It’s time for another CHN community question, where we tap our members to share brief thoughts in issues related to their journey, and try to shed light on what the Catholic Church teaches on various matters. This week’s question:
If your Christian tradition recited the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed, how did it treat the word “catholic” in those creeds? Was it omitted? Changed? Kept, but with an asterisk?
Please reply with your comments, and be sure to check the results of other CHN community questions in our forum!
In the OPC (Orthodox Presbyterian Church), we said it each week, but the pastor always qualified it by saying it didn’t mean “Roman Catholic” but merely “universal.”
“Methinks thou dost protest too much.” 🙂
Funny. A little Shakespeare.
It’s kind of strange how we took the meaning of ‘Catholic’, = ‘Universal’, to mean the opposite of what the early church intended by the term. By ‘Catholic’, they mean that the One Church was intended to be ‘universal’, for all. As a Protestant, I kept understanding ‘Catholic’ to mean that anyone who named the name of Christ and believed the handful of fundamentals (virgin birth, atoning death, bodily resurrection, triune God, biblical inerrantcy, etc) was part of the big-tent, church universal.
It’s another case of reading back into history a meaning for a common term that is utterly foreign to the earliest Christians.
As a PCUSA (or what became that) Presbyterian, we took it as “universal”, not the Catholic Church. We knew the church was unified before the Reformation and we accepted the Creeds (and used to recite the Apostles Creed every week in the 50s and 60s). We didn’t see things all the time in opposition to the Catholic Church as some fundamentalists do; we just viewed it all as the history of the Christian church and the way things were. Now when I joined what became the ELCA Lutherans, in one church we belonged to they changed “catholic” to “Christian” in the Creed.