Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology Online

Extract

Catholicism, along with Orthodoxy and Protestantism, is one of Christianity's three principal branches and statistically the most important. Today's use of the term is a recent, secularized means of referring to the Catholic Church, whose head is the pope and whose headquarters are in the Vatican City in Rome.The word Catholicism is a latecomer in the long history of the church, a word whose history has yet to be written. It is scarcely more than four centuries old in the French language, where it seems to have been born amid the sixteenth-century wars of religion as a counterpart to the Protestantism of the Calvinists. The schism between German Lutherans (the Church of the Augsburg Confession) and Catholics – only recently healed after lengthy ecumenical dialogue – has no exact parallel in the relations between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches: the orthodoxy Constantinople claims for itself is not opposed to any putative Roman heresy, but to the iconoclasts over whom it triumphed in the ninth century.Relations between confessions are inflected with language difficulties about which no unanimity exists and which are open to multiple interpretations. “Church” is a theological concept that each confession develops in its own way. Doctrinal differences have led to the establishment of separate churches whose ecclesiological peculiarities limit and undermine ecumenical dialogue. In ... log in or subscribe to read full text