At the church door last Sunday, I inquired of various visitors where they were from: Tokyo, Berlin, Moscow, Johannesburg, London, Marseilles, and then there were our own nationals from Winston-Salem, Austin, Seattle and other places beyond the typical Manhattanite's geographical information. All of them worshipping "with the angels and saints" illustrates the dictum that the Catholic Church is too universal to be merely international.

The United Nations is international but it does not extend into eternity, even though some of the speeches there might give that impression. Philanthropic organizations may be international in their good works, but the best of them cannot comfort the souls in Purgatory. The most prosperous international corporations have no claim on the treasury of merit provided by the saints in glory. The Catholic Church is not limited to time and space. As the Church Militant she does cover the globe we live on, but as the Church Expectant she encompasses the holy souls in Purgatory preparing for the Beatific Vision, and as the Church Triumphant she counts in her ranks all the saints "like light appearing."

Our Lord gave Peter and James and John a glimpse of this when he appeared with Moses and Elijah on Mount Tabor. There are those who glibly suggest that "catholic" only means universal in the international sense. One can only be Catholic, though, by confessing the same true Faith proclaimed by the saints at all times and in all places, as St. Vincent of Lerins famously put it.

This high claim shatters spiritual provincialism, by which I mean that kind of trendiness which trims belief to the assumptions of one's own generation. As Dean Inge said, he who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a widower. And Chesterton reminded self-conscious progressivists that the Catholic Church "is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age."

Catholicism is the only real cosmopolitanism because it is not limited to this fraction of the cosmos, and it is the only authentic sophistication because its "Sophia" is, as Newman taught, "the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of the whole course, the whole work of God."

Recently, as seems routine around Lent, a film producer made himself the laughingstock of archeologists by claiming to have discovered the tomb of Christ and indications that he lived and died a bourgeois. This sort of hoax would affirm the little world in which we live as the only world. The man who publicized his "discovery" has not adjusted to his own world well: He has been married five times and belongs to the Mars Society which wants to migrate to another planet. Yet, the media salivate after these hoaxes as though they were scientific archeologists on to something. It is indeed a degrading slavery and we hope that Lent saves many from such servitude.

Fr. George W. Rutler