Caltholic Array of Deeply Held Opinions ...

[C John Edward Culver]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:
>I wanted to
> know why the Catholic church considered itself universal. (I suppose
> it goes back to the time when Roman Catholic and Christian were
> virtually anonymous, if you didn't count Greek Orthodox, which
> probably didn't have that name yet.)

Exactly. The term itself, "catholic" (from Greek "kata" and "holos" --
"according to the whole", or "universal") dates to a letter from
Ignatius in the second century, predating even the Apostles' Creed. So
yes, it comes from a time when the Catholic Church was truly catholic,
and the term was a theological point, not a name.

CJ