A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Of all the various Christian understandings of the word ‘Catholic’, the most commonly used is a description for the Church over which the pope in Rome presides, and with that usage there go claims for an overriding and objective authority among all other Christian bodies, which the contemporary papacy has so far done nothing to repudiate.1 A more neutral description of the ‘Catholic Church’ would be ‘the Western Church of the Latin Rite’. The point of this admittedly cumbersome label is that it acknowledges the equal historic status of the various Churches of Orthodoxy in eastern Europe and the Middle East, whom we have still to meet, not to mention the various Churches of Asia and Africa which decided after the fifth century to ignore or repudiate the Chalcedonian Definition of the nature of Jesus Christ.