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If Orthodoxy can accept an infallible Church then why not the Head of an Infallible Church. Isnt it rather a dicotomy to severe the head from the body?
As pointed out the issue of Infallibility is not something new. But the understanding of the doctrine can still develope in the Church we need to add meat to the bones of how infalliblility is exercised in and with the college of the Apostles.
That is the Apostolic Churchers which are their successors.
Stephanos I

And I thank you where you do not agree - for both your patience and your honesty. I actually learn more when people disagree with me (in a patient and reasonable way) then when people agree with me.

What I know of the context of this quote from early Councils is in connections with - excommunication (members of the church who have rejected what the church has to offer). The simple logic is that it is impossible for the church to give the grace of salvation that comes through her - to someone who rejects it and will not accept it. A no brainier. If I have my hand extended to give someone $5.00 and that person do not take it - rejecting it - he didn�t get the $5.00 I was trying to give him. Period. We should assume nothing further than that. He did not take my $5.00.

I remind myself of this - The Church has always recognized that it knows just what God has revealed to it and nothing more. It has been given grace to give to others - that it knows - but it has not the power nor authority to damn anyone. If God sees fit to give grace to someone who is outside the church (member or non-member) that is his business and He need not keep the Church informed of his decisions or doings.

I remind myself - Excommunication is not a damnation - it is a recognition that a member of the church is not in community with the church as a body. �Ex (not) communication (communicating). Not-communicating. Let us not assume anything further.

Providence arranges for us (member and non-member) events throughout the day in which we have choices of conscience to make - and in this way we cooperating with God�s acts which �form us� into his own image. And every man has a conscience and Providence comes to all men. So there - are the only two essential and necessary ingrediance(sp) for sanctification. This is confirmed in the Catholic Catechism (Article 6) and in its following section on the �Natural Law� which echoes St. Paul�s statement that all men and every man knows God through the things he has created and so no man has an excuse for being separated from God.

There is nothing �church member� specific about the Beatitudes. It is morals and conscience.

(I am more talking to myself in public here than trying to tell you anything concrete)

As to my first opinion that it is simply a Brief (which it is or was) after further research tonight it appears that this Brief was adopted by the Council it was submitted to - and all or some of it placed into Cannon law. So - it does now appear to me to culminate in an Infallible declaration (darn!).

Since I find the literal and face interpretation of �We declare, say, define, and pronounce that it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.� (Meaning every human must be subjected to the Pontiff) to seem contradictory to early Councils and later Councils (Vatican II Decree on Ecumenism) then I must start by assuming that there may be something wrong with that literal interpretation.

At this point I must admit that I am stumped. And my hat is tipped to you for your patient ways and reasonable presentation in combination with a very reasonable person who has send me several private messages to the same effect.

This calls for further research. It is a bothersome thing.

(now I must correct myself to being stumped in the same subject in private mail)
-ray

reply:
We CAN accept a bishop who heads the Apostolic Church but not under the conditions set down by Vatican I. Rather we accept the first bishop under the conditions set down long before this council:

"And [the synod�s] second constitutive element is the existence among these bishops of a clearly defined primacy of the first bishop. This primacy is defined in the famous Apostolic Canon 34.� (Alexander Schmemann, The Idea of Primacy In Orthodox Ecclesiology; The Primacy of Peter, p.161).

�The bishops of every nation must acknowledge him who is first among them and account him as their head, and do nothing of consequence without his consent... but neither let him (who is first) do anything without the consent of all; for so there will be unanimity...� Apostolic Canon 34 (4th Century)

Trusting in Christ's Light,
Wm. DerGhazarian
Looys Kreesdosee
www.geocities.com/derghazar [geocities.com]

Matthew...

On the subject of giving context to Unam Sanctam...

I am now hot on the trial. It seems to be one letter of an ongoing series of lettered between the Pope and the Catholic King of France (Philip) and may be addressing the situation that seemed imminent of Philip forcible pulling French Catholics away from the Pope and forcing Catholic priests in France, through violence, to recognize Philip as head of the Church in France.

Hmmm�. Sounds like something that did happen in England.

So the Pope may be saying that he is head of the church - not Philip - and if Philip did what he was planning to do - the Church Philip would create would be cut off from its proper Bishop and in that act its sacraments would become invalid, as sacraments of the Catholic Church. In other words Philip has no reality if he were to proclaim himself head of the Catholic Church of France. The Catholic Church was tied to the Pope by God and Philip could not created another reality. If he broke away, the sacraments called �salvation� in the letters, being outside of the true Catholic church would no longer be valid Catholic sacraments.

Once cut off from the proper Patriarch, and bishops being ordained by a King who is not even a priest - valid ordination would die out and the sacraments become totally invalid.

So far, what I am reading fits with what I already know to be the context of the formula as originating in early Council documents �No salvation outside of the church� as being used only and exclusively in regards to a member of the church (perhaps ordained priests? Not sure) who reject the church and is now causing great public scandal to the church (ex-communication) and having nothing to do with people who were not members of the church.

It has always been my experience when reading Church Councils and such that the church may judge her own members but never passed judgment on non members.

A heretic can only be a member of the church (or ex-member who presumes to still be teaching in the name of the church) can be said to be in error about something but cannot be declared heretics.

I will supply bibliography as soon as I am more sure of what I am reading and how I am reading it. We will look at this together. I would like to confirm what I am reading by checking other sources too.


-ray

Dear Ray,
Very interesting comments and I'll take those five bucks that you are offering.
Lauro

Very interesting indeed.

The comments which I ran across and which I must now track down are here...

http://www.bringyou.to/aplogetics/debate9.htm

I originally had hesitated to give this link in as much as it is a record of a discussion and not easy to tell who, at all entries, who is saying what in reply to whom. Nor have I yet confirmed any facts presented in it. But for your interest - there it is.

Now my task is to sift it and check to see if the main position given (that it was one letter among a series between Boniface and King Philip of France) can be confirmed in any reliable way through other sources.

I am guessing, at this point, that the situation was developing around the time of the French Revolution.. And a few years after this letter France began to hunt down and kill anyone who called himself a Catholic with special attention to kill catholic priests who remained loyal to the Pope.

Did you ever see the movie �Brotherhood of the Wolf�? It is a bit based on a real incident where misguided Catholics actually perpetrated the rouse. Of course obligatory sex is added to the movie version. Ticket sales you know. But in the real incident it was a fundamentalist Catholic society which perpetrated the murders in effort to hoax that Philip�s movement to take over the French Catholic church and cut France off from Rome - was actually resulting in the �release of the beast� of Revelations within the French country side.

I digress as usual.

In my years of private study I have found two things to be true� trust reality no matter where it leads you� and find the - context (knowing the situation and nuances of language and culture shared by the original writer and the directly intended reader). Divine inspiration will take care of itself - these people who authored this stuff are normal human beings who share our all too human nature.

I know for a fact that the formula �Outside of the church� originates in early Council documents and refers to members of the Church who were once of the same mind as the church (�knowing the truth� is that formula) and have now come to knowingly and willfully rejected that truth (which the church is the embodiment of) and the church itself, and now, while still operating in the name of the church now teach others their own errors, and are causing great harm to Catholic people, and refuse a direct command of the church to cease.

�Outside the church� as a formula - it is not the same thing as referring to someone who is not, nor ever has been, a member of the Church. If you wish to investigate that yourself I suggest you start with the Cannons of The Catholic Church and the sections on Sanctions. The first thing you should notices is that Excommunication is a Sanction - and that sanctions can only be leveled upon - members of the church. The church is granted no authority to place sanctions or judgments upon anybody- but its own.

The Church considers herself to have the power to sanction its own members only - and no one else. From there you can now go to the early Council documents and find the early appearance of �Outside the Church� used in formula and plainly see that it is tightly tied to - excommunication. And you should notice that the �power� or force of any sanction rests firmly and only upon being cut off from the sacrament (the mysteries) which Jesus gave to his Church as means to - salvation. To the early mind of the church salvation was the sacraments and the sacraments were salvation. To say one is to say the other. And so the connection exists that �outside the church there is no salvation� as a phrase should be understood as to say that�

---- begin updated wording----
the validity and efficacy of the seven sacraments exists as the invisible reality of external sacraments only when bound to the genuine source of these sacraments.

The validity and efficacy of the [b]Catholic sacraments[b] known as �salvation�, no longer exist in anyone, or any group, which has severed from the authority from which that invisible validity and efficacy originate and flows.
-----end of my words------

Valid priesthood and sacraments being tied, as it were, to a valid Patriarch of apostolic succession. Philip as head of the Catholic Church of France being not a valid Patriarch. What else could the Pope say?

If there is any sacramental nature to these things in some church that has severed from the origin of the sacraments and from apostolic priesthood then that is a matter up to God and there is no mandate that God must inform the Catholic church of what he has decided to so�. but they are no longer - sacraments of the [b] Catholic church[/I] of Rome. Let us not assume anything more than that and let us not extrapolate anything further.

Again, the Catholic church has only the authority to define what is its own and no authority to define or judge what is not its own.

I have always found it to be true that if something seems complex to me - I have not yet found its meaning - but if something dawns on me as �Oh yah - now that was a complicated way to say something real simple and obvious!� then I was on the right track.

These men were brilliant of mind at times - but they did not tend to �make things up� or formulate �rules� by which they claimed they could produce �reality. Their brilliance was in the recognition of existing realities. So when you have found what they were talking about one tends to say to himself �Well of course. That is plain as day and simple as dirt. Anyone - knows that.�

I digress as usual.

When I an done with Unam Sanctam - no matter where it leads - I will make new post (open a thread) my results and include what bibliographic links that I can.

Ah - do I hear the bell which signals that it is time for an enigmaticie quip?

"It is impossibly that God conflict with reality - but it is always possible that our own concepts of God lack reality. We must let go of one to receive the other."
(end quip)

In the mean time my boss actually requires that I do some work for my paycheck (darn!)

If you try to track things out and get anywhere, please keep me informed via private message.

-ray

I cannot understand the dogmatic statements about the Pope's infallibility made at VCI. Here is a comment from a poster on an Orthodox forum which summarizes some dismay over this pronouncement. What kind of finesse will be required to back out of this? Is is possible to understand the Infallibility comments within a collegial framework such as the Orthodox insist upon?

Here's some insight into Cardinal Newman's thought at the time:

"Is this the proper work of an oecumenical Council? as to myself personally, pleae God, I do not expect trial at all; but I cannot help suffering with the various souls which are suffering, and I look with anxiety at the prospect of having to defend decisions which may not be difficult to my private judgement, but may be most difficult to maintain logically in the face of historical facts. What have we done to be treated as the faithful never were treated before? When has a definition of a doctrine de Fide been a luxury of devotion and not a stern practical necessity? Why should an aggressive, insolent faction be allowed to "make the heart of the just mourn"...? Why can't we be let alone, when we have pursued peace and thought no evil?" (Robert McClory, Power and the Papacy: the People and Politics Behind the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility, Liguori, 1997, p. 88.)

Newman, to be fair, believed in a version of infallibility consistent with his theology of collegiality, which laid the foundations for Vatican II. Why he ended up assenting to the dogma is not for me to judge, nonetheless we can catch a glimpse of the trepidations facing those who found the new dogma too hard to swallow:

'As a historian, [Hefele] could find no justification for papal infallibility in past ages, and unlike de Las Casas, he could not affirm today what he denied yesterday. "i'm sitting on a volcano," he wrote a few months after returning to his diocese in Austria....Nor, he believed, could the Church bear the scandal of a possible schism over his convictions. That, he reasoned would be a disaster even worse than the doctrine. So Hefele, more than a year after the declaration of the dogma, sent in his written submission, burned all the papers he had written on the council, and asked his friends to return his letters so he could burn them as well. He called it a "sacrifice of the intellect."' (Ibid, p. 131.)


Dan L

I left out an 'o'...

http://www.bringyou.to/apologetics/debate9.htm

-ray

Pastor Aeternus repeatedly referes to the collegial framework through which doxctrinal definitions emerge. It rules out novelty from the Pope. It is impossible to understand outside of a collegial framework.

As to Newman's thoughts, why didn't your correspondent just quote him?
http://www.newmanreader.org/works/anglicans/volume2/gladstone/section8.html

Dear Ghazar,

I was pondering Apostolic Canon 34 which you quoted, and I was wondering how this relates to the decrees of Vatican I. Here are some of my ponderings, and I would appreciate some comments and/or corrections as you (or anyone else) deems fit.

1) According to this Canon, I cannot question the theological correctness of the decree on infallibility, because this Canon only refers to the establishment of UNITY, and does not judge theological matters. Basically it says that there must be agreement in order to achieve UNANIMITY, NOT THEOLOGICAL CORRECTNESS. I believe it is a natural consequence of the infallibility of the temporal Church that it must have an infallible temporal head, as Stephanos wrote. The Pope invited the Orthodox to Vatican I, and the Orthodox refused. Whose fault is that? In any case, the Canon obviously refers to ecclesiastical discipline, and not theological matters.

2) Vatican I's decree that the statement of the Pope ex cathedra is irreformable without the consent of the Church is NOT affected by this Canon because the truth of a theological matter has NEVER been established by consensus, but rather by divine command. However, if the Vatican I decree refers to DISCIPLINARY matters, then it DOES conflict with the Canon. Then, again, DISCIPLINARY matters are NOT, according the consensus of the entire Church, IRREFORMIBLE. Thus, I understand that the Vatican I decrees regarding universal jurisdiction in DISCIPLINE CAN change, and there might be an eventual consensus on this point.

3) After having read the excursus in the NPNF series regarding the Filioque, I conclude that the Orthodox have no right to question the appropriateness of the Filioque because it was NEVER decreed to be a UNIVERSAL change, but was only ever intended to affect the Western Church. Beyond that, the “ecumenical” Council of Florence decreed the correct understanding of the Filioque, completely in line with Traditional Patristic understanding of ONE source for the Holy Spirit's spiration. I recall reading the critique of the recent agreed statement on the Filioque in the American Churches (posted by Elexei), and despite the criticism from the Orthodox side, the critic seems to have likewise performed a disservice by overlooking this important fact.

4) The establishment of the rank of Constantinople over and above Alexandria, Antioch, etc., according to this Canon, DEPENDED on the agreement of the Pope of elder Rome, and did NOT depend on the raising of its civil status. Constantinople owes a lot to Rome, ecclesiastically speaking.

5) This Canon indicates that the Pope of Rome should only have a say in the matters of other Sees beside his own when it is “of consequence.” I think that reflection on this point – that is, what can be regarded as “of consequence” – should be the focus of present ecumenical discussions. Energy should be spent in providing the Church a canonical list of such matters that could be regarded as “of consequence.”

6) There appears to be an ambiguity in the collegial aspect of this Canon. It is UNambiguous that the Pope of Rome can affect, perhaps even veto, an action by all the other bishops if it is “of consequence.” But what does it mean that the other bishops should not “let him do anything without the consent of all”? Is this an exhortation that the other bishops MUST give the Pope their support so that unanimity may prevail in the face of the world that does not know Christ (recall that Jesus states that UNITY ITSELF is to be a WITNESS to the world)? Or does this indicate that the Pope is LIMITED in his actions according to the unanimous agreement of the other bishops? If we take the example of the Bible, it seems to me that with regards to theological matters, the former situation must prevail; with regards to disciplinary matters, the latter must prevail.

Thoughts, comments, and corrections are always appreciated.

In His light and mercy,
the Sinner Marduk

Thank you.

-ray

To be clear�

I joined this thread not because I had trouble with the Pope's infallibility but because I had trouble with the interpretation of Unam Sanctam as if it were saying that anyone who was not a member of the Catholic Church (on earth or militant) and not subject to the Pope of Rome - would not obtain heaven - which interpretation puts it at odds with what the Early Councils called the �just man� and Vatican II describes in this way�

Vatican II - Dogmatic Constitution On The Church
I have become satisfied that Unam Sanctam is best understood in context of Europe where temporal Kings were about the business of hijacking portions of the Catholic Church away from the Pope. Such attempts were not new as the emperor Justine, of Constantinople, had attempted the very same thing and had some success�. however in Europe the result would be to cut off that portion of the church from its Apostolic Patriarch and in so doing invalidate sacraments and priesthood.

I remain sure that santification is availibe to all and everyone who does the work of conscience and that the work of conscience is also foundational (an absolute basic MUST) for Church members.

Background and context of Unam Sanctam �
http://webpages.charter.net/djhalnon/unam.html
http://www3.tky.3web.ne.jp/~jafarr/A%20Portrait%20of%20King%20Philip%20IV%202.html
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Pope-Clement-V
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0861305.html

-ray

Actuallly Ray that is an interesting thought.
But that is not how Unan Sanctum and Pastor Aeturnus are to be understood.
They teach us that if one who has "been enlightened by faith, and knows the truth of these teachings" rejects them, then there is no salvation for this person because they have placed themselves outside the Church.
You have to understand the Catholic Moral Principle of vincible and invincible ignorance and of culpubility and inculpubility.

In otherwards Catholics believe that grace is mediated through the Church which is Christ's body here on earth. Hence if you wilfully and knowingly cut yourself off from that body you cut yourself off from grace and so from salvation.

Stephanos I

Yes. I do see that and understand it and recognize its reality. If a person comes to understand something as true and he then reject what he understand to be true - he cuts himself off from reality and goes against his own conscience. That is the simple thing I have long held (well - not always in my youth and I not always suceed in my old age either )

I had held the principle that you state, before, but not in relation to the meaning of Unam Sactum. Unam Sactum was new to me and I entered it by way of someone else�s understanding of it. I had to �step� along to understand it better.

This current discussion forced me to begin to look at Unam Santum because I could not come to agree with an apparent interpretation that all humans must be under the Pope as head of the pilgrim church in order to be saved. What exactly did that mean?? So I voiced my opinions (among which was thinking it was not an infallible declaration) .My researching the BULL lead me to research its connection with King Philip� and some of my opinions changed. Now - after putting into its historical context (which allowed me to understand it in that context of situations in Europe at the time) and now followed by my further reading in Vatican II Dogmatic Constitution on the Church - has given me even better understanding.

At first (and even second) I thought Boniface was confusing the church triumphant (in heaven) with the church pilgrim (on earth) - but now I must confess - he was not confusing the two he was uniting the tow into one. Unum (Unity) Santum (Sacred) the unity or oneness of the sacred. I should have seen that clue J

I now understand the Bull for the most part - I do understand it as leading up to its closing which is - an infallible pronouncement.

I admit openly that I now understand it that I now understand how it is that every human creature (including those that died even before the earthly establishment of the office of Peter) come to be subject and united to the Catholic Church under the Office of Peter at the moment of entering heaven (even if never united to Peter on earth).

I will cut my explanation short (I yak too much anyway) but if your yourself have read some of my past posts on how it is that events in the human life of Jesus are spoken of in the Old Testament - and how Jesus himself speaks in the Old Testament - and how it is that the moments in time of the crucifixion and resurrection are a moment when time and eternity - touch - then you can understand how it is that I can now see that the Office of Peter extends forwards (from the moments of the humanity of Jesus) and �backwards� to be prefigured in the Old Testament.

I do admit and am now in awe that the Office of Peter is a gateway through which all humans of all times will pass on entrance into heaven. Just as it is that, after death - we shall all and everyone know by infused knowledge that Jesus was and always has been God - we shall also know that the gospel (in its many forms and not just written words in a book) has its influence even before (OT times) and after the event of the resurrection of Jesus.

This will probably be the content of my meditations for awhile.

Stephanos - thank you for your patience with me.

-ray

Dear Stephanos ...

I would appreciate any other comments and explainations you might have on the subject.

-ray