Hey everyone. I have heard it said before that the Catholic Church is not a denomination. I agree with this because I know it is orthodox theology but I do not know how/why the Catholic Church isn’t a denomination. Could someone please explain this to me? Is it because the Catholic Church is the original Church and didn’t split from any other church?
“Denomination” can mean a lot of things. It’s a vague term, and I don’t think it’s a term addressed in any official Catholic teaching. (I may be wrong on that.)
If it simply means “a religious organization,” obviously the Catholic Church is one (though one could quibble about the “sui juris churches” and argue that the Catholic Church is actually 23 denominations!).
But the term has a fairly specific, narrow historical meaning. The roots of denominationalism, many would say, lie in 17th-century England with the collapse of the Church of England’s attempt to unify all English Christians under one ecclesiastical roof. Dissenting churches were reluctantly recognized, and political thinkers began to articulate the idea that it was a good thing to have multiple expressions of Christianity within a nation.
In America, this theory found its fulfillment, with the First Amendment’s disestablishment clause.
In America, a “denomination” came to be defined as one particular organization of Christians among others, none of them claiming to be
the Church and all of them cooperating insofar as their differing views allowed. Denominationalism in the narrow sense means that multiple parallel organizations are accepted as the norm, with people choosing the one that best fits them.
In that sense the Catholic Church is clearly not a denomination.
As I said above, you could argue that the “sui juris churches” are denominations. Religious orders are clearly different from denominations, but in some ways function similarly. The recent invention of the “personal prelature” marks another kind of ecclesiastical organization that is somewhat like a denomination.
Catholics are often confused about this because on the one hand they claim not to be a denomination, while on the other mistakenly assuming that each Protestant denomination claims to be what the Catholic Church claims to be.
Edwin
