When I investigated I got a bit of a surprise
First, according to The Oxford English Dictionary, holism is a term coined by General J. C. Smuts (1870-1950) “to designate the tendency in nature to produce wholes (i.e. bodies or organisms) from the ordered grouping of unit structures.” So holist & holistic came into our language
Catholic comes from the Greek Καθολικος - general, universal, concerning, in respect of, according to the whole - which is subtly different, being whole already, not just a tendency
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography sums up Smuts thus:
“White South Africa's most outstanding twentieth-century figure, and its most renowned internationally, Jan Christiaan Smuts was a man of remarkable intellectual gifts. The major actor in the unification of South Africa, he helped refashion the modern Commonwealth, established the framework for the League of Nations, and inspired the preamble to the charter of the United Nations Organization. A peacemaker who played a notable role in Paris in 1919 and Ireland in 1921, Smuts nevertheless spent much of his life at war and achieved a reputation within South Africa for high-handed ruthlessness. A philosopher and scientist, he seemed psychologically unable to address South Africa's all-important ‘colour question’, and in this respect never rose above the racist discourse of the time. If Africa was his emotional mother country, Europe was his intellectual fatherland and throughout his life he retained an almost visceral fear that the fragile European civilization established in South Africa would be overwhelmed by black ‘barbarism’. He thus remains a curiously elusive if not evasive figure, as his frequent sobriquet, Slim (‘crafty’) Jannie, suggests.”
The Anglican version of the Christian creed includes the words:
I believe in the Holy Ghost;
The holy Catholick Church;
The Communion of Saints;
The Forgiveness of sins;
The Resurrection of the body,
And the Life everlasting.
Amen.
with the stress on the universal meaning of Catholic, not just (or even at all) the Roman branch
Some dictionaries suggest that catholic-with-a-capital-C refers specifically to the Roman version; others suggest that no religion should be capitalised
But I want to set the ball rolling on a campaign to brand the word holistic as unacceptable & totally non-pc
Because of its obviously racist origins, of course
