Catholic Church.

Catholic Church. The term catholic literally signifies 'universal.' The phrase Catholic Church is therefore equivalent to 'universal church,' and cannot properly be applied to any particular sect or body, such as the Roman, Greek, Anglican, Reformed, Lutheran, or Presbyterian, all of which form merely portions more or less pure of the 'church universal.' It occurs for the first time in the pseudo-Ignatian Epistle to the Smyrneans. It was first employed from about 160 A.D. to mark the difference between the orthodox 'universal' Christian church and the various sects of the Gnostic heretics; though, afterwards, it served also to distinguish the all-embracing Christian church from the religious exclusiveness of the pre-Christian ages, in which the church was restricted to a single nation. The formal principle of the Catholic Church is thus expressed in the famous canon of Vincentius of Lerinum (434 A.D.), 'Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est'—i.e. the marks of the Catholic Church are universality, antiquity, and unity. The name has been retained by the Church of Rome, which claims to be the visible successor of the primitive one; and although Protestant divines have been careful to deny its applicability to a church which they consider essentially changed by the corrupt accretions of centuries, yet the term Catholic is still used by the populace of almost every Protestant country as synonymous with Roman Catholic, so that from their minds all conception of the literal meaning of the word has vanished. For an account of the Church of Rome, see article ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH.