A blessed day, and a warm welcome to you, humble listener. Thank you for joining me for today’s episode of An Assemblage of Grandiose and Bombastic Grandiloquents. I shall ask you not to go all ‘holier than thou’ as we discuss today’s word: cathedral.
Cathedral is a word from the 1580s meaning ‘church of a bishop’, from the phrase ‘cathedral church’. It can be partially translated from the late Latin phrase ‘ecclesia cathedralis’ meaning ‘church of a bishop’s seat’, which in turn comes from the Latin ‘cathedra’, meaning ‘an easy chair, principally used by ladies’, which again can be traced to the Greek ‘kathedra’, meaning ‘seat or bench’. Are you still with me, faithful follower?
It was born an adjective, and attempts to force further adjectivisation onto it. The seventeenth century yielded ‘cathedraical’, ‘cathedratic’ and ‘cathedratical’. Nowadays, cathedral can be more simply defined as ‘a big church building, central place for some area’ or ‘the principal church of an archbishop's or bishop's archdiocese which contains an episcopal throne’. The term ‘cathedral’ actually carries no implication as to the size or ornateness of the building. Nevertheless, most cathedrals are particularly impressive edifices.
Churches with the function of ‘cathedral’ are usually specific to those Christian denominations with an episcopal hierarchy, such as the Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, and some Lutheran and Methodist churches. Church buildings embodying the functions of a cathedral first appeared in Italy, Gaul, Spain and North Africa in the fourth century, but cathedrals did not become universal within the Western Catholic Church until the twelfth century.
The Catholic church also uses the terms ‘pro-cathedral’, a parish or other church used temporarily as a cathedral, usually while the cathedral is under construction or repair, ‘co-cathedral’, a second cathedral in a diocese that has two sees, and ‘proto-cathedral’, the former cathedral of a transferred see. The cathedral church of a metropolitan bishop is called a metropolitan cathedral.
Isn’t language wonderful?
Written by Taylor Davidson, Read by Zane C Weber
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