CATHOLICITY

CATHOLICITY. From “catholic” (q.v.), hence the quality of completeness or wholeness possessed by the catholic Church. The term acquires later in church history the sense of “universality,” first of all meaning “inclusiveness,” i.e., the Church as the proper home of all humankind, and secondly and still later of “extension,” i.e., the Church as including all of its local manifestations. Hence the phrase, “catholic Church,” comes to mean something distinct from and greater than the local church in much the same way that people today distinguish an entire corporation from its local, or branch, office. Orthodox theologians tend at present to believe the last meaning to be at best misleading and, at worst, a serious distortion of catholicity’s original meaning. (See Ecclesiology.) If an extension of the definition is to be made on a geographic basis, then many Orthodox theologians would insist that it be extended on a temporal basis as well.