A Jesuit priest has criticised the addition of the word "Roman" to "Catholic" when referring to that church. The title remained "a puzzling one for me," wrote Fr Paul Andrews in the current Jesuit AMDG newsletter.
"As a boy I had a spell in England - Lancashire and London. I had been born into a Catholic family, and I used be puzzled by a word that some of my parents' Protestant friends used: they spoke of "arsees". Gradually I came to realise that they were talking about us Catholics, and that arsees stood for RCs, which stood for Roman Catholics. Sometimes they used it with respect, sometimes with condescension, and sometimes with veiled dislike," Fr Andrews wrote.
"The BBC had a policy of making a first reference to us in a news story as RC, and calling us Catholic thereafter, so as not to make the disdain too unbearable. Now I have heard presenters on Irish media, who watch too much English TV, talking about arsees, sometimes with a wan ecumenical courtesy, and a deference to the presumed prejudices of their audience.
"As I learned the story of the English Reformation, and the conflict between Henry VIII and the pope over his divorce, it seemed to me that this RC title was part of the effort of the British establishment to make the ancient Catholic faith of England seem something alien and imported, and to make the Catholic Church seem a foreign sect. The bias was not confined to the establishment. "A Methodist minister was showing a Catholic friend over the city of Nottingham, and pointed out a large building as 'the Italian mission'. It was only next morning that the visitor realised he had been looking at the Catholic cathedral."