Are Catholics Christian? Explained Like You’re Five

Quick Insights

• Yes, Catholics are absolutely Christians, because they believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God who died for our sins and rose from the dead, which is the very definition of being Christian.
• The Catholic Church is actually the oldest Christian Church in the world, founded by Jesus Christ Himself when He chose the apostles and gave Saint Peter a special role of leadership.
• Being Christian means believing in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and the Catholic Church has proclaimed this faith without interruption for more than two thousand years.
• Some people confuse “Christian” with “Protestant,” but Protestantism only began in the sixteenth century, more than fifteen hundred years after Jesus founded His Church.
• Catholics read the same Bible, profess the same Nicene Creed, celebrate the same baptism, and worship the same Triune God as other Christians throughout the world.
• The Catholic Church actually gave the world the Bible by determining which books belong in it, and she has guarded and proclaimed the Gospel of Jesus Christ longer than any other institution on earth.

Why This Question Gets Asked

The question of whether Catholics are Christian might seem strange or even slightly offensive to a Catholic hearing it for the first time, since from a Catholic perspective the answer is so obvious that the question barely needs asking. Catholics believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, they read the New Testament, they celebrate baptism and the Eucharist, they profess the Nicene Creed, and they have been proclaiming the Gospel since the first century. From the inside of the Catholic tradition, there is no meaningful question here at all. And yet the question does get asked, and it gets asked with genuine sincerity by people who are not trying to be offensive but who have been formed in a religious environment where “Christian” and “Protestant” have come to be treated as synonyms, and where Catholic practices and beliefs are understood as departures from authentic Christianity rather than as expressions of its most ancient form. Understanding why the question arises is the first step toward answering it well, because the answer needs to address not just the abstract theological question but the specific confusions and assumptions that lie behind it. The confusion has several sources: the widespread use of “Christian” in American Protestant culture to mean specifically Protestant and evangelical; the genuine theological differences between Catholic and Protestant teaching on salvation, authority, and the sacraments, which some Protestant traditions understand as disqualifying the Catholic Church from the category of Christian; and a long history of anti-Catholic prejudice in English-speaking Protestant culture that has presented Catholicism as a corrupt addition to original Christianity rather than as Christianity itself. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that all who have been baptized in the name of the Trinity share a real if imperfect unity with one another in Christ, and that the bonds of baptism, Scripture, and faith in Jesus are genuine bonds even where serious theological differences remain (CCC 818). Answering the question of whether Catholics are Christian therefore requires both a clear affirmation of what Catholics believe and a careful examination of where the confusion about those beliefs originates.

What It Means to Be Christian

Before asking whether Catholics are Christian, it is necessary to ask what being Christian actually means, because the answer to the first question depends entirely on how you define the second. In the most basic and historically grounded sense, a Christian is a person who believes that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, meaning the Messiah and Son of God, who died for the sins of humanity and rose bodily from the dead, and who confesses this faith through baptism and membership in the community of believers. This definition goes back to the earliest Christian sources, including the letters of Saint Paul, which are the earliest surviving Christian writings. Paul’s most compressed statement of the Gospel appears in his first letter to the Corinthians: “I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve” (1 Corinthians 15:3-5). Every Catholic fully and unreservedly professes this Gospel. Every Catholic affirms that Jesus is the Christ, that He died for sins, that He truly rose bodily from the dead, and that faith in Him is the path to salvation. The most ancient formal statement of Christian faith, the Nicene Creed, produced by the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD and the First Council of Constantinople in 381 AD, is accepted and recited by the Catholic Church at every Sunday Mass. This same Creed is accepted, at least in principle, by virtually all Christian traditions as the authoritative summary of the faith. The Catechism teaches that the Nicene Creed is the great profession of faith shared by the whole Church, and that its affirmations constitute the core of what Christians believe (CCC 194). By every criterion derived from the earliest Christian sources and the most broadly shared Christian confessions, Catholics are unambiguously and thoroughly Christian.

The Catholic Church Is the Oldest Christian Church

One of the most important facts for answering the question of whether Catholics are Christian is the historical fact that the Catholic Church is not a later addition to Christianity or a departure from original Christianity. It is the original Christian Church, the community founded by Jesus Christ during His earthly ministry and continuously present in history from that founding to the present day. Jesus gathered twelve apostles, whom He trained, commissioned, and sent out with specific authority to teach, baptize, forgive sins, and celebrate the Eucharist in His name. He gave Simon the name Peter, meaning rock, and said to him: “On this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). He appeared to the apostles after His Resurrection, breathed on them to give them the Holy Spirit, and sent them out with the command to make disciples of all nations and to baptize in the name of the Trinity (Matthew 28:19). The community that the apostles then founded and led, described in the Acts of the Apostles, celebrated the Eucharist, baptized new members, appointed leaders through prayer and the laying on of hands, and spread the Gospel from Jerusalem through Asia Minor and Greece to Rome itself. This community, continuous from the apostles to the present day through an unbroken succession of bishops, is what the Catholic Church is. The word “Catholic” itself, from the Greek “katholikos” meaning universal, was already in use to describe this community by at least the early second century. Saint Ignatius of Antioch, writing around 107 AD and therefore within the lifetime of people who knew the apostles personally, uses the phrase “the Catholic Church” in a letter to the Christians of Smyrna, making this the earliest known use of the term. The Catechism teaches that the Church Christ founded subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the successor of Peter and the bishops in communion with him (CCC 816).

The Apostles Were the First Catholics

A further way of appreciating the relationship between Catholicism and Christianity is to recognize that the apostles themselves, the men Jesus personally chose and commissioned, were by any reasonable definition the first Catholics. They believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, as the New Testament accounts of the Last Supper and the Bread of Life Discourse in John make clear. They practiced baptism as a sacrament of new birth rather than merely as a symbolic declaration of faith, as the Acts of the Apostles consistently records. They recognized Peter as holding a special leadership role among the twelve, as the pattern of his activity throughout Acts demonstrates. They appointed successors through the laying on of hands, creating the structure of apostolic succession that the Catholic Church maintains to this day. They gathered the Christian community around the celebration of the Eucharist on the first day of the week, establishing the pattern of Sunday worship that became the Mass. They appealed to the authority of the gathered community of apostles and elders to settle doctrinal disputes, as the Council of Jerusalem in Acts chapter fifteen demonstrates. They wrote letters to specific communities to correct errors and provide guidance, and those letters became the New Testament. Every one of these practices is central to Catholicism, and every one of them goes back to the apostles themselves. If the apostles were Christians, and there is surely no question about that, then the practices they established and the community they led were Christian practices and a Christian community. The Catholic Church’s claim is simply that she maintains continuity with that apostolic community in both faith and structure, a claim that the historical and theological evidence supports far more strongly than the alternative claim that authentic apostolic Christianity disappeared and had to be rediscovered in the sixteenth century.

The Nicene Creed — A Shared Christian Profession

Perhaps the single most powerful evidence that Catholics are Christian is the Nicene Creed, the most authoritative summary of Christian faith ever produced, which the Catholic Church has recited at Sunday Mass for more than sixteen centuries and which is accepted by virtually all Christian traditions as the definitive statement of the Christian faith. The Creed was produced by the first two Ecumenical Councils of the Church, Nicaea in 325 AD and Constantinople in 381 AD, and it was specifically designed to express clearly and unambiguously what orthodox Christians believe about God and about Jesus Christ. It affirms belief in God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth. It affirms that Jesus Christ is the only-begotten Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, of the same substance as the Father. It affirms that for our sake He came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, suffered death, was buried, and rose on the third day. It affirms that He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of the Father and will come again to judge the living and the dead. It affirms belief in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life. It affirms belief in one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church. It affirms one baptism for the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the dead and life everlasting. Every Catholic in the world affirms every one of these statements at every Sunday Mass. The word “Catholic” appears in the Creed itself, in the phrase “one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church,” and it has been there since the Creed was first formulated. To question whether Catholics are Christian on the basis of this Creed would be to question whether any Christian at all accepts it, since it is the most universally recognized standard of Christian orthodoxy ever produced.

The Sacraments and Scripture — Catholic Christian Practices

The Catholic Church’s sacramental and scriptural life places it squarely within the mainstream of the Christian tradition, and examining these practices reveals how deeply and thoroughly Catholic life is organized around the same realities that define Christian life in every tradition. The seven sacraments of the Catholic Church, baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, penance, anointing of the sick, holy orders, and matrimony, are all grounded in the New Testament and are all directed toward union with Jesus Christ. Baptism in water and the Spirit, which Jesus prescribed in His conversation with Nicodemus (John 3:5) and commanded His apostles to administer (Matthew 28:19), is the foundational sacrament of initiation into the Body of Christ. The Eucharist, the celebration of which Jesus instituted at the Last Supper and commanded His disciples to repeat in His memory (Luke 22:19), is the center of Catholic worship at every Mass. The New Testament itself, which Catholics read at every Mass and study as the inspired Word of God, records the life, teaching, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ and the apostolic proclamation of the Gospel. The Catholic Church does not add to or subtract from the core content of the New Testament Gospel. It proclaims that Jesus Christ is the Son of God who died for human sins and rose from the dead, and it offers the sacraments as the means by which the grace of Christ’s death and Resurrection reach individual persons in every generation. The Catechism teaches that the sacraments are actions of the Holy Spirit at work in His Body, the Church, and that they make present the saving mystery of Christ for each generation of believers (CCC 1076). These are not the practices of a non-Christian religion. They are the practices of the oldest and largest community of Jesus Christ in the world.

Why Some Protestants Question Catholic Christianity

The serious version of the claim that Catholics are not Christian does not rest on simple ignorance or prejudice. It rests on specific theological convictions about what salvation requires and how it is received, and engaging those convictions honestly is more respectful and more effective than simply dismissing the question. Some Protestant traditions, particularly those in the Reformed and evangelical streams, hold that the Catholic doctrine of justification, meaning the teaching about how a person is made right before God, adds human works to the grace of Christ in a way that compromises the sufficiency of Christ’s saving work. They point to the Catholic teaching that participation in the sacraments, cooperation with grace, acts of penance, and other works contribute to the process of salvation, and they argue that this represents a fundamental departure from the New Testament Gospel as summarized by Paul in his declaration that “a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law” (Romans 3:28). This is a serious theological question that deserves a serious theological answer rather than dismissal. The Catholic Church teaches that salvation is entirely a gift of God’s grace, that no human being earns it or deserves it, and that the sacraments are not human works that earn merit but divine gifts through which God pours His grace into the lives of believers. The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, signed by the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation in 1999, represents a landmark agreement in which both traditions acknowledged that their core teachings on justification do not condemn each other, meaning that the differences, while real and important, do not constitute a fundamental incompatibility of Christian profession. The Catechism teaches that justification is the most excellent work of God’s love, accomplished solely through the grace of Christ and received through faith (CCC 1994). Catholics and Protestants may understand the mechanics of justification differently, but both profess that salvation comes from Jesus Christ alone and that no human being can save themselves.

Mary, the Saints, and Misunderstandings About Catholic Worship

One of the most common reasons people question whether Catholics are truly Christian is the Catholic practice of honoring Mary, praying to the saints, and venerating religious images, all of which can look, from the outside and without explanation, like worship of beings other than God. Understanding what the Catholic Church actually teaches about these practices, as opposed to what they might superficially appear to be, reveals that they are fully consistent with Christian faith rather than departures from it. The Catholic Church makes a clear and principled distinction between the worship that belongs to God alone, called latria in the theological tradition, and the honor given to Mary and the saints, called hyperdulia for Mary and dulia for the other saints. Catholics do not worship Mary or the saints. They ask them to intercede, meaning to pray on their behalf before God, in exactly the same way that one might ask a living friend or a priest to pray for them. The theological basis for this practice is the conviction that death does not end the life of the soul and that the saints, who are alive in God, can and do pray for those still on earth. Saint Paul asks the communities he writes to pray for him (Romans 15:30), and asking the saints to pray is the extension of this principle to those who have died in Christ. The Catechism teaches that Catholic veneration of Mary and the saints is entirely ordered toward the glory of God and is an expression of the Communion of Saints, the union of all the baptized, living and dead, in the Body of Christ (CCC 956). The use of religious images, similarly, is not the worship of idols but the veneration of persons whose images serve as focal points for prayer directed toward God, a practice with roots in the Old Testament itself, since God commanded the construction of images of the cherubim in the Tabernacle (Exodus 25:18). These Catholic practices, properly understood, express Christian faith rather than departing from it.

The Papacy and Christian Authority

Another major source of the claim that Catholics are not really Christian is the Catholic teaching about the papacy, specifically the claim that the Pope exercises a supreme teaching and governing authority in the Church that some Protestants regard as incompatible with the sole lordship of Jesus Christ. Some Protestant traditions hold that the only legitimate authority in the Church is the Bible alone and that any institution claiming authority alongside or above the Scripture substitutes a human authority for a divine one. The Catholic Church’s response to this concern is to point to the New Testament evidence that Jesus specifically established a structured authority within His Church, giving Peter a unique leadership role and giving the apostles collectively the authority to bind and loose, to forgive sins, to baptize, and to teach (Matthew 16:18-19, Matthew 18:18, John 20:22-23). The papacy is not an addition to the Gospel but the continuation of the ministry Jesus gave to Peter, exercised by Peter’s successors in the see of Rome. The authority of the Pope is not independent of Scripture and Tradition but in their service, and the Catechism teaches that the Magisterium is not above the Word of God but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on (CCC 86). The claim that submission to the Pope disqualifies Catholics from being Christian would equally disqualify the entire early Church, which recognized the authority of the bishops as successors of the apostles and appealed to the bishop of Rome as the primary guardian of apostolic tradition. The early Church Fathers, including Ignatius of Antioch, Irenaeus of Lyon, and Cyprian of Carthage, all affirmed structures of episcopal and Roman authority that correspond to what the Catholic Church teaches today, and all of them were unquestionably Christians.

Common Ground Between Catholics and All Christians

Despite the real theological differences between Catholics and various Protestant traditions, the common ground that Catholics share with all Christians is more fundamental and more extensive than the differences, and recognizing this common ground is essential for an honest answer to the question of whether Catholics are Christian. Catholics and all Christians share faith in the one God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Triune God whose inner life of perfect love is the source of all creation and all salvation. They share faith in Jesus Christ as the eternal Son of God who became human, died on the cross for sins, and rose bodily from the dead. They share the New Testament as the inspired Word of God recording the life, teaching, death, and Resurrection of Jesus and the apostolic proclamation of the Gospel. They share baptism in the name of the Trinity as the foundational sacrament of entry into the Christian community. They share the Lord’s Prayer that Jesus taught His disciples. They share the great moral commandments of love for God and love for neighbor that Jesus identifies as the summary of the Law and the Prophets (Matthew 22:37-40). They share the hope of the Resurrection of the dead and eternal life in God. They share the missionary mandate to proclaim the Gospel to all nations. The Catechism teaches that those who are baptized and believe in Christ belong in a real, though imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church, and that the Holy Spirit makes use of these separated communities as means of salvation (CCC 819). This is a remarkably generous and theologically serious acknowledgment that Christian faith is not the exclusive possession of any single denomination, and that God’s grace reaches beyond the visible boundaries of any institutional structure.

The Early Church Was Catholic in Practice

The historical record of the early Church, from the first century through at least the fifth century, presents a picture of Christian worship, theology, and community life that is far more Catholic in its specific content than Protestant interpreters have traditionally acknowledged, and this evidence is relevant to the question of whether Catholicism represents authentic Christianity or a departure from it. The earliest non-Biblical description of Christian worship, found in the writings of Saint Justin Martyr around 155 AD, describes a Sunday gathering that includes readings from Scripture, a homily, prayers of intercession, the presentation of bread and wine, a prayer of thanksgiving over them in which Christ’s words of institution are recalled, and the distribution of the consecrated elements to those present as the Body and Blood of Christ, with deacons carrying them to those unable to attend. This description of a mid-second-century Christian Sunday service is recognizably the structure of the Catholic Mass, and it includes the explicit belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist that is one of the most distinctively Catholic Christian beliefs. Saint Ignatius of Antioch, writing around 107 AD, insists that the Eucharist is the “flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ” in terms that leave no room for a merely symbolic interpretation. The Didache, an early Christian document from around the turn of the second century, describes baptism, Eucharist, and church order in ways that align closely with Catholic practice. None of these sources, all of which predate any separation between “Catholic” and other forms of Christianity, describe a church that looks like a Protestant congregation. They describe a church that looks Catholic, because the Catholic Church is the direct continuation of the community these sources describe.

Saints, Scholars, and Scientists — The Catholic Christian Tradition

The breadth and depth of the Catholic intellectual, artistic, and spiritual tradition provides further evidence that Catholicism is not a superficial or corrupt form of Christianity but one of the richest expressions of Christian faith and culture in the history of the world. The great theologians of the Catholic tradition, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Anselm, Newman, are among the most profound Christian thinkers in all of history, and their work is devoted entirely to understanding and communicating the faith in Jesus Christ. The great saints of the Catholic tradition, Francis of Assisi, Dominic, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Therese of Lisieux, are among the most compelling witnesses to the transforming power of the Gospel across any Christian tradition. The Catholic university tradition, which gave the world Oxford, Cambridge, Bologna, Paris, and hundreds of other institutions of higher learning, was explicitly Christian in its founding purpose and in its conviction that faith and reason, including scientific reason, are complementary rather than contradictory. Gregor Mendel, the Augustinian friar whose careful experiments with pea plants founded the science of genetics, was a Catholic priest. Georges Lemaître, the Belgian priest who first proposed the theory of the expanding universe that became the Big Bang theory, was a Catholic priest and physicist. These are not the products of a tradition that has departed from authentic Christianity. They are the products of a tradition that has engaged the fullness of Christian faith with intellectual seriousness, artistic creativity, and spiritual depth across twenty centuries. The Catechism teaches that the Catholic intellectual tradition reflects the conviction that faith seeks understanding, that the God who revealed Himself in Scripture is the same God who created the rational universe and endowed human beings with the capacity to know truth (CCC 158).

Baptism as the Bond of Christian Unity

Among all the points of genuine unity between Catholics and other Christians, baptism holds a uniquely important place, because baptism in the name of the Trinity is the foundational act of Christian initiation that the New Testament establishes as the gateway to the community of those who follow Christ. Jesus commands His apostles to baptize all nations in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19), and the Acts of the Apostles records the fulfillment of this command as the Church spreads from Jerusalem outward. The Catholic Church recognizes that any valid baptism performed with water in the name of the Trinity, even if celebrated outside the Catholic Church, genuinely incorporates the baptized person into the Body of Christ and establishes a real bond of Christian unity between that person and all other baptized Christians. The Catechism teaches that those baptized in Christ form one body and that baptism constitutes the sacramental bond of unity existing among all who have been reborn through it (CCC 1271). This means that when a Catholic is baptized and when a Baptist is baptized and when a Lutheran is baptized, all three receive the same foundational sacrament of Christian initiation and are all genuinely incorporated into the Body of Christ. The differences that remain between these traditions are real and significant, and the Catholic Church does not pretend otherwise. But the foundational bond of baptism makes all of them genuinely and unambiguously Christian, even as they differ in their understanding of other aspects of Christian life, worship, and doctrine. Any definition of “Christian” that excludes Catholics on the grounds that they are not truly Christian would, by exactly the same logic, have to exclude anyone who practices baptism in the name of the Trinity and professes faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, which would exclude virtually everyone normally regarded as Christian.

The Question Reveals a Deeper Misunderstanding

When someone sincerely asks whether Catholics are Christian, the question very often reveals not a specific theological concern about Catholic doctrine but a broader misunderstanding about the history of Christianity and the relationship between its various traditions. Many people in the English-speaking Protestant world grew up with a historical narrative in which Christianity began with Jesus, was quickly corrupted by the Catholic Church into something pagan and idolatrous, was rescued by the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, and continues in its purest form in the evangelical Protestant tradition. This narrative has the history of Christianity almost exactly backwards. Christianity did not originate in the sixteenth century, and the Catholic Church did not corrupt it. The Catholic Church is the original Christian community, the community that produced the New Testament, determined the canon of Scripture, formulated the Nicene Creed, preserved the apostolic tradition through centuries of persecution and theological controversy, and spread the Gospel to every inhabited continent. The Protestant Reformation represented a genuine reform movement responding to real abuses and raising genuinely important theological questions, and the Church’s response to those questions in the Council of Trent produced real and substantial reforms of Church practice. But the Reformation did not recover an authentic Christianity that had been lost. It produced new traditions that maintained some elements of the apostolic faith while departing from others, and the resulting diversity of Christian traditions includes both genuine treasures of faith and genuine losses of apostolic fullness. Understanding this history helps to reframe the question of whether Catholics are Christian, because once the history is told accurately, the question answers itself. The Catechism teaches that the Catholic Church possesses the fullness of the means of salvation, while sincerely acknowledging that elements of truth and holiness are found in other Christian communities as well (CCC 816).

How Catholics Should Respond to This Question

Catholics who encounter the sincere question of whether they are truly Christian do well to respond with patience, warmth, and factual clarity rather than with offense or defensiveness. The person asking very often does so in genuine good faith, from within a religious formation that has presented Catholicism as something other than authentic Christianity, and they deserve a response that takes their concern seriously and addresses it honestly. The most effective starting point is usually to affirm the common ground clearly and warmly: Catholics believe in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; they believe that Jesus is the Son of God who died for sins and rose from the dead; they read and revere the New Testament as the inspired Word of God; they celebrate baptism and the Eucharist as the Lord commanded; they pray the Lord’s Prayer that Jesus taught; they seek to live by the two great commandments of love for God and neighbor. These are the core contents of the Christian faith, and Catholics hold them as firmly and as joyfully as any other Christian tradition. From this common ground, the Catholic can then address whatever specific practice or doctrine is causing the confusion, explaining what the Catholic Church actually teaches rather than what it is sometimes alleged to teach, and inviting the questioner to see how these specific practices express rather than compromise the Christian faith. The Catechism calls every Catholic to be ready to give a reason for the hope within them, doing so with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15) (CCC 2471). This readiness to explain and to engage, combined with genuine respect for the sincerity of the questioner, is the most authentically Catholic response to this most basic of questions about Catholic identity.

What This All Means for Catholic Identity and Christian Unity

The answer to the question of whether Catholics are Christian is a clear, confident, and joyful yes, grounded not in institutional loyalty or defensiveness but in the historical, theological, and scriptural evidence that the Catholic Church is the community Jesus founded, the community the apostles led, the community that produced the New Testament and the Nicene Creed and the great tradition of Christian saints, scholars, and missionaries across twenty centuries. Catholics are not Christians because the Church claims the label or because they wish to be included in the category. They are Christians because they believe in Jesus Christ as the eternal Son of God, crucified and risen, Lord and Savior of the world, and because they have expressed and lived that belief through the sacramental, theological, and moral tradition handed down from the apostles through an unbroken succession of bishops to the present day. The question of whether Catholics are Christian, for all the confusion that generates it, opens into one of the most important and fruitful conversations in contemporary Christianity, because answering it well requires examining the history of the faith, the content of the Nicene Creed, the nature of the sacraments, the structure of apostolic authority, and the question of what unity among Christians actually requires. The Catholic Church’s answer to all of these questions is rooted in the conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord of the Church He founded, that the Holy Spirit has guided that Church through every century of its history, and that the fullness of the Christian faith, including the sacraments, the apostolic succession, the Scriptural canon, and the great tradition of theological and spiritual wisdom, is the patrimony of every Catholic and the gift that the Catholic Church offers to the whole world. To be Catholic is to be Christian in the most ancient, most complete, and most historically continuous sense of that word, and recognizing this truth is both a source of personal confidence for every Catholic and a foundation for genuine, honest, and fruitful dialogue with all who share faith in Jesus Christ.