As a bi-ritual Catholic priest currently serving as an active duty military chaplain, I have become increasingly convinced that Catholics need to stop calling themselves “Roman Catholic” and stick with just “Catholic.”  For starters, most people – Catholic and otherwise – do not use the term “Roman” properly, and often tend to use it in ways that end up suggesting something inaccurate or confusing.  On top of that, Catholics’ continued use of ritual and/or ecclesial prefixes obscure the unified front that the world needs, and further serves to give certain malicious non-Catholics the opportunity to disguise their denominations as truly Catholic.

Let’s begin with some etymology.  Yes, the term “Catholic” comes from the Greek “καθολική” (“katholikí”) which means “universal,” but as the one, holy, catholic (universal), and apostolic Church founded by our blessed Lord began to be splintered, it sadly became necessary to distinguish among Christians.  Those who remained in union with the pope started using the term “catholic” as a proper adjective, and overtime this came to be written with a capital “C” just like any other proper adjective (e.g., American, Shakespearian, Victorian, etc.).  The Catholic Church was still catholic (universal), but it was no longer the case that the universal Church was all Catholic.  That is, there began to be such things as Christians who belonged to the universal Church by virtue of their valid baptism but who were not Catholic.  Some will argue – and they are technically correct – that anyone who has a valid baptism is a member of the big “C” Catholic Church even if they profess to be a member of a Protestant or an Orthodox denomination.  There is only one baptism, they correctly point out, and so there is no such thing as a Protestant baptism or an Orthodox baptism, and that all the baptized are members of the Church, the big “C” Catholic Church, whether or not they think they are.  On a canonical level, there are additional qualifications that could be made in terms of whether or not a baptized person is bound to those laws of a merely-ecclesiastical origin, and so in that limited sense there is, in fact, such a thing as a Protestant baptism or an Orthodox baptism as something distinct from a Catholic baptism, but that quibble is not the point here.  The point is that the capitalized term “Catholic” came to indicate whether or not someone submitted to the pope, plain and simple (that which such submission requires/does not require could be debated elsewhere).

Now let’s look at “Roman.”  Some want to suggest that this term is simply meant to indicate the origin of Catholicism, and that “Roman Catholic” is thus completely synonymous with the definition of “Catholic” as explained above.  In this way, such people use, for instance, the hideously wrong and horribly confusing term “Eastern rite Roman Catholics” to describe the so-called Uniates.  In their mind, this is the best way to describe those Eastern rite Christians who are in union with the pope.  After all, we want to stress their union with the pope, and since the pope lives in Rome, and is the Bishop of Rome, and heads the “Roman Catholic Church” (another incorrect term, as I will argue below), why not be as specific as possible by calling them “Eastern rite Roman Catholics”?  The problem, however, is that the proper adjective “Catholic” already includes the qualification of being in union with the pope, as demonstrated above, and thus the use of the additional term “Roman” is unnecessary.  But not only would the use of the term “Roman” be unnecessary in this situation, it’s also wrong, and that’s because the term “Roman” is only meant to indicate the liturgical rite.  And good luck telling an Eastern rite Catholic that she’s Roman!  They are all very proud to be united with the pope – especially those whose ancestors remained in union with Rome when the rest of the East broke off – but there is nothing about them which is Roman, especially not after the de-Latinization process begun by Pope Leo XIII in 1894.

As we can discern from a quick study of Canon Law and liturgical books, there are both “Churches” and “rites” within the Catholic Church.  The Catholic Church consists of 24 autonomous (i.e., “sui iuris”) Churches:  the Albanian Church; the Armenian Church; the Belarusian Church; the Bulgarian Church; the Chaldean Church; the Coptic Church; the Church of Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro; the Ethiopian Church; the Eritrean Church; the Greek Church; the Hungarian Church; the Italo-Albanian Church; the Latin Church; the Macedonian Church; the Maronite Church; the Melkite Church; the Romanian Church; the Russian Church; the Ruthenian Church; the Slovak Church; the Syrian Church; the Syro-Malabar Church; the Syro-Malankara Church; and the Ukrainian Church.  Since the pope is the head of the Catholic Church as a whole, he is thus ultimately responsible for all 24 of these particular Churches, although each of them has their own head, all of whom submit to the pope and thereby remain truly Catholic (fun fact:  the pope is the head of the sui iuris Latin Church as well as the head of the Catholic Church as a unified whole).  In addition to the category of sui iuris Church, there is also the category of rite, including, but not limited, to:  the Alexandrian rite; the Ambrosian rite the Antiochian (West Syrian) rite; the Armenian rite; the Byzantine rite; the Chaldean (East Syrian) rite; the Mozarabic rite; and the Roman rite.  In a few circumstances, one will note that there are some Churches which have the exact same name as the rite they celebrate.

The heart of my first reason for dropping the term “Roman” lies in this distinction between Churches and rites.  Why is it so important to indicate what liturgical rite we happen to celebrate when identifying our religion?  And if we want to be more specific than just “Catholic,” wouldn’t it follow logically that we identify with the particular Church to which we are ascribed before identifying with the rite we celebrate?  After all, Churches have such things as hierarchies and laws; rites do not.  Perhaps the reason why some Catholics identify themselves by their rite and others by their Church is because they are trying to be as descriptive as possible.  That is, in the West, a Church is more encompassing than a rite, whereas in the East, a rite is more encompassing than a Church.  For instance, in the Latin Church alone one can find the Roman rite, the Ambrosian rite, the Mozarabic rite, as well as several other rites that came out of either a religious order or a certain territory.  In the East however, we see that the Byzantine rite, for instance, is the only rite only celebrated by 14 of the 24 Churches, and that the Alexandrian rite is the only rite celebrated by another 3 of the 24.  Maybe this is why one finds people introducing themselves as “Roman Catholic” or “Ukrainian Catholic” but never as “Latin Catholic” or “Alexandrian Catholic.”  We tend to want to use modifiers that will describe us as particularly as possible, and so in the West that means identifying with a rite – not a sui iuris Church – whereas in the East that means identifying with a sui iuris Church – not a rite.  In the East, it is common to remove confusion by referring to both one’s rite and Church, such as “Ukrainian Byzantine” versus “Ruthenian Byzantine.”  Additionally, the term “Greek” is sometimes used synonymously with “Byzantine,” given that the Byzantine rite came out of the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire, and so one will also see such terms as “The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church” to distinguish it from the Roman rite Latin Catholic dioceses that also exist in Ukraine (the latter are Roman rite Ukrainians of the sui iuris Latin Church, whereas the former are Byzantine rite Ukrainians of the sui iuris Ukrainian Church).

As one can see, therefore, it is incorrect to use terms like “Latin rite,”  “Roman Catholic Church,” or “Byzantine Catholic Church” since we are thereby defining a rite by a Church or a Church by a rite.  There is no such thing as the “Latin rite,” but rather the Latin Church in which the Roman rite is predominately – though not exclusively – celebrated.  As an aside, since the Latin Church is the only Western Church in the group of 24 Churches, “Latin” may correctly be used in place of “Western,” and so we can speak of the Western Church versus the 23 Eastern Churches, but we cannot speak of the Western rite since there are many Western rites.  Interestingly enough, some Orthodox jurisdictions are doing their own sort of Anglicanorum Cœtibus by establishing “Western rite Orthodox” parishes for those Protestants that don’t want to be Protestant but also don’t want to be Catholic.  In this way, they can receive valid sacraments via their union with an Orthodox Church, while clinging to their familiar liturgy and standing fast in their rejection of the papacy.  Given everything I’ve said though, I would argue that they should really be calling themselves “Roman rite Orthodox,” but I have a feeling that they would never do that, as accurate as it would be.

The second of my two reasons why we need to stop calling ourselves “Roman Catholic” is because there are some non-Catholics out there who take advantage of this by seeing in it an opportunity to disguise their own denomination.  I’ve run in to plenty of high-church Protestants who will call themselves big “C” Catholic, falsely explaining that “oh I’m Catholic, I’m just not Roman Catholic.”  Whenever I hear that, I tell them that they’ve gotten it backwards:  they are Roman, they’re just not Catholic.  The rite that they celebrate is a degraded version of the Roman rite since, after all, that was the liturgy being used by the Protestant reformers when they stopped submitting to the pope and thus stopped being Catholic.  In England, for instance, the day after the Supremacy Act passed declaring King Henry VIII as the head of the Church in England, the liturgy celebrated by those newly-schismatic bishops and priests was indeed still the Roman rite, it was just being celebrated by people who were no longer Catholic.  As Protestantism continued to splinter, their worship services became less and less recognizable with the Roman Rite, but to be fair, the Roman rite Mass is the liturgy from which their own services morphed.

The other problem here is that our continued use of the term “Roman Catholic” gives a certain license to some of those same Protestants to found separate denominations called “Lutheran Catholic,” “Anglican Catholic,” “American Catholic,” “Liberal Catholic,” etc.  To a third party, I imagine it seems quite logical to see those terms all listed next to each other on a Google or Wikipedia search and assume that they’re all branches of the Catholic Church when in fact they are all forms of Protestantism since they refuse to submit to the pope.  This does damage to the Catholic Church, however, because now third parties may easily come to think that we believe things which we do not.  To conclude, I would suggest that we quit identifying ourselves by either our rite or our sui iuris Church and instead just present a unified, papacy-affirming front by calling ourselves simply “Catholic.”  All of those other modifiers only serve to allow for confusion and introduce unnecessary distinctions to a world that needs to hear a single, solid, Catholic voice.  As we chaplains are required to do in the military whenever we want to conduct a worship service, Bible study, or prayer group, let’s practice “truth in advertising,” and let’s keep it simple.  For my part, I will continue to politely correct my Protestant chaplain friends whenever they refer to me or my brother priests as “Roman Catholic.”  I’m just “Catholic,” thanks.