Newman's 10 points

CatholicCulture breaks it down for us:

"it seems to me appropriate, as we prepare for Lent, for me to repeat St. John Henry Cardinal Newman’s great argument for accepting Christ and becoming a Catholic, which he made in part at various stages of his life, and in totality through his life’s work.

Let me put the argument in ten simple points:

All men and women are conscious of the difference between good and evil and each of us has the sense of living under a judgment of how we will choose to act.

This sense of reality implies the existence of a lawmaker and a judge, that is, of a God who actually cares about how we behave.

Since we have this sense of a God who cares what we do, we must assume that He will reveal Himself and His will to us in some way.

This prompts us to look throughout history, in every time and place, for a Revelation attended by signs and wonders of a sort that betoken its Divine origin.

In fact, we can identify such an attested Revelation only among the Jews, culminating in the coming of the Jewish Messiah, who is Jesus Christ. An urgent necessity, then, impels us to examine this Revelation closely.

Assuming we find it credibly marked by Divine signs, we must further seek to understand the particular mission of this Jesus Christ, and what arrangements he made for the continuation of this mission after His bodily departure from the scene.

Historically, what we find is that Christ’s mission was carried on by a Church founded by Christ Himself, and that only one institution claims to be this self-same Church, in continuance from that time until the present day.

Moreover, we find, on reflection, that whatever Revelation Christ offered cannot be expected to be intact today unless He also provided a principle of authority which would protect that Revelation against human errors and cultural shifts through the centuries.

And at length we find that only the Catholic Church claims to possess such an authority, and can be shown to have exercised it continuously from the first century until now.

Finally, then, every person ought to reflect on the implications of his initial awareness of moral reality, and do his best to follow these implications through to their sole logical conclusion—that the full richness of God’s plan for us is preserved, expounded, experienced and lived in the Catholic Church.

It is particularly good to remind ourselves of the rational foundation of our Faith as Lent begins."