The word ‘catholic’ has had a varied and often controversial history in Anglicanism. Its ordinary English sense is that of general and universal. One sees this historically in the growing medical literature of the seventeenth century in relation to cures or treatments that are said to be generally or universally applicable. Of course it had a specific application to Western Christianity after the Great Schism in 1054 when the Eastern churches generally became known as Orthodox and the Western as Catholic. At the time of the Reformation in England catholic was somewhat self-consciously used to mean all Christians in distinction from those churches under the jurisdiction of the Church of Rome. Elizabeth's injunctions in 1559 stated: ‘You shall pray for Christes Holy Catholique church, that is, for the whole congregation of Christian people dispersed throughout the whole worlde, and especially for the Church of England and Ireland.’ Similar usage is retained in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. More convoluted usages appear in the nineteenth century in the context of the Oxford movement and the ritualist controversies. This phase has influenced current usage.
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