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Why the Religion of the Vatican
is neither Roman nor Catholic

The religion of the Vatican is not catholic. The word catholic comes from the Greek word katholikos which is from kata (according to) and holos (whole). Thus, the word katholikos means according to the whole. The followers of the Vatican falsely claim catholic means universal and try to apply the term in a geographic sense, but the term was used by Saint Ignatius of Antioch as early as a.d. 105 — well before the Church was geographically universal. The truth they avoid is that catholic means according to the whole Christian teaching. That which is the whole Christian teaching is clearly explained by Saint Vincent of Lerins:

. . . in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all. For that is truly and in the strictest sense catholic, which, as the name itself and the reason of the thing declare, comprehends all universally. This rule we shall observe if we follow universality, antiquity, consent.

There are numerous teachings of the Vatican that are clearly not of antiquity. That fact alone makes them not catholic.

The religion of the Vatican is not Roman because the Roman Empire in the West was overrun by Germanic tribes who took over. Along with the rest of the social structure, the Vatican was conquered by these Germanic peoples. The Germanic version of history is that the Roman Empire came to an end in 476 and was eventually re-established as the Holy Roman Empire. Historians have correctly declared that the so-called Holy Roman Empire was not holy (it was quite pagan), it was not Roman (it was Germanic), and it was not an empire (it was a confederacy of smaller states).

The Roman Empire survived until 1453. The Germanic version of history incorrectly calls this the Byzantine Empire even though the people of the empire always called themselves Roman, spoke the Roman language (today, the vernacular in Greece in Romaic), and lived under Roman law. When the Arabs conquered the Roman Empire in 1453, the called the Christian millet under the Patriarch of Constantinople the Roman millet and referred to their Christian Faith as Roman Orthodox whilst calling the religion of the Vatican the Latins or Franks (the Franks were one of the Germanic tribes that overran Europe).

It is, therefore, historically inaccurate to apply either the catholic or the Roman adjective to the religion of the Vatican.

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