Sir, - James Dowling's distinction between Catholic and catholic (July 12th) is not overlooked by me; I reject it. When St Ignatius of Antioch in 99 AD called the Church KATHOLIKE, describing perfectly what we now term transubstantiation and the hypostatic union, there was no upper or lower case. The question is thus artificial and anachronistic. Of course Protestantism must seek to discredit the pristine origin of an epithet universally identified tout court with the Church of Rome, since it is fatal to its own claims. Hence alone Catholicism with a big C and catholicism with a little one.
This almost Jesuitical device allows for the notion of some predenominational "catholic" Church of "wildly disparate opinions" (the object, incidentally, of much of today's facile ecumenism), at such an early stage of development as to contain stem cells capable of metamorphosing into anything from Roman Catholics to Free Presbyterians. What Mr Dowling must realise is that this account is not an impartial view of things but in fact the exclusive and inevitable tenet of those Christian communities which have separated themselves from the universal communion of the Bishop of Rome. For a body does not grow organically into mutually incompatible parts. Denonimationalism, the very term "denomination", are Protestant inventions.
Catholics are not concerned with denominations but with the Church. We cannot accept a truth-truce (as with so-called inter-communion) in order to confer upon non-Catholic denominations some pragmatic, genteel parity of esteem, as if we were all equal, if nuanced, co-heirs to some primitive, unformed umbrella group. We believe that the various Protestant communities, deliberately founded to reject what had gone before, objectively compromised the integrity of Catholicism. We deny their latter-day assumption that we came into being only when they had decided to repudiate us. They seem to imagine that the "catholic" Church to which they now lay claim had somehow perished by the 16th century and must be founded again from scratch, using the Bible (or parts of it) for a purpose never intended, as an ecclesiological DIY manual applied to a man-made historical vacuum.
Catholics do not believe that the Church once founded by Christ and constantly sustained through scandal and sin by the Paraclete needs to be founded again by anyone. We do not believe that she can be reinvented. We believe that neither the ravages of time nor the murk of evil has prevailed against her, that she still makes her toilsome way, battered but true, through the collapse of empires, cultures, ideologies and manifestos along an unwavering trajectory from Alpha to Omega.
We believe in that Church which has in her essential form continuously existed in every age since her foundation by Christ on the Apostle Peter, which, while embracing yet challenging all, transcends the ethos or constitution of any particular nation or state, which proposes to the heart of modern man and woman everything taught by Christ and not merely those excerpts congenial with contemporary prejudice. That Church may be called by denominationalists Roman Catholic, by me, simply Catholic, by Mr Dowling, merely catholic. No matter. She is the same - yesterday, today and forever. She has never permitted the fullness of marriage and the fullness of the priesthood to reside in the same person and she never will.- Yours, etc., Rev David O'Hanlon, C.C.
Kentstown, Co Meath.