www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West Intercommunion taken to an extreme?

I know it's not news to you. Just letting you know that I know.

I'm as persnickety purist as the next church geek so I'm all for Rome's favoring the Greek Catholics being as Orthodox as possible. That said, the above goes too far. Just anti-Catholic anti-Westernism, revisionism, ex post facto rationalization for the schism, creating a super-Orthodox identity (maybe understandably), different from the old semi-latinized po-nashomu church.

Just did. Thanks. That's great for you, but I'm thinking of numbers now compared to the '50s for example. How many men was Christ the Savior built for?

Ouch. Thanks for being honest. Looks like schism wasn't the way to keep the patrimony going after all.

Mr. Koehl was arguing it is a big-T issue when it's not. How in this thread have I missed the point? I never make excuses for the morons who kicked your dad and grandparents out of the church for no good reason. You're right to stand up for your rights per Brest and Uzhorod. But schism is not objectively good.

It's defined Catholic doctrine, a non-negotiable. Sorry you thought otherwise. That said, it's not what many think it is. Historically the church has always been grassroots and decentralized, thus phenomena like po-nashomu church. Papal infallibility is so rarely and cautiously used, and Popes can't invent or change doctrine. So getting upset about the Pope doesn't make sense.

I'm a Catholic. [sergesblog.blogspot.com]

From a friend:

The bishops of the Church of the East have had to be monks since the 12th/13th century, and so cannot either marry or be married. It is also worth noting that since the late Fifth Century (Synods of Seleucia of 484, 496) deacons and priests (and originally bishops) could marry both before and after ordination and, if widowed, without restriction on the number of times that they might remarry. But Rome has never, ever allowed such a practice in the Case of the Chaldean Catholic "uniates," imposing, rather, on them the discipline of the other eastern churches: celibate bishops; ordination of married men to the diaconate and presbyterate; no marriage or remarriage after ordination.

Because unlike the Kievan metropolia at Brest-Litovsk, the Anglicans aren't a church. No real bishops, no Mass.

Nope. See above.

Absolutely not. First off, the Forward in Faithers in the UK who converted weren't interested in anything of the kind. They were would-be Catholics when they were still Anglicans. Second, they don't want that because the real history is King Charles, et al., were Protestants, far less Catholic than high Anglicans liked to think. They even persecuted Catholics.

Privately you may venerate anyone. As for the second part, see above.

Nope. A Cranmerian rewrite, not at all the medieval recensions of the the Roman Rite.

Other than the quirk of claiming the historic episcopate, Anglicanism's roots are closer to Calvin and Zwingli than to the semi-Catholic Luther.

Yes, the Ordinariate like the Pastoral Provision before it has the option of some Prayer Book texts. I meant the Prayer Book isn't a form of the medieval services. That's an Anglican myth.

And there's more than one ordinariate: US, UK, Australia.

It's like a kind of gnosticism or freemasonry to believe that sophists like Mr. Koehl and Fr. Taft who hang out at the same academic conferences have some esoteric knowledge of the truth, thinking they're smarter than either Catholicism or Orthodoxy. Like the Anglican branch theory, looking down on both churches.

Surely there have been some good branch theorists, sometime in the many years that Branch Theory has existed.

I guess I can see some similarities with Orthodox Christians (even though I already knew you're Catholic).

It has a point, as high-church Anglicans envisioned it (trying to claim legitimacy for King Henry's schism, like the puppet Catholic church in Red China, turned Calvinist/Zwinglian heresy): that all the pre-'Reformation' churches have an overwhelming amount in common. Take St Vincent of Lérins' semper, ubique et ab omnibus and you pretty much get Catholicism, which is why by even non-papalist high churchmen were accused of 'aping Rome'.

But in itself it's wrong. As a friend learned in history points out, NONE of the pre-'Reformation' churches believe the true church is divisible. It's impossible. Catholicism has a nice attenuated version that actually recognizes orders outside it, the Augustinian vs. the Cyprianic view of hardline Orthodox: if you're credally orthodox (so easy the Nestorians pass the test), have bishops, and have sound teaching on the Eucharist, you're in the club (albeit estranged in the case of the Orthodox for example).

The trouble with branch theories, be they mainline Protestant denominationalism (where the Anglicans are now) or the elitism of Mr. Koehl, Archbishop Elias (Zoghby), or Fr. Taft, is they're relativistic. They're really saying there's no church, even if they don't realize it.

I don't want to get into a debate about whether that's true or not. I quote it to point out that the wording reflects bias -- unless you also say "the Schism of Brest" instead of "the Union of Brest". [Linked Image]

Thank you! The two obviously have tons in common; the church sees the Orthodox as an estranged Catholicism. Beyond that, to this day I say the Orthodox have lots to reteach the official church about the value of decentralized, traditional folk Catholicism, how the whole church has been for most of its history (because pre-modern communication and travel made it so). A great thing about being Catholic is it doesn't teach you to hate the Orthodox. And being Catholic doesn't mean you have to believe the Greek Catholic churches are perfect, nor must you make excuses for the idiots who pushed Toth and Chornock out.

Damn straight, because as understandable as it was, and I think I do understand, that's exactly what it was to me as a Catholic. It saddens me no end when I'm in an old American industrial Northeast town like Binghamton or Perth Amboy and see its beautiful century-old Greek Catholic parish church has left the church. It never should have happened and was our own churchmen's fault.

^If my grandfathers were living, they would tell you the Church left them, they did not leave the Church.

But it was a union, too, or in other words it was side-switching. (Not that I want to beat a dead horse. But it seems an important point since we Catholics have a long history of classifying everyone as in-communion-with-Rome or not-in-communion-with-Rome, as if every person not-in-communion-with-Rome were an island.)

No argument there.

To some extent, fogey and I are talking in circles. But it is clear that we the divide from opposite sides of the canyon while we debate the most efficacious manner in which to "bridge" the same.

FROM:"Steps Towards A Reunited Church: A Sketch Of An Orthodox-Catholic Vision For The Future,2010The North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation Georgetown University, Washington, DC"...

"The challenges of the Western Enlightenment to religious faith, and the threats of the new secular, absolutist forms of civil government that developed in nineteenth-century Europe, challenged the competence and even the right of Catholic institutions to teach and care for their own people. In this context, the emphasis of the First Vatican Council’s document Pastor Aeternus (1870) on the Catholic Church’s ability to speak the truth about God’s self-revelation in a free and unapologetic way, and to find the criteria for judging and formulating that truth within its own tradition, can be understood as a reaffirmation of the apostolic vision of a Church called by Christ to teach and judge through its own structures (see, e.g., Matt 16:18; 18.15-20; Lk 10.16). Yet Vatican I’s way of formulating the authority of Catholic Church officials -- particularly its definition of the Pope’s “true and proper primacy of jurisdiction” over each local Church and every Christian bishop (DS 3055, 3063), and its insistence that the Pope, “when acting in the office of shepherd and teacher of all Christians... possesses… that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to be endowed in defining doctrine” -- shocked critics of the Catholic Church, and has remained since then a focus of debate and further interpretation within the Catholic world. Despite the attempt of the Second Vatican Council (Lumen Gentium 23-25 [1964]) to contextualize and refine this portrait of papal authority and Church structure, the Catholic Church’s vision of a teaching authority and a practical decision-making power vested in the Pope, who faces few wider institutional checks, has been a principal cause of division between it and the Churches outside its communion. ...
But while the Western Church went on to develop its own institutional independence in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages under the headship of the bishop of Rome, the Eastern Churches remained fully integrated into the religious and political fabric of the late Roman Empire, even as the Empire’s territory dwindled under the domination of Arab and Turkish peoples. The Church’s main doctrinal definitions remained imperial law; maintaining Christian unity was an important imperial priority. And when the Eastern Roman Empire finally fell before the Turkish invaders in 1453, the Churches of the eastern patriarchates shared the political and social role of unifying and protecting the Christian minorities in lands dominated by a variety of Muslim rulers. In the Slavic territories to the north and east, new metropolitan sees and new patriarchates continued to develop after the fall of Constantinople, carrying out the mission of unifying newly converted Christian peoples, who largely shared the same geographical, linguistic and ethnic characteristics. Primacy had a less supra-national character than it had acquired in the Latin Church; what we presently call autocephaly -- ecclesiastical independence correlative to the emerging nation-state -- had become the underlying pattern for ecclesiastical organization.

Custom and habit, in all human societies, tend to become law. Structures that had come into being gradually, under the pressures of changing cultural and political conditions, came to be seen in both Eastern and Western Christianity as normative for the life of the Church....

7. . The Role of the Papacy. In such a communion of Churches, the role of the bishop of Rome would have to be carefully defined, both in continuity with the ancient structural principles of Christianity and in response to the need for a unified Christian message in the world of today. Although the details of that role would have to be worked out in a synodal way, and would require a genuine willingness on both sides to accommodate one another’s concerns, a few likely characteristics of this renewed Roman primacy would be these:

a) The bishop of Rome would be, by ancient custom, the “first” of the world’s bishops and of the regional patriarchs. His “primacy of honor” would mean, as it meant in the early Church, not simply honorific precedence but the authority to make real decisions, appropriate to the contexts in which he is acting. His relationship to the Eastern Churches and their bishops, however, would have to be substantially different from the relationship now accepted in the Latin Church. The present Eastern Catholic Churches would relate to the bishop of Rome in the same way as the present Orthodox Churches would. The leadership of the pope would always be realized by way of a serious and practical commitment to synodality and collegiality.

b) In accord with the teaching of both Vatican councils, the bishop of Rome would be understood by all as having authority only within a synodal/collegial context: as member as well as head of the college of bishops, as senior patriarch among the primates of the Churches, and as servant of universal communion. The “ordinary and immediate” jurisdiction of every bishop within his particular Church, would be “affirmed, strengthened and vindicated” by the exercise of the bishop of Rome’s ministry (Vatican II, Lumen Gentium 27; cf. Vatican I, Pastor Aeternus 3). In a reunited Church, this understanding of papal and episcopal authority, as complementary and mutually enhancing, would have to be expanded to include the much more complex patterns of local, primatial, and patriarchal leadership that have developed in the Eastern Churches since patristic times.

c) The fundamental worldwide ministry of the bishop of Rome would be to promote the communion of all the local Churches: to call on them to remain anchored in the unity of the Apostolic faith, and to observe the Church’s traditional canons. He would do this as a witness to the faith of Peter and Paul, a role inherited from his early predecessors who presided over the Church in that city where Peter and Paul gave their final witness.

d) His universal role would also be expressed in convoking and presiding over regular synods of patriarchs of all the Churches, and over ecumenical councils, when they should occur. In the Western Church, this same presiding function would include convoking and leading regular episcopal synods. In harmony with the Pope’s universal ecumenical ministry, the Roman curia’s relationship to local bishops and episcopal conferences in the Latin Church would become less centralized: bishops, for instance, would have more control over the agenda and the final documents of synods, and the selection of bishops would again normally become a local process.

e) In cases of conflict between bishops and their primates that cannot be resolved locally or regionally, the bishop of Rome would be expected to arrange for a juridical appeal process, perhaps to be implemented by local bishops, as provided for in canon 3 of the Synod of Sardica (343). In cases of dispute among primates, the bishop of Rome would be expected to mediate and to bring the crisis to brotherly resolution. And in crises of doctrine that might occasionally concern the whole Christian family, bishops throughout the world would have the right to appeal to him also for doctrinal guidance, much as Theodoret of Cyrus did to Pope Leo I in 449, during the controversy over the person of Christ that preceded the Council of Chalcedon (Ep. 113)"
http://www.scoba.us/articles/towards-a-unified-church.html