What are the different categories of modern Roman Catholicism?
There are same nine categories of Roman Catholic people around the world. The distinctions between them are not often clear because they can overlap or merge or blur into one another. Nor would individual Catholics necessarily appreciate or agree with such labels. But they will serve as convenient definitions for purposes of discussion: 1. Nominal or Social Catholicism: the Roman Catholicism of the largely uncommitted-perhaps those born or married into the Church but who have little knowledge of Catholic theology and who are, in practice, Catholics in name only. 2. Syncretistic/eclectic Catholicism: the Roman Catholicism that is, to varying degrees, combined with and/or absorbed by the pagan religion of the indigenous culture in which it exists (e.g., as in Mexico and South America). 3. Traditional or orthodox Catholicism: the powerful conservative branch of Roman Catholicism that holds to historic church doctrines such as those reasserted at the Council of Trent in the sixteenth centu
