Yesterday morning I spent time again with the St. Basil community in Palo Alto for their Sunday liturgy.

The Byzantine-rite Christians will often call their building a "temple." (Is this true of all Eastern Christians?) Church, or ekklesia, may be limited to naming the community. (Though American Orthodox, following convention, may use the word church to refer to the building as well.) Some American RC parishes have renamed themselves as a "Roman Catholic community" and so on, in accordance with a better understanding of ecclesiology. (Or it is another impetus of the Spirit of Vatican II towards the horizontal, and so many of these parishes are rather "liberal" in their understanding of doctrine and liturgy.) Such a change, as far as I can tell, is superficial - they may call themselves a community, but they do very little to live as one outside of participating in the liturgy. How many of us invoke the patron saint of our parishes daily?

Often American Christians, Catholic and Protestant, will make this point about the word "church" - "It isn't the building," but God's people - it is part of a valid re-emphasis on an adequate ecclesiology, but they go too far with the Anglophone obsession with univocity to serve their polemics while justifying it as being faithful to Sacred Scripture.

Did Latin Catholics ever use the word templum to refer to their buildings of worship? Or did it strike them as being too pagan?