Quick style note: It really bothers and confuses me how so many reporters use Catholic when they mean Roman Catholic. Catholic means universal and Roman Catholic refers to that church based out of, well, Rome. There is a difference. Many people who are not Roman Catholic consider themselves catholic — and even Catholic sometimes. ~Mollie, GetReligion

The journalists who label Roman Catholics simply as Catholics are not making a decision based on style (and are certainly not making one based on ecclesiology)–they are trying to convey the information with as few words as possible. And it isn’t a question of style–insisting on calling a Catholic a Roman Catholic is a bit pejorative, as it is designed to qualify Catholicism in terms of its relation to Rome, which is ultimately incidental to its own conception of the Catholic Church’s catholicity. To be fair, no one else readily self-identifies using the label Catholic except for “Roman Catholics,” so how bothersome and confusing could it really be? Old Catholics might have a more meaningful complaint against this sort of thing, and perhaps followers of Lefebvre also, but most other Christians would be hard pressed to be either bothered or confused by this usage.

It is much like insisting on placing some qualifier in front of Orthodoxy (be it Eastern, Greek, Russian, or what have you). Those qualifiers can be merely descriptive (it is not irrelevant whether someone is Greek, rather than Russian, Orthodox–though it is hardly of the first importance), or they can be intended to slight or diminish the thing described. The attitude might go like this: “Yes, it’s Orthodox, but it’s Russian Orthodox, so it’s really just a Russian thing.” It is my understanding that Protestants in continental Europe do not like being called Protestants, which was originally a pejorative name thrown back at them in the 16th century, but Evangelicals instead, which must make the American distinction between evangelical and mainline Protestants rather bizarre to them. Nonetheless, Americans routinely refer to what few Protestants there are left in Europe by this moniker that many of them do not like and regard as belittling–it is a convention in this case, and not an attack.

The Orthodox obviously regard the Orthodox Church as the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, and so we could call ourselves Catholics, too, but typically in the writings of the Fathers the marker of Orthodox has been as important as Catholic, so I suppose it is less of a burning problem for many Orthodox people. Orthodox Presbyterians might quibble with journalists for indifferently referring to the Orthodox as simply Orthodox–don’t they realise that other people consider themselves orthodox without all of the icons, blinnis and kollyva?

But this has in turn led to a diminished popular sense of what catholicity is, which is principally wholeness and perfection rather than universality (for which the term ecumenical has usually been the preferred word in the Greek), which is a concept that lends itself to misinterpretation. The universality of the Church is Her significance for the entire world, and Her transcendence in Christ of the limitations of, and Her transformation of, time and place.