Communicating Catholicism

The trouble with adjectives is that they can become malleable in meaning. I'm yet really to get into the philosophy of nominalism and discussions about what it means to mean something in my amateur sojourn through the philosophical universe. I notice from Fr Hart's blog that there is a big discussion about the confusion as to what "Catholic" means. From Anglican Papalist quarters, there is the question of what it means to be Catholic when one isn't in communion with the Pope. Indeed when many people hear the word, their mind immediately leaps to Roman Catholic.

Now, the Holy See officially denies the appellation "Roman Catholic" because it believes itself to be THE Catholic Church and all who refuse to be in communion with her to be non-Catholics. Yet for those outside, particularly in the Orthodox and Anglican Churches, the "Roman" epithet is quite reasonable because of the affiliation of the Holy See with the Patriarch Bishop of Rome. It is possible that one could hear of the Antiochene Catholic Church or the Alexandrian Catholic Church, et c, only for these they feel no need to stress the idea of Catholic. It's already part of their make-up.

The squabble is mainly over the ownership of the word "Catholic" and who has the authority both to define it and to make the judgement as to who or what is Catholic and who or what is not. So what does "Catholic" mean?

Many of you who read this will have a better understanding of what the word means than I do and I would be teaching my grandmother to suck eggs were I to make statements that "Catholic" comes from the Greek kath holos meaning "concerning the whole". Again, many of you will be familiar were I to mention the Vincentian Canon that the Catholic Faith is "Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est." Catholicism is to do with wholeness, what the whole Church has always believed everywhere and yet, as Fr Hart notes, the word in Anglican circles is used to separate the "Catholic" High Church from the "Protestant" Low Church. That which is supposed to unite actually divides.

The Church to which I belong is the Anglican Catholic Church. This causes a great deal of confusion to people. Am I a Roman Catholic? Does my Church exist to act as a holding bay for those taking up  the Ordinariate? Shouldn't that be Anglo-Catholic? Are we Anglicans or not?

But look carefully. If my church confuses people by being called the Anglican Catholic Church, then those people ask questions. If they ask questions, then they have started a dialogue with me and with my jurisdiction. I can then talk to them about the beliefs that I share, not just with my Bishop, my priest and my Diocese, but with all Christians who accept the Apostolic Faith as laid down in the Scriptures and in the Church Fathers and the first seven truly Oecumenical Councils. That confusion has been a great vehicle for me to talk to people, to listen to them and what their understanding of things is. I can strike up a friendship, or not, but at least there is an interaction.

Many people want words to mean the same to everyone. They want to say "I'm a Catholic" and for everyone to know what that means. The trouble with carefully defined adjectives is that they end conversation. No-one debates the meaning of what it is for a triangle to be "right-angled" because the definition is precise and pertains to an object which possesses an abstract reality rather than a physical reality.

On the other hand,Human beings are notorious for blurring boundaries of definition, often deliberately. So what a word such as "Catholic"means to one person can be very different from what it means to another. There are calls for Anglicans to fight to take back possession of the meaning of the word. But why? First, with the large number of Roman Catholics, that's rather tilting at windmills to get everybody in the world aware of the fact that we Anglican Catholics are just as Catholic. Second, it's a bit silly when many in the world are unchurched and don't really care what the word means in the first place. Thirdly, and this is my point, to make everyone aware of what Catholic means destroys the possibility of communicating with another person stone dead. The conversation becomes:

A: What religion are you?
B: I'm an Anglican Catholic.
A: Oh.

rather than

A: What religion are you?
B: I'm an Anglican Catholic?
A: Anglican Catholic? Don't you mean Anglo-Catholic?
B: Well,....
or

A: What religion are you?
B: I'm an Anglican Catholic?
A: Are you CofE then?
B: Well,....

or

A: What religion are you?
B: I'm an Anglican Catholic?
A: Is that possible? How does that work?
B: Well,....

The Anglican Catholic Church believes herself to be as properly Catholic as the Roman Catholic Church. We certainly do not believe that we are THE Catholic Church, but merely a visible part of it. Our sister churches of UECNA and APCK have similar beliefs but they are as much part of THE Catholic Church as we are and many other good Catholics who come under many polygrammatic acronyms. We are proud to have the word "Catholic" as part of our name and if this causes confusion among people, then good! We then have something to talk to them about, and, if we're good Christians first, we will talk to them in a way that is kind and generous and more interested in them than perhaps they are in us. Perhaps that way, we can show our Lord Christ according to the whole of our lives and not just in our intellects.