restricted to the ar­
rangement sponsored by Vehe and Hosius.
The via notarum as these men employed it was a perfectly
effective demonstration. It was addressed to men who professed
themselves willing to follow the teaching of Scripture and of the
Fathers, and who wanted to be associated with our Lord in the
same way that the primitive Christians were joined to Him.
Throughout all of its various individual arrangements, the demon­
stration from the notes of the true Church gave these men ample
evidence that the Church of the promises, the company of die
Christians, was, on the authority of Scripture and of the Fathers,
essentially an organized and visible society, the visible society
which they knew as the Catholic Church. Men like St. Robert and
Francis Sylvius did not waste their time in using this compara­
tively complex process to prove something self-evident, the fact
that as individual societies the various Protestant religious assem­
blies had not been established by our Lord during the course of
His public life in this world. This fact was taken in as one element
of their demonstration. They were engaged in polemic, not against
one individual religious group nor against a mere union of societies.
They were trying, in the interests of divine truth, to overcome an
erroneous system, the system in which the Protestant teaching on
the notes of the Church formed the key position. In showing that
the Fathers of Constantinople had declared the visible Church over
which they ruled as the Church of the faith, in presenting the
formulae of St. Augustine and of the other patristic writers, the
Counter-Reformation theologians were offering ample proof that,
to be in the company of Christ, or to be a Christian, a disciple in
the strict sense of the term, a man had to belong to the visible
Church.
12 Cf. De praecipuis fidei nostrae orthodoxae controversiis cum nostris
haereticis, in the Opera omnia (Antwerp, 1698), pp. 256 ff.

33 Ci Professio fidei Catholicae, in Migne’s Theologiae cursus completus
I, coi. 1004 ff. This Professio is sometimes ascribed to Francis Veronius, S.J.

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THE AMERICAN ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW

The weakness which Dr. Thils and other modem theologians
have remarked in the modern use of the via notarum arises, not
from any defect in the process itself, but rather from a faulty use
of this process. In certain modem works there is a tendency to
depict the Catholic Church and dissident religious organizations
as claiming the same dignity, and to treat the via notarum as a kind
of magic instrament for deciding the contest in favor of the
Catholic Church. Thus the notes of the Church are considered as
standards awarding the prerogatives of our Lord’s true Church to
the Catholic Church rather than, let us say, to the Methodist
Episcopal Church.
Actually, of course, there is no such contest The Catholic
Church’s prerogatives as the true Church of Christ are not claimed
in the name of any non-Catholic religious society, or even for the
sum-total of these societies. They are claimed for an invisible
church of the just or of the predestined. All that the modern
Protestant bodies claim, and all that any such visible organization
ever claimed, is the status of a society organized for the furtherance
of die common interests of persons who seek their salvation as
members of this invisible church. The Catholic via notarum shows
that the Church of salvation is actually the visible society, the
Catholic Church.
Furthermore, in recent years there has also been a tendency on
the part of some authors to rely too much on a mere enumeration
of the notes and an indication that they are found within die
Church. After all/ the essential work of the via notarum is to indi­
cate that the visible Catholic Church is the true Church of Jesus
Christ. The process is devoid of purpose and of meaning when
the person to whom it is addressed is not aware of what the ex­
pression “true Church of Jesus Christ” really means. The classical
masterpieces of ecclesiology all insisted upon the “names” of the
Church, the various designations given to the Church by our Lord
and by the Fathers. When they set out to prove that the Catholic
Church is the true Church of Christ, they were demonstrating that it
is the Kingdom of God, the City of God, the House and Temple
of God, and our Lord’s Mystical Body. They were showing that
the Catholic Church is the Church of the faithful and that, in order
to have the designation of disciple of Christ or of Christian, in
the sense in which these terms appear in Scripture, a man must
belong to the Catholic Church.

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. 297

In the religious and secular literature of our own time, a tremen­
dous amount of the force and meaning contained in the notion of the
Church or the Ecclesia has been lost. We have become so prone
to apply the name “church” to every religious organization that
we forget that it was and is the pre-eminent title of the company
within which our Lord dwells. We are so accustomed to hearing
expressions like “the union of the Churches” that we are apt to
forget that this manner of speech would have sounded like blas­
phemy to the men who first elaborated the argument from the notes
of the Church. For them, and for their opponents in religious
debate, there was manifestly only one Church of Christ, and one
church of Satan. We can expect little good from the via notarum
when it is advanced by the type of Catholic writer who will use
the inherently contradictory expression, “orthodox Christians, both
Protestant and Catholic.”

It is encouraging to find a distinguished non-Catholic scholar
like H. Bum-Murdoch protesting against the attenuated meaning
attached to the word “church” in modem times.®* Only when men
come to realize the content and the implications of this word can
they be in a position to profit from the via notarum83 Unless they
have an idea of what the notion of the true Church of Jesus Christ
really is, they will not appreciate what this process of proof has to
show them. Once they come to learn that meaning, however, they
will find in the proof from the notes of the Church one of the most
fruitful portions of Catholic theology.

Joseph Clifford Fenton
The Catholic University of America,
Washington, D. C.

w Ci. Church, Continuity and Unity (Cambridge, England: At the Uni­
versity Press, 1945), p. 8.

®Dr. Thils* diffidence towards the via notarum may, perhaps, be ascribed
to his belief that modem theologians see only a contest between the Catholic
Church and three rival religious organizations where their counter-Reformation predecessors described one great conflict between the Catholic Church
and the ecclesia sathanae (cf. op. cit„ p. 5).