What we believe

The Catholic Church was founded nearly 2,000 years ago by Jesus Christ.  It is rooted in both Scripture and Tradition.  Among Christian traditions, Catholicism is distinctive.  Only the Catholic Church combines all these attributes:

• The Catholic Church is led by the pope, the successor of St. Peter, the rock upon which Jesus said he would build his Church (Matthew 16:18).
• The other leaders of the Catholic Church, the bishops, have unbroken lines of succession back to Jesus’ apostles.
• The Eucharist — the Real Presence of Christ — and the six other sacraments, which are visible signs and channels of God’s grace, are found in the Catholic Church. Click here to read more about the sacraments.
• The Catholic Church’s teaching on faith and morals is protected from error by the Holy Spirit.
• The Catholic Church gives fitting honor to the Mother of God. The angel Gabriel declared Mary to be “full of grace” (Luke 1:28), making her worthy of our highest reverence.
• The Catholic Church has survived for 2,000 years, in spite of every form of persecution, opposition, and difficulty.

If you've been away from the church for a while or didn't grow up Catholic and are interested in learning more about the faith, the first step is to pray to God for his help to lead you. You can call a parish and ask to speak with a priest or a layperson who can guide you. Many parishes have programs or small groups to start exploring the faith like Alpha and others. For more information, go to Becoming Catholic.

Father Mike Schmitz from Ascension Press answers this question quite well. Here is an excerpt:

"To claim to be spiritual but not religious is like saying, 'I'm a scholar, but I don't read.' What informs your scholarship? There needs to be content. Where would a spiritual person get data about the spiritual life? How would they even know the answers to the most basic questions: Is your spirit good? Is God good? Who is God? Is God on your side? Who are you? What is the goal of living?

"There is the desire of 'I want to do what I want to do.' If I have religion, then I am obligated to obey someone else's will. But if I am merely spiritual, there are no demands upon me other than to follow my own sense of 'this is what I currently prefer.'

"I've seen this mindset manifest itself with comments like, 'Well, I find God the most in nature, so I would rather go into the woods on Sunday morning than to a church.' I also find God revealing himself in nature. But what is going on here? I am merely asserting my own preference: I want to go to the woods, so I will go to the woods. I don't actually have to be concerned with what God might want. I'm not even asking if God has a preference regarding where he wants to be found or how he wants to be worshiped. I am merely doing what I want to do.

"In this case, my 'god' is me. I become the one who decides 'this is what God would want,' rather than asking, 'God, what do you want?'

"'Spiritual but not religious' is just another form of idolatry. In this case, the false god is the god I have invented. God is no longer a someone. 'God' is now just some vague idea, an impersonal force that makes no demands on me and is simply 'there' so that I don't feel lonely.

I will talk to people who say, 'All I need to know is that God is love.' I believe that God is love as well. But where did they get that truth about God? They didn't get it from looking at nature. If anything, nature is impartial. It can be beautiful, but it can also be ugly. It can bring life, but it just as easily brings death. There is nothing in nature alone that indicates that God is love. Nature doesn't seem to even care about human beings.

"We have been told that God is love through the revelation of Jesus Christ. No person on this planet had even hoped that God is love until Christianity. There was no proof of this until God became one of us and revealed himself in this way. The only way Jesus could accurately reveal this truth is if he himself is truly God. And if Jesus is God, then that means that God is not impersonal, he is not invented by us; he is revealed to us. Our spirituality has been formed and informed by our religion."

A good start to find resources and straight answers to questions about Catholic teachings are the Ascension Presents YouTube channel or the Busted Halo website. They cover many of the key issues and explain many of the Church's teaching.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church is a comprehensive source for all Church teachings. You can find an online version here.

You are not alone. We all feel the pain and sadness of clergy abuse. The Archdiocese of Seattle has a website — Protect and Heal — where you can see what steps have been taken to protect children and vulnerable people in the Archdiocese of Seattle.

Additionally, Bishop Robert Barron's book Letter to a Suffering Church may be helpful. Here is a brief video where he addresses clergy abuse in the Church and what you can do about it.

We know from the fourth commandment that God wants us to honor our parents, so how much more must he want us to honor his Mother? The angel Gabriel declared Mary to be “full of grace” (Luke 1:28), making her worthy of our highest respect. Mary herself stated that “all ages will call me blessed” (Luke 1:48). The Catholic Church is simply obeying and fulfilling this scriptural prophecy. We ask Mary to intercede for us and to draw us closer to her son, Jesus, as we pray at the end of the Hail Mary, "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death."

The saints are members of the Church who have arrived at perfect union with Christ. They are examples of great faith, hope and charity, and we call on them to pray for us who are still on our pilgrimage of faith. We don't pray "to" the saints; we ask for their intercession, thereby bringing us all closer to Christ.

The Blessed Virgin Mary promised many graces to those who recite the rosary. It is a powerful prayer that helps those who faithfully recite it grow in grace and holiness.  When Mary appeared to the children at Fatima over a hundred years ago, she asked the children to pray the rosary for peace--peace in our hearts, our families, our country and our world.

Learn more by reading this article.