Monday, January 07, 2008
One Order of Catholic; Hold the Roman, Please

Andrew Greeley gets a little hot under the (Roman) collar over other "Christians" -- Catholics have "been Christians since the beginning," he grumbles -- who claim some sort of ownership over the "Christian" label in politics: My crowd has been calling themselves ''Catholic'' for 17 centuries. The adjective "Roman" added in the American context is a slur, sometimes unintentionally conveyed in the tone of the one using it. It hints that we are somehow foreign and perhaps subversive. It came into use when the ''publics'' started to recite the Nicene Creed and their leaders had to explain that the ''one, holy, catholic and apostolic church'' of the creed wasn't us. We've been Christians since the beginning. The claim of the evangelicals to a monopoly on the term is little more than a century old. It excludes Mormons, secularists and Catholics. We don't like being excluded, and we might just begin to make trouble about it. We invented Christianity, guys, and your claim to sole rights is historical nonsense -- and bigotry, too. Greeley goes on to tackle larger questions about religion and politics, but the Roman vs. Roman Catholic distinction prompted a response from Martin Marty over at the University of Chicago: There is no question that Protestant meanies in America once spit out variants such as "Roman" (without "Catholic") or "Romish" or "Romanist" or, worse, "Papist" or "Jesuitical," with purely pejorative intent. Turn over a plank and you may still find some creepy-crawly critters, anti-Catholic to the core, who speak or write that way.