{"id":950,"date":"2022-04-14T08:46:32","date_gmt":"2022-04-14T00:46:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/suicideawareness.my\/boblew\/?p=950"},"modified":"2022-04-17T10:00:42","modified_gmt":"2022-04-17T02:00:42","slug":"950-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/suicideawareness.my\/boblew\/950-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Chapter 1<\/strong>
Historical Background<\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Strictly speaking, Catholic Christianity originated with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Both the Julian and Gregorian calendars, now used throughout much of the world, start with that event, with years marked as either BC or AD (BCE or CE in more neutral language). Bear in mind, however, that there are at least 40 calendars used throughout the world today, including the Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Jewish calendars, each with their own start dates. Regarding the Gregorian calendar, AD stands for Anno Domini (“in the year of the Lord”) and BC stands for Before Christ. Catholicism, then, began at time 0 on the Gregorian calendar.

The Catholic Church, however, did not have its true start until the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in 30 AD based on Luke 3:23: “When he began, Jesus was about thirty years old” (All quotations are from New Jerusalem Bible (NJB), the Catholic translation (from Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic) of the Bible published in 1985 by Doubleday (New York, NY) (assuming here that Jesus was a real historical person). It would probably be more accurate to say that the Catholic Church<\/em> actually began when Christians began meeting together in various places during the 1st century AD. The earliest use of the term “Catholic Church” is from a letter written by the early church father Ignatius to Christians in Smyrna around 106 AD: “Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude [of the people] also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church” (Strawley, 1900). Later, St. Cyril (circa 315-386) is quoted as saying: “If ever thou art sojourning in cities, inquire not simply where the Lord’s House is, not merely where the Church is, but where is the Catholic Church. For this is the peculiar name of this Holy Church, the mother of us all, which is the spouse of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Only-begotten Son of God” (cited in Berry, 2009, p 68).

With regard to the institutional leadership, it was not until the end of the 2nd century that bishops (successors to Jesus’ 12 disciples) began congregating in regional meetings to discuss and resolve doctrinal issues. In the 3rd century, the leading bishop (Bishop of Rome) began to have meetings to discuss problems that the other bishops could not resolve on their own. The Catholic pope is considered the Bishop of Rome and is believed by Catholics to be the direct successor of Saint Peter, one of Jesus’ disciples about whom he said “You are Peter and on this rock I will build my community” (Matthew 16:18). In 380 AD, the Roman Emperor decreed Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD, the Church began to establish monasteries and send missionaries through Northern Europe and the British Isles (Norman & Barrett, 2007).

In the 7th century AD, the Eastern Catholic Church came under invasion by Islam, which by the middle of the 8th century had destroyed three of the five major Catholic centres (called “patriarchal sees”) located in Jerusalem (Israel), Alexandria (Egypt), and Antioch (Turkey). Over the next several centuries, the Catholic Church and Islam fought for control of various regions in the East and the West, including Rome itself, which was sacked in 850 AD. Constantinople in the East was also besieged during this time by Islam, although the Christian faith was preserved. By the 11th century, friction began to develop between the Latin Western Church and the largely Greek Eastern Church, and in 1054 AD, the Eastern Orthodox Church split off from the Roman Catholic Church (called the East-West Schism or “Great Schism”).

The Eastern Orthodox Church (or simply (Orthodox) should be distinguished from the 22 Eastern Catholic Churches (Ukrainian, Greek, Greek Melkite, Maronite, Byzantine Ruthenian, Coptic Catholic, Syro Malabar, Syro-Malankara, Chaldean, Ethiopic Rites), which consider themselves Catholic but not Roman<\/em> Catholic (Roman Catholic also called the “Latin Rite”).

In the 16th century, Protestant reformers (Martin Luther, John Calvin, and others) started to challenge the doctrine and practices of the Roman Catholic Church, creating the second major split. In response, the Church began a series of reforms that would later be called the “Catholic-Reformation” or “Catholic Revival” beginning with the Council of Trend (1545 AD). However, this was not enough for the Protestant reformers in Europe who gradually began to win over the people of the region (especially northern Europe and the British Isles). As its base in Europe began to erode, however, the Roman Catholic Church would spread widely around the world especially to the Americas (in particular, Mexico, Central America, and South America).

Catholicism Today<\/strong>

The Roman Catholic Church is the oldest and largest Christian organisation in the world with a membership of nearly 1.3 billion (Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae, 2016). In comparison, the Eastern Orthodox Church has a membership of approximately 200 million (Fairchild, 2016) and the Protestant churches approximately 800 million. The major differences between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches involve the primacy of the Catholic pope’s leadership, a disagreement about the wording of the Nicene Creed (concerning the doctrine of the Trinity), and belief regarding the purification of those who have died (i.e., purgatory). Otherwise, there is general agreement between the two confessions (Ut Unum, 1995). In the United States, one in five adults (21% or 68 million) is Roman Catholic (Pew Research Centre, 2016), although that percentage appears to be changing.

In 2014, the Pew Research Centre’s Religious Landscape Study found that while 32% of Americans reported they were raised Catholic, 41% no longer identified themselves as Catholic (Pew Research Center, 2015a). Based on those figures, 13% of Americans are former Catholics, 19% of Americans were raised Catholic and currently identify as Catholic, and 2% of Americans have converted to Catholicism. The recent scandal involving child abuse by priests may have had something to do with the changing Catholic landscape. The scandal received enormous public attention (both the perpetration and the cover up). The absolute prevalence of child abuse in priests has been estimated to be about 4% (USCCB, 2004) and up to 7% in some part of the world (Wright & Roberts, 2017), although bear in mind that the latter figure is for priests “accused of abuse,” not cases of abuse that have been documented and confirmed. Compare these rates to 10% of the non-clergy adult male population that is involved in pedophilia (Awad & Saunders, 1991). While this means 96% of Catholic priests have not been involved in child abuse and the rate of abuse by priests is less than half of that by males more generally, the fact that such abuses have occurred at all by these trusted clergy has likely adversely affected the faith of many Catholics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Strictly speaking, Catholic Christianity originated with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Both the Julian and Gregorian calendars, now used throughout much of the world, start with that event, with years marked as either BC or AD (BCE or CE in more neutral language). Bear in mind, however, that there are at least 40 calendars […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/suicideawareness.my\/boblew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/suicideawareness.my\/boblew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/suicideawareness.my\/boblew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/suicideawareness.my\/boblew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/suicideawareness.my\/boblew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=950"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/suicideawareness.my\/boblew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1054,"href":"https:\/\/suicideawareness.my\/boblew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950\/revisions\/1054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/suicideawareness.my\/boblew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/suicideawareness.my\/boblew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/suicideawareness.my\/boblew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}