www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West NCR article on steps to reunion

http://ncronline.org/news/faith-parish/catholic-and-orthodox-unity-close-enough-imagine

I'm interested in anyone's comments.

First of all, they seem to be late to recognizing this process has been going on.
Second, this article really seems rather simplistic to the entirety of the process.

It is news to me that the Eastern Orthodox have accepted the validity of the latin church's ordinations. I thought it was still an open question with doubt. Does the word validity even have much meaning since the ecclesiologies are so different?

Dan, if the EOC recognizes the ordination of Latin clergy, the news has not trickled down to the laity. I suspect that that is wishful thinking on the part of the author of the piece.

Except for John Allen's column, the NCR is chock full of dissident, liberal trash and can hardly be called a Catholic newspaper. The Paulists (of whom the author is one) are also known as a "progressive" bunch. Their publishing house puts out dissident materials with regularity.

Fr. Gabriel Bunge, a Roman Catholic hermit, was received into the Russian Orthodox Church last year and was not re-ordained.

Rybak, it is no secret that the EOC only recognizes her own sacraments as valid; when a RCC priest converts to Orthodoxy and wants to remain a priest in the EOC, different jurisdictions handle the situation differently. I posed teh question to a highly placed priest in the Greek archdiocese. He indicated to me that the Greeks would re-ordain the RCC priest, while the Russians (he cited the OCA as his example) would welcome the convert as a priest by a service called vesting and that was likely what happened to the fellow you mentioned. The theory of the latter action, as it was explained to me, is that the conversion to Orthodoxy, at least from the Russian perspective, perfected the imperfect RCC sacraments.

Simplistic indeed and I smelled a rat as soon as I saw 'NCR'.

Basically they think Rome and Orthodoxy can unite if, at least beneath the externals, both become essentially Episcopalian, where changes in essentials are possible by vote.

The left such as NCR say they hate papal authority when they really hate its limits: the Pope can't invent or repeal doctrine so he can't make the changes they want.

The Orthodox have the same view of doctrine and church infallibility – doctrine can't be invented or repealed – but a different view of the scope of the Pope [eirenikon.wordpress.com], the one real difference between the two sides.

So they're not of much use to the Western liberals trying to change the Catholic Church.

And it's fairly obvious to even a casual or passing observer that Orthodox church life has much more in common with the kind of RCs whom NCR hates than with NCR and their friends.

As johnzonaras wrote, recognition of RC orders is not a matter of Orthodox doctrine but opinion, the allowable range of which runs from mirroring Rome's recognition of the Orthodox (historically there's been a lot of this recognition in practice: nobody in the Toth and Chornock splits was reordained for example) to 'absolutely null and utterly void'. So the NCR writer wasn't lying about this but didn't tell the whole story.

No one denies that NCR has a progressive bent. However, i don't see any publication's conservativeness or progressiveness as a blanket to reject reading it. This is just my opinion, though.
I think it is important to recognize the slant, and then balance one's reading of both sides and discern appropriately.

This is quite true, the late Metropolitan Orestes Chornock was made a Bishop by the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople in 1938 without any 'reordination'.

I, too, am a little prejudiced against the National Catholic Reported -- as a matter of fact, when I saw NCR I automatically thought of the National Catholic Register.

But the good news is that we can each read the actual document for ourselves:

http://www.usccb.org/seia/steps-towards-reunited-church.shtml

Any thoughts about it? (Of course, many of you probably read it back in October and might not recall what you thought about it.)

A good sign is that SCOBA posted links to the same article and paper on its home page last year!

Finally got around to reading this ... definitely liked it, although I think they could have spent more time on #8, "Preparatory Steps".