Catholicadj/ˈkæθ(ə)lɪk/

• 1

  Of the Western Christian church, as differentiated from e.g. the Orthodox church.

  • Christmas is celebrated at different dates in the Catholic and Orthodox calendars.
  • Who or what is a Catholic? This Greek word has become one of the chief battlegrounds in western Latin Christianity, for it is used in different ways which outside observers of Christian foibles find thoroughly confusing. The word ‘Catholic’ is the linguistic equivalent of a Russian doll. It may describe the whole Christian Church founded two thousand years ago in Palestine, or the western half of the Church which split from mainstream eastern Christianity a thousand years ago, or that part of the western half which remained loyal to the Bishop of Rome (the Pope) after the sixteenth century, or a Protestant European Christian who thought that the Bishop of Rome was Antichrist, or a modern ‘Anglo-Catholic’ faction within the Anglican Communion. How can the word describe all of these things and still have any meaning? I have written this book about the sixteenth-century Reformation in part to answer that question. The Reformation introduced many more complications to the word; in fact there were very many different Reformations, nearly all of which would have said that they were simply aimed at recreating authentic Catholic Christianity. For simplicity’s sake I will take for granted that this book examines multiple Reformations, some of which were directed by the Pope. From now on I will continue to use the shorthand term ‘Reformation’, but readers should therefore note that this is often intended to embrace both Protestantism and the religious movements commonly known as Tridentine Catholicism, the Catholic Reformation or Counter-Reformation: the revitalized part of the old Church which remained loyal to the Pope. ’Catholic’ is clearly a word which a lot of people want to possess. By contrast, it is remarkable how many religious labels started life as a sneer: the Reformation was full of angry words.
• 2

  Of the Western Christian church, as differentiated from e.g. the Orthodox church.

  • The Church of the Sacred Heart is a Catholic one.
  • Catholic churches are adorned differently from Protestant ones.

Catholicnoun/ˈkæθ(ə)lɪk/

• 1

  A member of a Catholic (western Christian) church.

• 2

  A member of a Catholic (western Christian) church.

  • The wife of the Prime Minister is a Catholic.
  • The consubstantialists, who by their success have deserved and obtained the title of Catholics, gloried in the simplicity and steadiness of their own creed, and insulted the repeated variations of their adversaries, who were destitute of any certain rule of faith.

Catholicname/ˈkæθ(ə)lɪk/

• 1

  A surname.

catholicadj/ˈkæ.θ(ə.)lɪk/

• 1

  Universal; all-encompassing.

  • The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does, belongs to all.
  • Essentially, and in idea, the empire, in the minds of the Romans, was world-wide. This conception descended to the Church, which was ‘Catholic’ in spite of Buddhists, Confucians, and (later) Muhammadans.
• 2

  obsoleteCommon or prevalent; especially universally prevalent.

• 3

  All-embracing.

  • […]a knowledge which should not only know at what particular spot in these mounds it should excavate, but, having excavated, would understand how to sift and use these materials properly, with a profoundly pious and reverential mind,—a knowledge not narrow, sectarian, one-sided, but catholic, human, large, one to which Homer and Horace and Goethe and Tennyson should no be more foreign than Church Fathers, and archæologists, palæographers and antiquaries[…]
  • A catholic mind is a continual source of pleasure, a catholic taste continually enjoys it. Narrow-mindedness is a curse wherever it exists, whether in the religions, scientific, literary, or aesthetic sphere, or in the world of social intercourse; whether it dwindles religion into a dogma, or science into a formula, or literature into a style, or art into a school, or morality into a maxim.
• 4

  obsoleteUniversally applicable.

• 5

  Of universal human interest or use.

  • And as the whole booke of Psalmes is Oleum efjusum, (as the Spouse speaks of the name of Christ) an Oyntment powred out upon all sorts of sores, A Searcloth that souples all bruises, A Balme that searches all wounds; so are there some certaine Psalmes, that are Imperiall Psalmes, that command over all affections, and spread themselves over all occasions, Catholique, universall Psalmes, that apply themselves to all necessities.
  • And this vast number is but a selection ; the editors chose only out of the mass before them what was most noteworthy and trustworthy, and what was of catholic rather than of national interest.