Word.ws English Dictionary

more Catholic than the Pope

more Catholic than the Pope adjective: adhering more stringently to Roman Catholic practices and doctrine than is required by church doctrine.

Adjective

more Catholic than the Pope (comparative form only)

  1. (comparative-only) Adhering more stringently to Roman Catholic practices and doctrine than is required by church doctrine.
  2. (broadly, comparative-only) Adhering more stringently to any norm more strictly than is required by the arbiters of the norm.
    • The recently liberated European states east of the Oder-Neisse line, seeking not only entry into NATO but membership in the Union club as well, had to be more circumspect, more “European” so to speak, more Catholic than the pope2005, Jan S. Prybyla, The American Way of Peace: An Interpretation
    • It has been asserted that Blair, far from seeking to slow Bush's rush to war, urged him to be tough, in an attempt to be 'more Catholic than the Pope'.2008, Robert Harvey, The World Crisis: The Way Forward After Iraq, page 23

Questions about more Catholic than the Pope

What does more Catholic than the Pope mean?
More Catholic than the Pope means adhering more stringently to Roman Catholic practices and doctrine than is required by church doctrine.
What part of speech is more Catholic than the Pope?
More Catholic than the Pope is an adjective.

Words near more Catholic than the Pope in the dictionary

  1. more
  2. more and more
  3. more at eleven
  4. more betoken
  5. more by token
  6. more Catholic than the Pope
  7. more comfortable than an old shoe
  8. more confusing than a Rubik's Cube
  9. more cry than wool
  10. more cushion for the pushin'
  11. more dead than alive

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: more Catholic than the Pope (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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