Well, is a Ukrainian Catholic worshipping in a Byzantine Rite a 'Roman' Catholic? Or a Maronite Catholic a 'Roman' Catholic? Go try to call one of them a 'Roman' Catholic. I am not responsible for what happens to you if you do. They are Catholic, they are in union with the Catholic Church, but they aren't 'Roman' at all. And they will tell you that.
Me? I am a member of the Latin Rite, so calling me Roman Catholic is no foul. But for millions of other Catholics of diverse rites it is a foul. Because it is inaccurate.
I would imagine they would take less offense than if I called them “Uniates.” Many Eastern Catholics identify as Orthodox in Communion with Rome.
The only problem is that exclusively using the word Catholic frustrates ecumenical discourse. For example, Anglo Catholics, and the Anglican Catholic Church, a continuing Anglican church, and Old Catholics, and Polish National Catholics.
Also, since Vatican II, the Eastern Catholics have been permitted to rediscover the traditional theology of the Orthodox, Assyrian and Mar Thoma churches most of them separated from.* The net result is a disparity in liturgy, theological emphasis and spiritual practice that has become quite noticeable in the case of some of the Byzantine and Oriental Catholic churches. For example, the Coptic Catholic, Armenian Catholic, Ukrainian Greek Catholic, Romanian Greek Catholic, Belarussian Greek Catholic, Melkite Catholic and Chaldean Catholic churches have de-Latinized their liturgy (especially the Ruthenian Greek Catholic), and are still in communion with the Pope, but many have deleted common Roman Catholic practices such as the Stations of the Cross, the Novena, the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, the use of sacring bells, and certain liturgical Latinizations. In Ukraine, anger over this led to the formation of the Society of St. Josaphat, which is in a formal partnership with the SSPX and celebrates according to the old Latin-influenced rites (for example, Pascha is celebrated on the morning of Easter Sunday rather than at midnight).
Lastly, Eastern Catholics make up only a small portion of the total number of Catholics in communion with Rome, a very small portion.
Thus, I think it is reasonable that the word Catholic be shared ecumenically with Anglo Catholics, their Presbyterian counterparts the Scoto-Catholics, their Lutheran counterparts the Evangelical Catholics, the Assyrian Catholic Church of the East, the Old Catholics, especially the Union of Scranton consisting of the Norwegian Catholic Church and the Polish National Catholic Church, which was kicked out of the Union of Utrecht around 2002 for being conservative (and then, about a year or two later liberals who weren’t even entirely Polish illegally occupied the PNCC parish in Toronto for several years and painted a rainbow flag on the roof while the church litigated to recover its property, which fortunately they did, and I believe the PNCC is one of the churches that under the Code of Canon Law of the Eastern Catholic Churches, Roman and Eastern Catholics isolated from one of their own priests can receive sacraments from a PNCC priest, and likewise Polish National Catholics can do the same.
By the way, Eastern Orthodox regard themselves as Roman and as Catholic, and some object to using the term Roman Catholic to refer to the Catholic Church led by the Pope in Rome. As you may or may not know, the Greek and Antiochian Orthodox in the Levant are commonly called Rum, or Rum Orthodox, from Romioii, meaning Roman, with the Eastern Mediterranean known as the Bahr-al-Rum, meaning “Sea of the Romans.”
There is also the issue of Sedevacantists.
Also, the Nicene Creed, Apostles Creed and Quincunque Vult express a belief in the Holy Catholic Church. The compromise that allows ecumenical forums like this one to function is that we all get to define Catholicity based on our beliefs, so for some members, the Catholic Church is everyone in communion with the Pope, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople or the Archbishop of Canterbury (this opinion is exceedingly rare but not unknown), for others, it is all of the churches who are led by bishops or bishops and priests in apostolic succession, defined either on the basis of common faith and sacramental validity as per St. Cyprian of Carthage or on the basis of sacramental validity alone as per St. Augustine of Hippo, or some admixture of the two, or in the case of some Protestants, on the basis of continuity with the apostolic faith, a succession of ideology rather than based on sacraments, while for others it consists of branches of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church resulting from schisms more political than theological, and for others it consists of the local church, and then, there is invisible church ecclesiology, wherein every Christian everywhere is part of the Church Catholic, with some differences in opinion about what constitutes a Christian. And these are just the most widely held ecclesiologies. The common thread of all ecclesiologies is that they revolve around the definition of Catholicity and the Church. Of course, the word Church means ecclesia, meaning assembly, and the word Catholic means “according to the whole” rather than “Universal” as is widely believed, which makes the word synonymous with Orthodoxy.
And to be fair, Orthodoxy is widely used to refer to churches other than the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, and is also commonly used incorrectly to refer to correct belief. It actually means “Right worship”, and while I do as a general rule believe in lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi, the case of the mainline Protestant denominations has resulted in some liturgical churches whose Doxology is correct, at least most of the time, can be what I would call
heterodogmatic. (although the angry sermon delivered after the revocation of Roe v. Wade by a minister at Old South Church, a UCC parish in Boston with beautiful architecture whose worship is usually unobjectionable was, in my opinion, other than correct doxology, and one could object to the pro-unity, anti-division equivocation on the same issue by his moderate colleague at the famous Old North Church, which in all fairness to him is a national landmark attended by people of from both sides of the aisle, so to speak, so a major part of his job is to not cause offense, which actually has for historic reasons been a major part of the job of Anglicans throughout history, many of whom seem to have a sacred vocation to keep the peace between opposing theological factions; this historical attribute, whose goals were laudable in the Elizabethan Settlement, Latitudinarianism, and the Broad Church approach, has become problematic when it comes to human sexuality and abortion, which are issues where only the failing mainline churches, a small minority of other religions like Unitarian Universalism, Salafi Islam, and Reform Judaism, and various classes of the irreligious, disagree with a consensus that unites Baptists, Roman Catholics, Eastern Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Seventh Day Adventists, most of the worlds’ Anglicans (and most members of the mainline churches in general aside from their clergy and seminary professors), Zoroastrianism, and Orthodox and Karaite Judaism.
Also, one final point of great relevance to this thread: the scriptural canons are different when one compares the Vulgate to the Greek, Italo-Albanian, Arabic and Church Slavonic Bibles used by the Byzantine Catholics, the Ge’ez Bible of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Catholic churches, and the Peshitta used by the Syriac Catholics, the Chaldean Catholics, the Syro Malabar and Malankara Catholics, and the Maronite Catholics (who separated from the Syriac Orthodox Church about 450 years before entering into communion with the Roman Catholics, and fled to the hills of Lebanon, which was a smart move, as they were able to protect themselves against attack and thus are now politically the most powerful Christian population in the Middle East, given the President of Lebanon is required to be one, and it is noteworthy that the Druze religion also survived by occupying Lebanese hills).
So I propose the use of the term Catholics in Communion with Rome, or Roman and Eastern Catholics, to be inclusive of the Sui Juris churches, many of which are extremely independent of the Vatican, and have a relationship like that of an autonomous Orthodox church like the Church of Sinai to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the Church of Montenegro to the Church of Serbia, the Church of Bessarabia to the Church of Romania, the Church of Finland to the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and the Church of Japan to the Moscow Patriarchate (this is not a complete list as there are probably 35 canonical autonomous churches divided among 15 or 16 canonical autocephalous churches in Eastern Orthodoxy, and a more complex scenario in Oriental Orthodox where, for example, the Armenian church consists of two senior Catholicoi and two junior Patriarchs each of which is in charge of an autocephalous church, which at present are in full communion, but were divided in the Cold War due to the Soviet conquest of Armenia).
*For example, the Chaldeans entered into communion with Rome due to a tribal dispute between their tribe, which lived mainly in Baghdad and spoke mainly Arabic, and the other tribes, which were concentrated in the Nineveh Plains and Mosul, and spoke mainly Assyrian (Tikrit on the other hand is the historic home of the Eastern half of the Syriac Orthodox Church, where the Maphrian lived until the office was relocated to India to support the Malankara church. The Maphrian, a term coined to avoid confusion with the Catholicos of the East after the Syriac-Assyrian schism, consecrates the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, who in turn consecrates the Maphrian. Of course the Syriac Orthodox were present throughout Iraq including Mosul and Baghdad, but were never present in Persia to the extent the Assyrians and Armenians historically have been.
