Just how arrogant would it be, indeed, to assert to the stranger that he’s an accountant, loves basketball, has no sense of humor, and really enjoys jogging when, in reality, let’s say he is a chef, hates all sports, is very witty, and also detests doing anything that makes him break a sweat? Especially after the stranger reveals his true self to us. How offensive would it be to then continue insisting that this person is someone very different from who he has revealed himself to be? How charitable (let alone rational) is it to insist that someone is something or someone who, in fact, they are not at all?
What is faith? Rather than us deciding what we want to believe about God and the rest of spiritual reality, authentic faith is us taking God at His Word; receiving from Him, with both docility and vigor, what He has passed on to us. (cf. 1 Cor. 11:23) Believing with our minds what God says and does and acting like it with our lives.
In best case scenarios, “belief” is a human guess or intuition about something that happens to turn out to be true. (cf. Acts 17:22-31, Romans 1:18-22) In worst case scenarios, belief ends up being the enemy of faith. It’s the obstinate refusal, in worst case scenarios, to accept what someone else is revealing to us in favor of our own inaccurate whims instead.
This is the critical difference between Catholicism and all other religions in the world. To be a little bit simplistic about the subject for a moment, all the other religions of the world are manifestations of man picking and choosing what they believe about spiritual reality, doing our best to figure it out on our own; while orthodox Judeo-Christianity is essentially God saying to the human race, “Allow Me to Introduce Myself to you…”
Understood in this way, it should be quite clear as to why the Church would dare make the claim to be the one true religion in the world in contrast with all the others. She does this not out of arrogance but out of humility. Out of appreciation for the fact that when God speaks and acts, He deserves to be adhered to, well over and above our own personal musings and random convictions.
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