Are Catholics Romans?

[Jovian90]

As Catholics are we descendants of the Roman Empire,? Are we the spiritual successors to the legacy of the ancient Romans?

 

[midori]

The Romans were a political entity that spread throughout the known world of the time with conquest, and can be argued to have lasted somewhere around 2200 years’ worth of influence. (Founding in 753 BC, ended with the fall of Byzanitum in AD 1453.) Ancient Romans in 700 BC are going to be very distinctly different from the Romans of AD 900 or the Byzantines of 1300.

Catholics are a religious group that follows its Master, who was fully God, but incarnated as fully Human as well as a member of an obscure tribal group in the first century Middle East. And what’s more, we have a distinct directive to be part of the world, but not of it.

So rather than clinging to history, we learn from it; and rather than focusing on temporal affairs, we try to emphasize the cultivation of the spiritual.

But I’d be very skeptical about focusing on the legacy of the ancient Romans-- whose religious legacy was distinctly pagan-- because it’s the Jews who are obviously our older brothers, and their religion predates that of the Romans.

 

[Jovian90]

Okay, but why do we call ourselves Roman Catholic? Why did we use Latin, in our mass and prayers? Wasn’t that the language of the Roman Empire?

 

[midori]

Is Rome the Holy Land? No, the Holy Land is centered around Jerusalem. Jesus came for the “lost sheep of Israel.” It wasn’t until those invited to the banquet refused to show up that salvation was offered to everyone else— the blind and the crippled and the lame. We, since we’re not genetically of the House of Israel, are Gentiles. And the preaching to the Gentiles didn’t start until after the death of Jesus.

We don’t really call ourselves Roman Catholic, except for casually. It started out as a perjorative way to distinguish those who follow the church headed by the Pope in Rome, rather than being Anglicans, or Lutherans, or Calvinists, or others. (ie, “Papists”, “Popish Catholics”, “Romish Catholics”, etc.) But if you look at things like the Creed, it’s the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, not the One, Holy, Roman Catholic, and Apostolic Church. etc.

We used Latin because it was the international language commonly understood by much of the Known World for 2,000 years. It and Greek were the two major languages of commerce and international politics. Even after the fall of the Empire, Latin continued to be the language of religion, science, and intellectuals. So if someone from the Balkans wanted to communicate with someone from the Iberian Peninsula, would it make sense to hope that each knew the other’s local dialect, or would it make sense to presume that each knew Latin?

Over the last 200 years or so, scholars stopped writing their philosophy and science in Latin, and moved to the vernacular— French, German, English, and so on. And as religion moved into the vernacular post-Vatican II, Latin stopped being a staple of a good high school education, in favor of electives like Spanish or French. Latin and Greek are still a solid thing to study if you want to be a Classicist-- because there’s more stuff written in Latin than you could ever translate in a lifetime-- but we no longer rely on it as a common language.

“A man gave a great dinner to which he invited many.
When the time for the dinner came,
he dispatched his servant to say to those invited,
‘Come, everything is now ready.’
But one by one, they all began to excuse themselves.
The first said to him,
‘I have purchased a field and must go to examine it;
I ask you, consider me excused.’
And another said, ‘I have purchased five yoke of oxen
and am on my way to evaluate them;
I ask you, consider me excused.’
And another said, ‘I have just married a woman,
and therefore I cannot come.’
The servant went and reported this to his master.
Then the master of the house in a rage commanded his servant,
‘Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town
and bring in here the poor and the crippled,
the blind and the lame.’
The servant reported, ‘Sir, your orders have been carried out
and still there is room.’
The master then ordered the servant,
‘Go out to the highways and hedgerows
and make people come in that my home may be filled.
For, I tell you, none of those men who were invited will taste my dinner.’”

 

[steve-b]

Okay, but why do we call ourselves Roman Catholic? Why did we use Latin, in our mass and prayers? Wasn’t that the language of the Roman Empire?

Re: rites

Roman / Latin, is a rite.

And
there are
23 Eastern rites in the Catholic Church

all rites are 100% Catholic because they are in full unity with the pope of Rome, the successor to Peter

Numbers in each rite

Total Latin rite Catholics in the world, approx 1.2 billion
Total Eastern rite Catholics in the world, approx 16.4 million

Latin Rite​

1. Latin (or Roman) Catholic Church

Alexandrian Rite​

1. Coptic Catholic Church
2. Eritrean Catholic Church
3. Ethiopian Catholic Church

West Syrian (or Antiochene) Rite​

1. Maronite Catholic Church
2. Syriac Catholic Church
3. Syro-Malankara Catholic Church

Armenian Rite​

1. Armenian Catholic Church

East Syrian (or Chaldean) Rite​

1. Chaldean Catholic Church
2. Syro-Malabar Catholic Church

Constantinopolitan (or Byzantine) Rite​

1. Albanian Catholic Church
2. Belarusian Catholic Church
3. Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church
4. Byzantine Church of Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro (or Križevci Catholic Church)
5. Greek Byzantine Catholic Church
6. Hungarian Greek Catholic Church
7. Italo-Albanian Catholic Church
8. Macedonian Catholic Church
9. Melkite Greek Catholic Church
10. Romanian Catholic Church
11. Russian Catholic Church
12. Ruthenian Catholic Church (also known as the Byzantine Catholic Church in America)
13. Slovak Catholic Church
14. Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church

 

[adamhovey1988]

We don’t, properly speaking the correct term for a western Catholic is a Latin, although that has become a problematic term, because for a long time it referred to someone who spoke a Romance language, and more recently someone of Latin American heritage. If I recall correctly, the term Roman Catholic came about as an insult, the claim being, that members of the Church of Rome were not really Catholic. So, here’s how I see myself, I am a Latin Catholic, and I belong to the church that uses the Roman Rite, but never will you hear me call myself a Roman Catholic.