“Catholic” and the Book of Common Prayer
Lionel E. Deimel
 

Father, we pray for your holy Catholic Church;

What struck me about this line is the capitalization of the word “catholic.” My understanding has been that “Catholic Church” usually refers to the Roman Catholic Church, whereas “catholic Church” refers to the whole body of Christ. This reference in the 1979 prayer book of The Episcopal Church seemed odd, so I decided to investigate the use of “catholic” in the Book of Common Prayer (BCP).

The table below provides information about every instance of “catholic” in the 1979 BCP. “L” and “U” stand for “lowercase” and “uppercase,” respectively. Duplicated lines in the table represent multiple instances on the same page.

Observations

First, the raw statistics. The word “catholic” occurs 24 times with a lowercase “c” and 13 times with an uppercase “c.” Of the capitalized instances, 6 occur in the Historical Documents section of the BCP, and one of those instances actually does refer to the Roman Catholic Church. I will assume that the capitalized instances in Historical Documents reflect, if not original documents, then at least traditional versions of them.

Concentrating on the main body of the BCP and assuming that “catholic” generally means something like “universal,” the 7 instances of “Catholic” seem anomalous. There is no consistent usage here. For example, in the Great Vigil of Easter, “catholic” appears capitalized on one page and un-capitalized on the next. Holy Eucharist I offers two versions of the Nicene Creed; the first has “catholic” in lowercase, but the word is capitalized in the second. (The words of the alternative form are taken from pp. 15–16 of the 1928 BCP. Many of the words capitalized in the 1928 edition are in lowercase in the 1979 edition, so it is unclear why the capitalization of “catholic” was retained. This creed has an odd peculiarity, by the way. There is no “in” in the formulation “I believe one Catholic and Apostolic Church.” This follows the usage, if not quite the spelling, of the 1662 Church of England BCP. To me, at least, the clause is nonsensical.)

There does seem to be a tendency to capitalize “catholic” within prayers. Why, I cannot say. (See pp. 278, 387, 489, 504, and 816.)

I am inclined to consider all instances of “Catholic” in the 1979 BCP, excepting possibly those in Historical Documents, to be mistaken. In the next edition of the prayer book, such instances, if they are copied, should be rendered as “catholic.”

— LED, 12/28/2010

I have been unable to find anyone who can explain or justify the inconsistence in the rendering of “catholic” in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. John Rawlinson helpfully provided this observation:

Dr. Massey H. Shepherd, Jr., was my Senior Tutor in Seminary, and a good contact following. I once heard him say that each Drafting Committee was responsible for proofreading its portion of the proposed BCP. When they had done that and corrected errors, their part was passed to the whole Standing Liturgical Commission to read and correct. When that was done, a team of professional proofreaders read and corrected the whole text. When they had finished that work, the text was given to a second, and independent, team of professional proofreaders for correction. He said that when all of that was done and the book was printed, they only found a thousand corrections. So, it is obvious that many details were able to escape the multiple layers of proofreading. It was not for want of serious efforts to correct all of the errors!

— LED, 4/23/2024

 
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