Merry Christmas! (v.1)

Merry Christmas to all Catholics and New Sosigen Catholics!

Since writing ordinary banal congratulations is boring, I will explain why the two main branches of Christianity differ in their names by only one letter, how this happened and why this is bad.

One of the central dogmas of Christian theology is conciliarity, universality (el. καθολικότητα, from καθολικός— "universal, complete") of the Church, understood as its spatio-temporal universality. At first, everything seemed to be fine, there was a single Church, possessing the fullness of truth, it decisively destroyed heresies and lived quite well.

But then, alas, a schism occurred. Let's skip the story with mutual anathemas of the patriarchs and all that; what is important is that each of the newly formed Churches (which is quite natural) began to position itself as the true one, decisively declaring its conciliarity (el. already existed, skad. catholicity) and inseparability, presenting the other as unfortunate and lost, having fallen into heresy.

And after that, a whole mess of names began. These two Churches were called Western and Eastern, Catholic and Orthodox Catholic, and whatever else; the situation was further aggravated by the fact that while in Retzin it is possible to make a distinction between Catholics and Katholiks [kafoliki], most other languages do not allow this.

So it turns out that in Rečani they are called “katolična” and “katolička”, in English – Catholic and Orthodox-Catholic, in Hessian – Catholique and Hellenique (!), and there are thousands, thousands of them.

So all we can do is pray for “unification of all” and hope for the best, so that this crazy confusion will finally end on its own.