CATHOLICITY. - It is the third property of the Church, according to the Creed of Nicaea-Constantinople: "I believe in the catholic Church." This epithet "catholic" has served, from the very origins - it already appears in St. Ignatius of Antioch, who died in 107 (Ad Smirnenes, 8, 2) - to designate the hierarchical religious society founded by Jesus Christ to lead men to salvation, the Christian Church, the true Church spread throughout every place, as opposed to the local sects that have split off from it.
It is a fact that, in our own days, as formerly, as always, the epithet "catholic" has remained the proper name of the Church that recognizes as its visible head the bishop of Rome, successor of the apostle St. Peter. The catholic Church is nothing other than the Roman Church, that is, the Church that obeys the pope. The other Christian groups undoubtedly claim, they too, the title of catholic, but they do so feebly and without great conviction, and none of them has succeeded in appropriating this designation for itself. The "catholic Church" remains always, in the language common to all peoples, the Church that has its supreme visible head in Rome. Each of the dissident Churches is generally designated by a particularist term. One says: "the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Greek Church, the Russian Church, the Coptic Church, the Armenian Church, the Nestorian Church, the Anglican Church," etc. One therefore sees the importance of c. as a property of the true Church. The difficulty lies in defining precisely in what it consists. Theologians, and especially apologists, have distinguished all the species of c.: c. of time, of space, of doctrine; absolute c. and relative c.; simultaneous c. and successive c.; material c. and formal c.; quantitative c. and qualitative or attitudinal c.; c. of right and c. of fact; physical c. and moral c. The mind is lost in all these distinctions, and we lack the space to explain them individually. We shall content ourselves with giving a general notion of c. and with considering it: 1st as an essential property of the Church; 2nd as a note or distinguishing mark of the true Church.
I. GENERAL NOTION OF CATHOLICITY
The adjective "catholic" is a Greek word (= καθολικός, which derives from the adverb καθόλου = in general, in total), meaning "general, universal." The Catholic Church is therefore the universal Church. When it is said that this religious society, the Church, is universal, what is meant is that it addresses itself to all men without distinction of condition, race, nation, or culture; that it is open to all and claims to gather them all under its authority; that it intends to realize a universal empire from the religious point of view. This indicates that it works to realize its program, its destiny, by means of proselytism, by means of what is today called "the missionary spirit"; for one cannot conceive that a society aiming at universality would not seek to incorporate the whole of humanity. This can mean, finally, that in reality this society is already universal in some way, because it is spread everywhere; that it has everywhere believers in a more or less considerable number. This de facto universality, however relative it may be, is already a proof that the Church's claims to universality are well founded; that it possesses the capacity to realize them, since men of every order, of every country, of every race, of every culture already obey it and acknowledge it as their spiritual mother. Here, then, are three meanings of the word "catholic" intimately linked to one another: the Church is catholic by its purpose and its destiny; it is so by its activity, capable of realizing this purpose; it is so also, at least in an initial state, by the result of this activity, that is, by its more or less dense diffusion over the whole surface of the earth. These are the notions that the idea of universality or of c., applied to a religious society, evokes at first sight.
Historically speaking, the third of these notions, that is, expansion in every place, was the first to be emphasized, from the earliest centuries, by the Fathers of the Church. There is no doubt that this is the direct and historical meaning of the word "catholic" in the Creed of Nicaea-Constantinople, although the other meanings are not excluded. Indeed, in the 4th century, St. Cyril of Jerusalem is seen distinguishing several kinds of c., the first of which is geographical c. (Catechesis XVIII: PG 33, 1044). This is easily understood, because diffusion in space is a visible thing and easy to verify. It provided the Fathers with a ready-to-hand argument for convicting of falsity the schisms, the local sects, the heretical novelties, by appealing to the union in charity, in faith, in subordination to the Roman primate, of the universal Church, of the "Catholica," as St. Augustine often calls it. But one must not forget that universality of diffusion is far from exhausting the concept of c. This expansion is rather the visible manifestation of c. than c. itself. Hence the necessity of first examining more deeply the notion of c. insofar as it is an essential property of the Church.
II. THE CATHOLICITY, ESSENTIAL PROPERTY OF THE CHURCH
That catholicity, universality, is an essential property of the Church is clearly affirmed by the Sacred Books. The Old Testament describes for us the kingdom of the promised Messiah as a universal kingdom, which must gather together all the nations of the earth. Universalism is inseparable from messianism. All the messianic prophecies bear this imprint (see, for example, Gen. 12:3; 18:18; 22:18; Ps. 2:8; 21:26-29; Is. 2:2; 60:4 ff.; Jer. 3:17; Dan. 2:44; Mal. 1:15). In the New Testament the texts that affirm the universalist character of the Church, the kingdom of God on earth, are innumerable. It suffices to cite the very words of Jesus Christ, first in Mt. 28:18-19: "Data est mihi omnis potestas in coelo et in terra. Euntes ergo docete omnes gentes," then in Acts 1:8: "Eritis mihi testes in Ierusalem et in omni Iudaea et Samaria et usque ad ultimum terrae." Everywhere, in the writings of the New Testament, the Jewish particularism described in the Old Testament is opposed by the universalism of the new law promulgated by Jesus. Jesus is the savior of all, dead for all. The will of God is that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:4). No longer any distinction between the Jew and the pagan; the same Christ is the Lord of all, generous toward all those who call upon him (Rom. 10:12).
The Church is therefore made for all men, open to all. If this is so, God must have endowed it with all the means, with all the elements necessary to realize this destination. These elements must also bear the mark of catholicity, of universalism. Every man must be able to assimilate them; they must be free from every particularism unsuited to the masses. These constitutive elements of the Church, these means of realizing the universalist program, are of two kinds: some are internal and invisible, the others external and visible; for the Church is at one and the same time spirit and matter; it has a soul and a body. The soul is the whole supernatural, invisible apparatus that gives it vigor, vivifies it, sanctifies it, unites it to the Triune God: grace, the theological virtues, infused gifts and various charisms. The body is what appears externally of the Church: the hierarchy (papacy and episcopate), preaching, the magisterium, the ministry and the Sacraments, the visible union of all the faithful in charity, in obedience to the pastors, in participation in sacred things. One can easily observe that in the Church all this bears the imprint of universality, is assimilable, is appropriate to man in general, without any particularism, as happens in the other religions. Let it merely be noted that the internal elements are catholic because they are spiritual, free from matter, the mother of particularisms; and that the external elements, such as we see them functioning in the Roman Church, are so also because of their simplicity, their flexibility, their capacity for adaptation to legitimate national and cultural particularisms, without losing anything of what essentially constitutes them.
Catholic by its destination, by its constitutive elements and its means of action, the Church must also be so by its activity, in the sense that it must work without ceasing to associate with itself, to incorporate into itself the whole human mass, in order to realize, within the limits of the possible, the universal kingdom of God on earth.
This activity willed by Jesus Christ, ordained by Him, cannot be sterile. Necessarily it will produce what is called "de facto catholicity," diffusion into all parts of the earth. Here we find again catholicity such as the ancient Fathers understood it. Catholicity in space is the sign, the exterior manifestation of catholicity as a property, as it has been briefly described.
III. THE CATHOLICITY MARK OF THE TRUE CHURCH
It remains for us to examine c. insofar as it can be a means of recognizing which is the true Church among the Christian Churches currently existing, since it is a fact that there exist several Christian societies, each of which claims to be the true Church, or at least to be a true part of the one Church founded by Jesus Christ. This question of c. as a mark is the one that has above all preoccupied apologists and theologians, ever since the appearance of Protestantism. Little attention has been paid to c. as a property, such as it has just been defined. The apologists at first had in view only the Protestant sects, and it was relatively easy for them to demonstrate that each of these, taken separately, did not possess c. The question became complicated when attention turned to the dissident Eastern Churches, especially to the Greek-Russian Church, imposing in the number of its faithful and also in its geographical diffusion.
In our own day, the geographical c. of which the Roman Church could boast has been somewhat obscured, both by Protestant proselytism and by the diffusion in all countries of certain sects or Churches made possible by the ease of communication between the continents. There are also objections of a historical order, to which a response has had to be made. Thus Catholic apologists have found it increasingly difficult to demonstrate that c. was a "positive and exclusive" mark of the true Church. They have had to revise their definitions and multiply the distinctions to which allusion has been made. Several have said that c. was nothing but a negative mark. Others have abandoned spatial or quantitative c. in order to turn to qualitative c., or c. of aptitude. But even there serious difficulties arise with regard to certain dissident Churches. It may be said that Catholic apologists have not so far succeeded in clearly demonstrating that c. is a positive mark, belonging exclusively to the Roman Church (cf. G. Thils, Les notes de l'Eglise, pp. 214-54).
This failure perhaps derives from the fact that it has been forgotten that the separated Churches, especially those that have preserved more or less everything that constitutes the true Church, with the exception of the dogma of Roman supremacy, were not devoid of all the elements that enter into the definition of the four properties of the Church enumerated in the Symbol. One can find in some of them a certain unity, a certain holiness, a certain c., a certain apostolicity. The test must be redone by means of the four marks, resorting to the method of comparison and transcendence: the true Church is the one that best realizes the concepts of unity, holiness, c., and apostolicity, in what these concepts express of true perfection that is externally verifiable. As regards c., the following elements are externally verifiable: 1) geographical diffusion; 2) missionary activity; 3) liberation from every unassimilable particularism on the part of certain categories of men that hinders their entry into the Church. Among these obstacles are noted the subjection of a Church to civil power and its lack of independence. It is evident, moreover, that c., in the method of comparison, is inseparable from unity. Now, unity is the element most lacking in the separated Churches, not only in the Protestant sects, but also in the autocephalous Churches of the East: for example, what is called the Eastern Orthodox or Greek-Russian Church is not a single Church, but a collection of Churches independent of one another — there are currently about thirty of them — which are not even united among themselves by the bond of communion in sacris, some of which anathematize the others. It is not difficult to show that the Roman Church far and away surpasses each of the separated Christian groups with regard to each of the externally verifiable elements of c. These elements, moreover, are susceptible of progress. It may be said that c. as a mark is always in fieri. This is evident with regard to geographical expansion and likewise with regard to missionary activity. History also shows us that in certain epochs Roman Catholicism had to struggle to free itself from certain particularisms and from the domination of some secular power over it. As Congar has written, op. cit., p. 131: "The Church which internally participates without limit in the divine being, must participate, externally in its organization, in the infinity proper to human becoming. It must always be at work adapting itself to humanity in order to incorporate humanity into itself."