What is religion?
Our word “religion” derives from the Latin religio, which means an obligation or a bond, a noun derived from the verb religare (“to bind”).
While a natural form of religion may lead someone to recognize a Divine Revelation when it occurs, often people rationalize and convert their own selfish desires into either made-up religions or the denial of God altogether. The history of the world teaches us that it has generally been easier for people to make formal or informal religions out of their own selfish desires than to discipline their minds and wills in the service of Divine perfection.
Though Vatican II noted, in its Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate), that “The Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and good in these religions,” the Council did not say that all religions were of equal salvific value.
It is a lesson of history, in fact, that the normal condition of mankind is to be dramatically wrong about God and about what God has or has not revealed to us concerning Who He is and how He wants us to live and worship. If we traverse the religions of the world, we can enumerate the following types and examples:
Those which, like Buddhism and Confucianism, are mostly human philosophies;
Those that derive from tribal traditions which may be either purely natural or diabolically inspired—now morphing into contemporary popular commitments to witchcraft, or direct and deliberate devil worship (e.g., the St. Death of the drug cartels);
Those which, like Hinduism, are strange combinations of human philosophies with mythologies;
Judaism, which remains in a class by itself, being uniquely predicated on God’s self-revelation but ceasing to accept that on-going Revelation with the coming of Jesus Christ;
Odd religious amalgamations, like Islam and Mormonism, which are combinations of other religions, and which claim (without any evidence) a specific revelation all their own;
Those sects which, like all the Protestant forms, began with an appreciation for a miraculously-attested Divine Revelation but rejected the revealed authority principle that was intended to guarantee it against human tampering;
Those such as the Orthodox churches which originally participated in the fullness of Catholicism and indeed still preserve its sacramental character, but which were led primarily by politics to abandon key aspects of the Church’s Divine constitution—chiefly, again, the Petrine principle of authority;
And finally, Catholicism, which is not only based on a miraculously-attested Divine Revelation but possesses the God-given principle of authority necessary to protect that Revelation from spiraling into a fallacious nothingness through misdirected human interpretations—an absolutely essential feature which no other religion in the world even claims.
It ought to be obvious that for all religious claims we must consider the source, and in doing so we may find that the source is not God. Moreover, we must consider the institutional character of the religion itself to see if it bears anything of Divine origin within it, including any protection against its dissolution into a mere collection of human ideas and interpretations.
Even for those who claim a Revelation, while they may lead sincere followers to some understanding of and relationship with God, they may also proclaim an ever-increasing series of distortions of what God has revealed. This is so true that, even within the Catholic Church herself, we must thoroughly understand the nature and limits of her Divine protection against error.
Pic, Our Lady of Walsingham. By Dr. Jeff Mirus
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