When I attended Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City some years ago, we would periodically recite together the Nicene Creed as part of our worship service. Appended to the statement, ‘I believe in one holy, catholic, and apostolic church,’ was always a helpful footnote explaining that catholic – with a small c – refers to the church universal across space and time, as opposed to the Roman Catholic church in particular. William T. Cavanaugh explains,
The Greek adjective katholikos – derived from kath’ holou, ‘on the whole’ – in antiquity was commonly used as an equivalent of ‘universal’ or ‘general’. … Although we continue to use the word ‘catholic’ in English as an equivalent of universal, as Henri de Lubac points out, the terms in some senses diverge. ‘Universal’ suggests spreading out; ‘catholic’ suggests gathering together. In modern English ‘universal’ indicates a reality prevalent everywhere. According to de Lubac ‘”Catholic” says something more and different: it suggests the idea of an organic whole, of a cohesion, of a firm synthesis, of a reality which is not scattered but, on the contrary, turned toward a center which assures its unity, whatever the expanse in area or the internal differentiation may be.’[1]
- William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, T&T Clark, 2002, p. 113
In the same essay, titled ‘The Myth of Globalization as Catholicity,’ Cavanaugh delves more deeply into the differences between the notions of universality and catholicity, focusing in particular on the phenomenon of globalization as emblematic of the former and contrasted against the Church’s participation in the Lord’s Supper as representative of the latter. For Cavanaugh, the sacrament functions as a means of telling, within the Church and before the watching world, an alternative story of time and space. In this story, differences are not merely leveled out, reducing diverse humans to interchangeable parts of an homogeneous whole. Instead, he argues, the sacrament conveys the reality that all members belong to one Body, which even in diaspora is not scattered but exists in its entirety in every local celebration of the Supper, for ‘where two or three are gathered,’ the Head of the Body is fully present. The social implications of this story stand in stark contrast to those of the global market:
‘Practicing the narrative of the body of Christ collapses spatial barriers, but in a way very different from globalizing capitalism. Globalization depends on a mapping that juxtaposes people from all over the world in the same space-time. This juxtaposition situates diverse localities in competition with one another. At the same time, the illusion is fostered that the world’s people are contemporaries, different from each other, but merely different. In Eucharistic space, by contrast, we are not juxtaposed but identified. In the body of Christ, as Paul says, ‘If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it’ (1 Cor. 12.26). This radical collapse of spatial barriers accomplishes not competition, but says Paul, greater honour and care for the weakest member, who is identified with oneself. At the same time the other is not merely different but wholly other, for the suffering are identified with Christ himself (Col. 1.24), who nevertheless remains other to the Church.’ - ibid., pp. 120-121
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[1] Henri de Lubac, The Motherhood of the Church, trans. Sr Sergia Englund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), p. 174.
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