Talk:Novatianism

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Catholic

The article should not refer the Christian Church as the Catholic Church as it happened prior to the great schism. it is misleading —Preceding unsigned comment added by 218.160.84.242 (talk) 01:50, 7 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Given that the phrase "catholic church" shows up in Christian writings as early as 110 AD (in St. Ignatius of Antioch's letter to the Smyrnaeans), I don't think that it's incorrect to use the existing term here. --Trekkie4christ (talk) 17:47, 21 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I have made the clarifying changes. I believe they not only assure NPOV, but provide greater accuracy for the average reader. As "Catholic Church" is the official name of the christian Church headed by the Roman Catholic pope, as used in it's own official documents -- at least according to Wikipedia -- and that the actual definition of the uncapitalized word "catholic" is largely unknown to most readers and is instead assumed to be an adjective for anything related to the (Roman) Catholic Church, it is an appropriately clarifying substitution to put the word "universal" in its place in the context of this article. This is not only supported by the thoughts of the original commentator of this section, but by the fact that the inference on this page is "universal", rather than to single out the particular faction of the Church headed in Rome which has entered into schism with its Eastern Orthodox counterpart (among others) at least 700 years after the life of Novation -- who, as we all know, both vie to be identified as that "Church" against which Novation struggled. Let's take that argument to some other page. Jyg (talk) 19:40, 13 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The term Catholic indeed appears rather early... That should however not be seen as proof that it was used in the sense it's used today. E.g. you can say it means universal or something like general. So, if it says catholic, it actually it means something like general community of believers. The Roman Catholic Church just picked those words and then applied this to themselves. So essentially there existence is based upon semantic fraud and quite a lot of it. 105.12.7.103 (talk) 17:34, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]