THE VISIBLE UNITY OF THE CHURCH IS ESSENTIAL TO HER WITNESS

Why was it that St. Patrick, as a solitary apostle of the One Holy and Catholic Apostolic Church was able to convert Ireland to the faith of Christ in the 6th Century, but in the United States, in the time that 90 per cent of the Christian workers lived within its boundaries, with all the resources of the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, with the greatest freedom experienced by any people in all of history, lost the culture of the United States to secular modernism and post-modernism?
Part of the answer is the times we live in; however, another and critical aspect of the problem lies in the fact that the visible unity of the Church of Christ is essential to its witness, and the lack of visible unity guarantees that any given culture will not believe. How can I say that?
Christ prayed for that the Church might be one that the world might believe.
John 17:20ff- Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word;
21 That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. (emphasis mine)
22 And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one:
23 I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.

Now the world cannot see an invisible unity, so it was a visible unity that the Lord had in mind. The apostle Paul recapitulated this theme when he spoke in Ephesians
There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all. Ephesians 4:6
Bodies are visible, not invisible, and there is One Body of Christ, simply because there is also One Lord.

The visible unity of the Church is essential to Christian witness for it demonstrates in the world the Unity of the Godhead and the power of the One Lord to save a people from the divisions that sin has caused in the world.

So, reasoning from the Scriptural proposition, why did the Christians of the United States lose the culture to secular modernism? Because of the massive failure to maintain the visible unity of the Church. No, it is more than that- it is the embracing of the sin of schism as a virtue by the vast majority of believers in the United States, where division for doctrinal disagreements and also for purity of the Church is normative. So much so that there are more than 20 thousand discrete organizations, calling themselves Christian within the confines of the United States.
DeToqueville, in the early 19th Century saw America as a nation having the soul of a Church. However, after the War of Northern Aggression, the soul of America changed and was seen in the politics that was racked by scandal and the emergence of rapacious industrial robber barrons who were laws unto themselves, and the burgeoning of American imperial ambitions with the forced acquisition of the Phillipines, the virtual annexation of Central America, and so forth. What had changed?
A critical change had taken place at the Time of the Civil- the Churches could not agree on the most fundamental of Scriptural issues and divided along political lines- the ability to articulate a common vision of the Christian life failed, and with that failure, the Christian community lost the unity necessary to engage and win the Culture. And so it has been ever since.
Now the driving force that caused the failure of interpretation of Scripture was the failure to give any credence to the place of Tradition in the understanding of Scripture. The Apostle had commanded in Scipture that apostolic tradition, written and oral, be observed, yet the principle of sola Scriptura enunciated by the Reformation in reaction to the aberrent Traditionalism of the Roman Catholic Church, was just that, a reaction and not a reformation, and helped to lead to the disastrous unity of the Faith that we now see in the United States, and everywhere that its version of the Faith has been seeded throughout the world.
What shall we do in response to this terrible fact? I suggest that we believe what the Scriptures and the Creed has taught us- to believe in 'one, holy, catholic and apostolic church'. We've got to find our way back to it, so that our witness to Christ may once again be effective in the world. If it is not too late.