The 15 Marks of the Catholic Church

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The 15 Marks of the Catholic Church,
By St. Robert Bellarmine, 1542-1621

Developed by St. Robert Bellarmine,1542-1621,
Doctor of the Church and Cardinal
  1. The Church’s Name, Catholic, universal, and world wide, and not confined to any particular nation or people.
  2. Antiquity, in tracing her ancestry directly to Jesus Christ.
  3. Constant Duration, in lasting substantially unchanged for so many centuries.
  4. Extensiveness, in the number of her loyal members.
  5. Episcopal Succession, of her Bishops from the first Apostles at the Last Supper to the present hierarchy.
  6. Doctrinal Agreement, of her doctrine with the teaching of the ancient Church.
  7. Union, of her members among themselves, and with their visible head, the Roman Pontiff.
  8. Holiness, of doctrine in reflecting the sanctity of GOD.
  9. Efficacy, of doctrine in its power to sanctify believers, and inspire them to great moral achievement.
  10. Holiness of Life, of the Church’s representative writers and defenders.
  11. The glory of Miracles, worked in the Church and under the Church’s auspices.
  12. The gift of Prophesy found among the Church’s saints and spokesmen.
  13. The Opposition that the Church arouses among those who attack her on the very grounds that Christ was opposed by His enemies.
  14. The Unhappy End, of those who fight against her.
  15. The Temporal Peace and Earthly Happiness of those who live by the Church’s teaching and defend her interests.
home.inreach.com/bstanley/chmark.htm
 
Of these 15 marks, the Church herself, in the first Vatican Council, selected the following five as worthy of dogmatic decree

*What is more, the Church herself by reason of

her astonishing propagation,
her outstanding holiness and
her inexhaustible fertility in every kind of goodness,
by her Catholic unity and
her unconquerable stability, is

a kind of great and perpetual motive of credibility and an incontrovertible evidence of her own divine mission.*​

(My formatting added)

Of Bellamine’s additional marks, it was my observation of number 11 (Miracles) and 13 (opposition by the world, and fellow Christians, as a mark of Christ himself) which puzzled me as a Protestant, and were a part of my conversion 🙂
 
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