Top Five Things You Must Believe In Order To Be Catholic

Top Five Things You Must Believe In Order To Be Catholic
Qualifiers- You can't not believe these things and call yourself Catholic;
Sequence- unranked;

* Real Presence- This one's kind of a slam dunk. It's been on the books for millennia. The denial of this doctrine is a pretty recent development in the big scheme of things.

* Immaculate Conception of Our Lady- This one's better attested than its official definition might suggest. The tradition of these goes back to antiquity. It only became official dogma in 1854 but this was borderline consensus for all or most of the Church's history. Not bad for a "latecomer"...

* Magisterium- Again, history speaks so clearly to this that it scarcely needs defending except to people who refuse to read what the Church Father's believed and taught. Apart from that, vast swaths of the New Testament make no sense unless the Church has authority over her members.

* Papacy- This one should be obvious but here it is anyway. Still, I distinguish the value of the papacy quite apart from the Magisterium because the Magisterium by itself isn't exclusively Catholic. At least not anymore. The Eastern Orthodox, for example, won't hesitate to proclaim the legitimacy of obeying [insert bishop here]'s authority.

But the papacy as an office exists apart from that. One of the Church's central dogmas is that the Holy Father is the Vicar of Christ. You either believe that or you don't. And if you don't, you're not Catholic.

* Sacraments- This almost didn't make the list but I decided that even though the Protestants believe in the value of marriage, baptism, communion and other things, their understanding of those things is so flawed and incomplete that they arguably have missed the entire point.

To tie it back to the Real Presence, if it is not the Body and Blood we consume in the Eucharist, how then is John 6 to be interpreted? Our Lord appears to be speaking in quite literal terms there. But the "literalists" seem only too eager to allegorize this and many other passages from sacred Scripture.

I truly don't understand the value of a strictly commemorative observance of communion. I didn't understand it even when I was a Southern Baptist and I understand it even less now.

As I say, you can believe these things and NOT call yourself Catholic. That'd put you in the company of a lot of Anglicans, actually. More than you might think. But you can't NOT believe these things and call yourself Catholic.

And yes, yes, yes, there are several other doctrines I could've included. But I didn't. Because this is MY list. If those items being excluded bothers you that much, make your own list.

Oh, something else. I thought about posting something similar for evangelicals but their lack of unity about anything and everything makes that pretty tricky. You can find evangelicals who disagree on fundamentals as obvious as the divine inspiration of the Bible so attempting to unravel the "evangelical position" on any number of doctrines considered the amount of diversity of belief tolerated in the evangelical world is an exercise in impossibility. So I shall not bother.