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You can reject the claim of Petrine Primacy, but you cannot deny that's existed for over 1800 years.

Sadly, the modern Roman theory of primacy is not identical with the understanding of the nature of primacy during the first millennium.

When the subject of Newman and conscience is raised, the famous sentence form his letter to the Duke of Norfolk immediately comes to mind: "Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts, (which indeed does not seem quite the thing), I shall drink�to the Pope, if you please,�still to conscience first and to the Pope afterwards." In contrast to the statements of Gladstone, Newman sought to make a clear avowal of the papacy. And in contrast to mistaken forms of ultra-Montanism, Newman embraced an interpretation of the papacy which is only then correctly conceived when it is viewed together with the primacy of conscience, a papacy not put in opposition to the primacy of conscience but based on it and guaranteeing it. Modern man, who presupposes the opposition of authority to subjectivity, has difficulty understanding this. For him, conscience stands on the side of subjectivity and is the expression of the freedom of the subject. Authority, on the other hand, appears to him as the constraint on, threat to and even the negation of, freedom. So then we must go deeper to recover a vision in which this kind of opposition does not obtain.

For Newman, the middle term which establishes the connection between authority and subjectivity is truth. I do not hesitate to say that truth is the central thought of Newman's intellectual grappling. Conscience is central for him because truth stands in the middle. To put it differently, the centrality of the concept conscience for Newman, is linked to the prior centrality of the concept truth and can only be understood from this vantage point. The dominance of the idea of conscience in Newman does not signify that he, in the nineteenth century and in contrast to "objectivistic" neo-scholasticism, espoused a philosophy or theology of subjectivity. Certainly, the subject finds in Newman an attention which it had not received in Catholic theology perhaps since Saint Augustine. But it is an attention in the line of Augustine and not in that of the subjectivist philosophy of the modern age. On the occasion of his elevation to cardinal, Newman declared that most of his life was a struggle against the spirit of liberalism in religion. We might add, also against Christian subjectivism, as he found it in the Evangelical movement of his time and which admittedly had provided him the first step on his lifelong road to conversion. Conscience for Newman does not mean that the subject is the standard vis-a-vis the claims of authority in a truthless world, a world which lives from the compromise between the claims of the subject and the claims of the social order. Much more than that, conscience signifies the perceptible and demanding presence of the voice of truth in the subject himself. It is the overcoming of mere subjectivity in the encounter of the interiority of man with the truth from God. The verse Newman composed in 1833 in Sicily is characteristic: "I loved to choose and see my path but now, lead thou me on!" Newman's conversion to Catholicism was not for him a matter of personal taste or of subjective, spiritual need. He expressed himself on this even in 1844, on the threshold, so to speak of his conversion: "No one can have a more unfavorable view than I of the present state of Roman Catholics." Newman was much more taken by the necessity to obey recognized truth than his own preferences, that is to say, even against his own sensitivity and bonds of friendship and ties due to similar backgrounds. It seems to me characteristic of Newman that he emphasized truth's priority over goodness in the order of virtues. Or, to put it in a way which is more understandable for us, he emphasized truth's priority over consensus, over the accommodation of groups.

Again, let us take a formulation of Saint Basil. The love of God which is concrete in the commandments, is not imposed on us from without, the Church Father emphasizes, but has been implanted in us beforehand. The sense for the good has been stamped upon us, Augustine puts it. We can now appreciate Newman's toast first to conscience and then to the Pope. The Pope cannot impose commandments on faithful Catholics because he wants to or finds it expedient. Such a modern, voluntaristic concept of authority can only distort the true theological meaning of the papacy. The true nature of the Petrine office has become so incomprehensible in the modern age no doubt because we only think of authority in terms which do not allow for bridges between subject and object. Accordingly, everything which does not come from the subject is thought to be externally imposed. But the situation is really quite different according to the anthropology of conscience which through these reflections we have hopefully appreciated. The anamnesis instilled in our being needs, one might say, assistance from without so that it can become aware of itself. But this "from without" is not something set in opposition to anamnesis but ordered to it. It has maieutic function, imposes nothing foreign, but brings to fruition what is proper to anamnesis, namely its interior openness to the truth. When we are dealing with the question of faith and church whose radius extends from the redeeming Logos over the gift of creation, we must, however, take into account yet another dimension which is especially developed in the Johannine writings. John is familiar with the anamnesis of the new "we" which is granted to us in the incorporation into Christ (one Body, i.e., one "I" with Him). In remembering they knew him, so the Gospel has it in a number of places. The original encounter with Jesus gave the disciples what all generations thereafter receive in their foundational encounter with the Lord in Baptism and the Eucharist, namely, the new anamnesis of faith which unfolds, similarly to the anamnesis of creation, in constant dialogue between within and without. In contrast to the presumption of Gnostic teachers who wanted to convince the faithful that their naive faith must be understood and applied much differently, John could say: you do not need such instruction, for as anointed ones (i.e., baptized) you know everything (cf. 1 Jn 2:20). This does not mean a factual omniscience on the part of the faithful. It does signify, however, the sureness of the Christian memory. This Christian memory, to be sure, is always learning, but proceeding from its sacramental identity, it also distinguishes from within between what is a genuine unfolding of its recollection and what is its destruction or falsification. In the crisis of the Church today, the power of this recollection and the truth of the apostolic word is experienced in an entirely new way where much more so than hierarchical direction, it is the power of memory of the simple faith which leads to the discernment of spirits. One can only comprehend the primacy of the Pope and its correlation to Christian conscience in this connection. The true sense of this teaching authority of the Pope consists in his being the advocate of the Christian memory. The Pope does not impose from without. Rather, he elucidates the Christian memory and defends it. For this reason the toast to conscience indeed must precede the toast to the Pope because without conscience there would not be a papacy. All power that the papacy has is power of conscience. It is service to the double memory upon which the faith is based and which again and again must be purified, expanded and defended against the destruction of memory which is threatened by a subjectivity forgetful of its own foundation as well as by the pressures of social and cultural conformity.

And of course, that a modern young man should assert that he has the true understanding of the ancient view of the papacy, does not make it ancient either.

So the standard remains, "What is the truth of the matter?" Cardinal Ratzinger and Newman seem to address the matter squarely.

"Rome must not require more from the East with respect to the doctrine of primacy than had been formulated and was lived in the first millennium." [Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, page 199]

I am sure that this will not come as a surprise to anyone at the Byzantine Forum, but I do not accept Newman's theory of "doctrinal development." Moreover, I am not saying anything all that controversial, because Orthodox theologians (e.g., Fr. Andrew Louth, Fr. John Behr, Fr. Georges Florovsky, etc.) generally reject the Western theory of "doctrinal development."

I am reminded of Joseph Ratzinger's comments in his book, Principles of Catholic Theology:


Quote:
"Rome must not require more from the East with respect to the doctrine of primacy than had been formulated and was lived in the first millennium." [Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, page 199]

Good thing they weren't at the first 7 Ecumenical Councils!

I am sure that this will not come as a surprise to anyone at the Byzantine Forum, but I do not accept Newman's theory of "doctrinal development." Moreover, I am not saying anything all that controversial, because Orthodox theologians (e.g., Fr. Andrew Louth, Fr. John Behr, Fr. Georges Florovsky, etc.) generally reject the Western theory of "doctrinal development."

Apotheoun

I'd like to say as politely as possible that I think you're wasting your time trying to convince Catholics that Papal Infallibility is a false doctrine that was only created some time in the last millenium. To declare that the Pope is no longer Infallible, or only Infallible in the Latin Church would open a Pandora's box of new problems for the church, that I trust no pontiff, particularly Pope Benedict wants. One can only imagine the effects such a declaration or redefining would have within the Roman Catholic Church. For liberals within the Church it would be the green light to begin )(more openly than ever) rejecting the Church's teaching on divorce, contraception, ordination of women, homosexuality, you name it.