Last week, I reflected on a recent Gallup Poll that found that the level of confidence in organized religion and the Church among Catholics was 10 percent lower than the expression of confidence on the part of Protestants.

As I noted last week, one might want to look closely at how the questions were formulated that led to these percentages. One might also look at the people questioned, with a focus on how many self-identified Catholics have little or no real connection to the Catholic Church.

But the poll shows an undeniable challenge to the Catholic understanding of the Church herself.

The very reason for the Church, and for God calling all men and women to Her, flows from two elements of how God has always chosen to work with the world and with each of us.

The first is this: God has always worked to unify His people and to bring them, together, to the fulfillment of His promises. Think back even to the Old Testament, and to the manner in which Moses was called to bring the people of Israel, together, to the freedom of the Promised Land. Then God sent the prophets and the judges to care for His people, together.

God could have given salvation and the fulfillment of His promises to us individually. But God’s plan has always worked with His people as a whole. 

The Church is the continuing manner in which God’s love, His wisdom and, yes, His law, is given to His people in a unified and humanly structured fashion. Our individual salvation is not won by ourselves but is offered to us and mediated through the Church established by Christ.

While we must respond with our individual act of our own love and will for God, He desires that this be done in a context that Christ has established: the Church.

The second element of how God has worked with His people involves the use of humanity itself.

God could have saved and redeemed us by any manner of spiritual or mystical interventions. But time and again, God has demonstrated the goodness of creation by using it as the instrument of salvation.

God chose the man Moses to lead His people forth from slavery. God chose the woman Mary to be the means of Christ’s entry into the world.

And that leads to the most singular example of God’s use of our humanity, the human nature of Christ himself.

Even as Satan tempted Christ at the beginning of his ministry to renounce his humanity in favor of more spectacular means of bringing salvation, Christ embraced our human condition, even to the cross itself. And how many, on Good Friday, lost confidence in Christ, seeing what they thought was his weak and defeated humanity crucified before them?

The long and short of it is this: our Catholic confidence in and love for the Church is in keeping with how God has consistently given Himself to the world and offered us salvation.

The combination of bringing us together as His people and the use of humanity points to the Church as God’s chosen instrument of His love.

Because Christ established his Church, even to the proclamation of Peter as the Rock upon which Christ intended to build his Church, we need to love Her and have confidence in Her. We need to trust that even when we see the weakness or sinfulness of her members, Christ loves Her so much and is well able to guide Her in every age.

Our Catholic faith and understanding shows why Christ and his Church can never be separated. It is right for us to love the Church and to have confidence in Her.