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Since Irenaeus wrote decades after Ignatius, how come Irenaeus doesn't call the Church in Rome "the Catholic Church". If it was so well known as such then how come its proper name as the "Catholic Church" is not used by Irenaeus or other writers until the 4th century.

This might come as a shock but the writings of Irenaeus and Ignatius were not influenced by the splintering of Christendom over a millenium later following the Reformation.

You're carrying way too much baggage from the 16th century onwards and projecting it back in time. Your whole thinking is colored by the actions of Protestant reformers whom Ignatius and Irenaeus never even dreamed of. Forget Luther, Calvin and the ongoing debate about whether we are the Catholic Church or the Roman Catholic Church. Instead, hop into your time machine and travel back to a time when the need to identify the spreading Christian religion as universal, or Catholic or catholic was not a pressing polemic issue. The exact point at which Christianity had spread sufficiently throughout the then known world for it to be named "catholic" or "Catholic" was not marked by an official declaration. Some writers may have used this term earlier than others. This does not sunder the connection of the present day Catholic Church to the first apostles. It simply indicates that there was not a synchronous adoption of the word "Catholic". And why would there need to be?

You've approached the topic with the preconceived idea that today's Catholic Church has no connection to the apostles and taken the fact that the name does not appear immediately, or is used sporadically in early Christian writings as proof of your hypothesis. Very loose logic. As if the early Church fathers knew they would have to prove apostolic succession to a generation of Protestant skeptics who would appear 20 centuries later and would have called themselves "The Catholic Church" from the get go, in the same way that I might name a newly formed organization "The Augusta Vintage Car Club".

Silly and very sloppy.

Silly and very sloppy.

Yes, it was very silly and sloppy of Ignatius, Clement, Justin Matryr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, all the early patriarchs until Eusebius, who was under the employ of Pontiff Constantine [under whom the term "catholic Church" was capitalized and capitalized upon], to forget to write about Peter's mythological Bishopric in Rome.

That sloppiness required Eusebius [under the employ of Pontiff Constantine] to have to pluck that Bishopric out of the thin air over Vatican Hill, or dig it up from the shallow graves below, where of course the bones of Simon Magus [the Simon who was the Bishop of a Roman Christian cult] lie to this day.

Yes --- very silly and sloppy of those early patriarchs to say so much about Simon Magus there in Rome and so little about Peter. Their sloppiness made Eusebius and subsequent RCC propagandists work their poor little imaginations so hard to try to make something appear out of nothing.