CATHOLICITY. — It is the third property of the Church, based on the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Symbol: “I believe in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.” This epithet “catholic” has served, from its very origins—it already appears in St Ignatius of Antioch, who died in 107 (*To the Smyrnaeans*, 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, in contrast to local sects that have broken away from II.
It is a fact that, in our own day as in former times and always, the epithet “catholic” has remained the proper name of the Church which acknowledges 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 which obeys the pope. Other Christian groups may indeed claim the title “catholic” for themselves, but they do so weakly and without great conviction, and none of them has succeeded in appropriating this denomination for itself. The “Catholic Church” remains, in the common language of all peoples, the Church whose supreme visible head is in Rome. Each of the dissident Churches is generally designated by a particularizing term. One speaks of “the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Greek Church, the Russian Church, the Coptic Church, the Armenian Church, the Nestorian Church, the Anglican Church,” etc. One sees, therefore, the importance of catholicity as a property of the true Church. The difficulty lies in defining precisely what it consists in. Theologians, and especially apologists, have distinguished all kinds of catholicity: catholicity of time, of space, of doctrine; absolute and relative catholicity; simultaneous and successive catholicity; material and formal catholicity; quantitative and qualitative or attitudinal catholicity; catholicity of right and of fact; physical and moral catholicity. The mind is lost amid all these distinctions, and we lack space to explain them individually. We shall content ourselves with giving a general notion of catholicity and considering it: 1° as an essential property of the Church; 2° as a distinguishing mark of the true Church.
I. GENERAL NOTION OF CATHOLICITY
The adjective “catholic” is a Greek word (καθολικόν), derived from the adverb καθολου = in general, in total), which means “general, universal.” The Catholic Church is therefore the universal Church. When it is said that this religious society, the Church, is universal, it is meant that it is directed to all men without distinction of condition, race, nation, or culture; that it is open to all and claims to unite them all under its authority; that it intends to realize the universal empire from the religious point of view. This indicates that it works to realize its programme, its destiny, through proselytism, through what is today called “the missionary spirit”; for one cannot conceive of a society aiming at universality that does not seek to incorporate the entire human race. This may finally mean that in reality this society is already in some way universal, because it is spread everywhere; that it has everywhere followers, more or less numerous. This factual universality, however relative, is already proof that the Church’s claims to universality are well founded; that it possesses the capacity to realize them, since men of every rank, every country, every race, every culture, obey and acknowledge it as their spiritual mother. This is the point.There are three meanings of the word “catholic” that are intimately connected: the Church is catholic by its purpose and destination; it is so by its activity, capable of realising this purpose; and it is so, at least in its initial state, by the result of this activity, namely its more or less dense diffusion over the whole surface of the earth. These are the notions that the idea of universality or catholicity, applied to a religious society, immediately evokes.
Historically speaking, the third of these notions, namely expansion into every place, was the first to be emphasised, even 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 Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, though the other meanings are not excluded. Indeed, in the 4th century St Cyril of Jerusalem distinguished several kinds of catholicity, the first of which is geographical catholicity (Catechesis XVIII: PG 33, 1044). This is easily understood, because diffusion in space is a visible and easily ascertainable fact. It provided the Fathers with a ready-to-hand argument for refuting schisms, local sects and new heresies by appealing to the union in charity, in faith and in subordination to the Roman primacy of the universal Church, the “Catholica”, as St Augustine often calls II. But it must not be forgotten that the universality of diffusion is far from exhausting the concept of catholicity. This expansion is rather the visible manifestation of catholicity than catholicity itself. Hence the need to deepen first the notion of catholicity in so far as it is an essential property of the Church.
II. CATHOLICITY AS AN ESSENTIAL PROPERTY OF THE CHURCH — That catholicity, or universality, is an essential property of the Church is clearly affirmed by the Sacred Scriptures. The Old Testament describes the kingdom of the promised Messiah as a universal kingdom, which is to gather all the nations of the earth. Universalism is inseparable from messianism. All messianic prophecies bear this mark (cf., for example, Gen 12:3; 18:18; 22:18; Ps 2:8; 21:26–29; Is 2:2; 60:4 sqq.; 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 caelo et in terra. Euntes ergo docete omnes gentes”, and then in Acts 1:8: “Eritis mihi testes in Ierusalem et in omni Iudaea et Samaria et usque ad ultimum terrae”. Everywhere in the New Testament writings, in contrast to the particularism of Judaism described in the Old Testament, the universalism of the new law promulgated by Jesus stands out. Jesus is the Saviour of all, died for all. God wills that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim 2:4). No longer any distinction between Jew and pagan; Christ Himself is the Lord of all, liberal towards all who invoke 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, all the elements necessary to realise 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 unadaptable to the mass. These constitutive elements of the Church, these means of realising the universalist programme, are of two kinds: some are internal and invisible, others external and visible; for the Church is at once spirit and matter; it has a soul and a body. The soul is all the supernatural, invisible apparatus that gives it vigour, enlivens it, sanctifies it, the work of the one and triune God: grace, theological virtues, infused gifts and various charisms. The body is what externally appears of the Church: hierarchy (papacy and episcopate), preaching, magisterium, ministry and sacraments, the visible union of all the faithful in charity, in obedience to their pastors, in participation in sacred things. It can easily be observed that in the Church all this bears the imprint of universality, is assimilable, is suited to man in general, without any particularism, as happens in other religions. It need only 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 also catholic by 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 ceaselessly work to associate to itself, to incorporate the whole mass of humanity, so as to realise, within the limits of possibility, the universal kingdom of God on earth.
This activity willed by Jesus Christ, ordered by Him, cannot be sterile. Necessarily it will produce what is called “catholicity in fact”, the diffusion into all parts of the earth. Here we find again catholicity as the ancient Fathers understood II. Spatial catholicity is the sign, the outward manifestation of catholicity as a property, as briefly described above.
III. CATHOLICITY AS A MARK OF THE TRUE CHURCH — It remains for us to examine catholicity in so far as it can be a means of recognising which is the true Church among the Christian churches now existing, since it is a fact that there are several Christian societies that claim each to be the true Church, or at least to be a true part of the one Church founded by Jesus Christ. This question of catholicity as a mark has been the one that has most preoccupied apologists and theologians since the appearance of Protestantism. Little attention has been paid to catholicity as a property, as it has just been defined. Apologists at first had in view only the Protestant sects, and it was relatively easy for them to show that each of them taken separately did not possess catholicity. The question became more complicated when attention was turned to the dissident Eastern Churches, especially the Greek-Russian Church, impressive both for the number of its faithful and for its diffusion in space.
In our own day, the geographical catholicity of which the Roman Church could boast has been somewhat obscured, both by Protestant proselytism and by the spread, facilitated by the ease of communications between continents, of certain sects calling themselves Churches. There are also historical objections to which an answer has had to be given. Thus Catholic apologists have found it increasingly difficult to demonstrate that catholicity 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 catholicity was only a negative mark. Others have abandoned spatial or quantitative catholicity in favour of qualitative or dispositional catholicity. But even here serious difficulties present themselves with regard to certain dissident Churches. It may be said that Catholic apologists have not yet succeeded in clearly demonstrating that catholicity is a positive mark belonging exclusively to the Roman Church (cf. G. Thils, Les notes de l’Église, pp. 214–54).
This lack of success may perhaps derive from the fact that it has been forgotten that the separated Churches, especially those that have preserved almost all that constitutes the true Church, except 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 Creed.
Certain apostolicity. The proof must be redone using the four notes, resorting to the method of comparison and transcendence: the true Church is the one that best realizes the concepts of unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity, in what these concepts express of true perfection externally verifiable. As regards catholicity, the following elements are externally verifiable: 1) geographical diffusion; 2) missionary activity; 3) detachment from every particularism that is unassimilable by certain categories of men and obstructs their entry into the Church. Among these obstacles are mentioned the subjection of a Church to civil power and its lack of independence. It is moreover evident that, in the method of comparison, catholicity is inseparable from unity. Now, unity is the element most lacking in the separated Churches, not only in 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—which are not even united by the bond of intercommunion, some of which anathematize the others. It is not difficult to show that the Roman Church far surpasses each of the separated Christian groups in each of the externally verifiable elements of catholicity. These elements, moreover, are susceptible to progress. It can be said that catholicity as a note is always in fieri. This is evident with regard to geographical expansion and likewise missionary activity. History also shows that in certain epochs Roman Catholicism had to struggle to free itself from certain particularisms and from the domination of secular power over II. As the Congregation wrote, op. cit., p. 131: “The Church, which participates without limit in the divine being internally, must participate externally in the infinitude proper to human becoming. It must always be at work adapting itself to humanity in order to incorporate it.”