Although the term ‘catholic’ is generally applied to the Church Of Rome, its literal meaning is universal, all-embracing, and including a wide variety of things. Immediately then we observe that the label Roman Catholic presents a contradiction, designating that which is both Roman and universal. But it is not my intent to make very much of this seeming oxymoron, other than to reflect that the designation (as of anything) which ‘sticks’ usually does so because it is appropriate.
Here my aim is to show that the Roman Catholic Church does indeed deserve the appellation ‘universal’ – namely in the sense of Revelation 13:8 – And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. The reference is to the apocalyptic ‘beast’, a religious and political entity which constitutes the biblical antichrist. In an universal apostatising, a falling-away from the original faith, so our Holy Bible, the entire world shall worship the beast.
Let us start with the designation Roman. Rome, the ancient Roman empire of the Bible, denotes paganism, a universal and syncretic polytheism. It is cosmopolitan, pluralistic and culturally diverse in its charter. The Romans were the materialist of the ancient world – after Democritus and the Greek atomists – with a consummate cynicism regarding their derivative deities. So, likewise, the gospel of Mark, the simplest and most prosaic of the gospel narratives, is appropriately deemed the gospel to the Romans – that is, to the essentially carnal mind of philosophical naturalism. This is not to imply that ‘Romans’ (or modern-day Romanists) cannot respond to the gospel and thus be saved in the biblical sense; the indication, merely, is of a secular paradigm which constitutes the far opposite of the mystical transcendentalism which characterises holy scripture. In other words, the Roman in Roman Catholicism correlates with the said philosophy of materialism, with its essential focus upon worldly power and influence.
Rome, in biblical symbolism, thus represents the carnal or intellectual understanding of the gospel, which symbolism fittingly describes the pertinent niche of man-made theology and cobbled creeds – the food sacrificed to idols, as referenced in scripture. It is the spiritual veil of worldly understanding, whereby humanity is shut out from the light of divine salvation. As Jesus addressed this mindset in Mathew 23, But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for you neither enter in yourselves, nor suffer those who are entering therein. Instead of sanctifying grace as revealed in the blood atonement, the emphasis is on ‘works’ and thus on human failing in the face of that insurmountable chasm between the actual and the vaunted ideal. The Nicene creed, the mystical asceticism of the Desert Fathers and Christian monastics became the foundation for a hybrid faith devoid of spiritual efficacy.
Roman Catholicism, for this reason, cannot cope with the Christian Bible, forbidding its use, or subjecting it to carnal recensions, to interpretive creedal redactions, in accord with an eclectic universalism and with the fanciful ideas, as plucked from a papal tiara, of its sovereigns. The result is a contrived religious mythology which accords with the religious folklore and superstitions of the world at large. And it is in this sense, furthermore, that the Roman Church is catholic – which is to say, universal. The biblical scriptures, in keeping with a universal religious legalism, are reduced to an ethical and moral prescription, wherein salvation is contingent upon human merit. This, of course, corresponds with the popular idea of ‘church’ or ‘religion’ whereby the world is kept in the outer courts of religious ambivalence and equivocation – of mystical glamour, spiritual confusion and outright deception.
Ethics and morality constitute the obsession of the religious outer courts. Religionists and secularists, atheists and agnostics – all are religious in the essential sense of a moral binding or covering of the soul (Adam’s fig leaf as the biblical archetype of contrived religion). We’re as good as anyone else and we don’t need ... we all have heard this kind of thing. All, in other words, hold to a creed of some kind. We have already noted how the creeds of Christendom reduce the Word of God to a formula, and the religious life to obsequious lip service. Yet nowhere is this more evident than in the greater public sphere with its emphasis on political correctness. A linguistic inquisition (in sum: avoid the seven words taboo) has become the hallmark of moral ascendancy. Meaning is abrogate – it is form that matters, such that language is reduced to gibberish, and discourse come to an end, in keeping with the symbolic type of the biblical tower of Babel.
We observe, in effect, the continuity between the perfunctory lip-service of false religion and the similarly perfunctory linguistic formulations of political correctness. And thus apparent is the essential congruity between universal religious sensibility and the mindset of that entity designated Mystery Babylon, the Mother of Whores and Abominations of the Earth.