08/06/2026
One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church with the Orthodox Faith
Reading Church history will lead one to Orthodoxy.
The Latin Church's appropriation of the names "Roman" and "Catholic" is historically disputed, for the Orthodox Church remains an equal claimant, if not one with a stronger claim to continuity with those titles.
As for the name Roman, the Eastern Churches were fully part of the Roman Empire. While the Western portion, including the City of Rome itself, fell to the Germanic barbarians in 476 AD, the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine), which predominantly spoke Greek, continued for nearly another thousand years, only falling in 1453 AD after the Ottoman Turkish conquest of Constantinople.
Even after this fall, Orthodox Christians in the East and the Levant, living under Islamic caliphates and later Muslim rule, continued to be identified by authorities themselves as Rūm (Romans). When the modern Greek state achieved independence and later expanded into territories formerly under Ottoman rule, many Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians did not identify themselves primarily as "Greeks" in the modern national sense, but rather as Romans (Rhomaioi/Rūm).
If anything, the East preserved Roman civilization more continuously than the West, which underwent centuries of Gothic, Frankish, and other Germanic influences that transformed its political and cultural identity.
As for the term "Catholic," it is a Greek word (Catholicos) meaning "universal." In the early Church, "Catholic" referred to the universal and undivided Church of Christ, not to a name exclusively associated with a single patriarchal see.
Rome was only one of the great patriarchates. Others included:
-Constantinople (Istanbul), the New Rome, officially designated as such by Emperor Constantine and later affirmed in imperial and ecclesiastical legislation;
-Antioch (Syria), where St. Peter first served as bishop before his ministry in Rome;
-Alexandria (Egypt), whose bishops likewise bore the title, Pope;
-Jerusalem (Palestine/Israel), the Mother Church of Christianity.
Jerusalem remained Orthodox until the arrival of the Latin Crusaders, who established a parallel Latin hierarchy alongside the existing Orthodox one.
Greek is also significant because it is the language in which the New Testament was originally written. The Scriptures were only translated into Latin by Jerome in the late fourth century.
Thus, when one asks what the "Roman Catholic Church" truly is, the answer more accurately describes the Orthodox Catholic Church: a Church that was both Roman and Catholic, encompassing both Latin and Greek traditions, possessing all the ancient apostolic sees! Including those of the Holy Land and preserving the faith and dogma of the early Church.
Lastly, it would be more accurate to refer to the Church centered in the Vatican as the Latin Church, which broke away from the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church during the Great Schism of 1054 AD. Wherein changes and corruption in faith, dogma, and administration were noticed by latin monks and priests, one of them Martin Luther, who kickstarted the Protestant Reformation, breaking The Western Latin Church into irreconcilable denominations that continues to divide until this very day.
