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

The last I heard was that Fr. Taft retired from the Orientale after a long and distinguished academic career. The Russicom, more Orthodox in appearance than most Orthodox places of worship, is a hotbed of poseurs and wanne-be heretics? Who would have thought? Where's the Inquisition when you need it?

Sergei, some day you are going to find yourself in room with Catholic clergy and theologians who are both informed and in positions of authority, and you are going to spout off some piece of arrant nonsense. I pray I live to be in that room at that time, so that I might find out just how you prefer your crow to be prepared.

All I can say is there is plenty of crap people get away with in the church, and he seems to be one of those non sequiturs.

I've always hoped that the Russicum and its Church of St Anthony Abbot, like the rest of the little Russian Catholic Church, are a showplace of what Rome always wanted Greek Catholicism to be: 100% Catholic in doctrine, nec plus, nec minus, nec aliter (Pope St Pius X when commissioning the Russian Catholic Church) compared to Orthodox practice. If the first is not so, I'm very sorry to hear it, but it wouldn't refute Catholic doctrine.

'Inquisition'? Please. I expect crap like that from pro-abortion and gay activists, not the son of an Orthodox priest.

So the great Stuart Koehl doesn't like me. I'm gonna go cry now.

Meanwhile, would your self-styled holiness deign to answer the question?

I think I can translate: the ones who agree with Mr. Koehl, who go to the same academic conferences to preach the same dissent as him, so they have no business being trusted with authority. The same freemasonry that thinks the magisterium is for morons.

I am not trying to bait you. I meant completely everything I said to you. I believe that the Church takes a much less hard line than you claim it does, on the points you offer.

I can believe that THE Church is genuinely present in the Orthodox Churches (as the Catholic Church DOES actually teach) without claiming that 'neither the Catholic nor the Orthodox Church is really the Church,' nor as you also put it recently, that 'the Catholic Church is only a part.' It is not impermissible for me to make use of Orthodox theology nor is it wrong of me to include Orthodox teaching in the 'ordinary magisterium of the Church' if I want to make sense of a purported papally defined doctrine such as the Immaculate Conception. You claim this is dissent...(or at least you did when I tried talking about it with you a few weeks back)...I am not aware that any bishops do.

You insist on a much starker distinction--namely, 'the faith' vs. 'dissent--between these two sets of propositions than the Church does, and yet you brand as a dissenter anybody who raises any question at all about your insistence. Is this disingenuous? Do you really believe that when then Cardinal Ratzinger offered the private theological opinion that union with the Orthodox East could require from the Orthodox no more than the first millennium that he was actually expressing 'dissent' of the sort for which you've just urged excommunication? I believe Pope Paul was the first (though not the last, I think) pope to call them 'general councils of the West.' Also dissent?

I've explained myself in this thread.

So what'll it be?

Repeating an assertion is not explanation.

The answer is "a", but I think that because everything is still such an ongoing process and that there are so many grey areas in how Eastern Catholics are supposed to be both Catholic and Orthodox, things haven't been articulated enough yet.
So far, Rome has not chastised any of the Eastern clergy for dissent, and I don't think i've ever seen anyone openly preaching dissent on byzcath either, so where are you seeing this huge problem?

For instance, some of those "councils of the West" you mentioned don't make sense in Orthodox terms, but there hasn't been a clarification or a consensus on how exactly Eastern Catholics are to interpret those councils from an Orthodox perspective.

And asking honest questions about how to implement Roman dogma in an Eastern way isn't nearly the same thing as shouting out "I will not obey!" or "Orthodoxy or death!"

If those academic conferences you keep mentioning refers to Orientale Lumen, those are not some hotbed of dissent. I've never been myself, but it's been attended by the likes of Cardinal Weurl of Washington and Cardinal George of Chicago. Two highly orthodox prelates. Not to mention the highly respected and orthodox monks of Holy Resurrection monastery.

Not exactly the "women priests" or "Catholics for Choice" crowd.

I wasn't aware of the new department of the Curia "The Congregation of More Catholic than the Pope."

I get the nuances well enough. Again, in Greek Catholicism it's about Orthodox expression of Catholic doctrine. Then there's out-and-out dissent.

Ha! I knew the firestorm would burn itself out if I wait long enough. (And even if it hasn't I don't want to wait any longer. )

Hoo ... don't get me started on catholic answers.

Meh, I've kind of given up on the idea of being an honorary Orthodox.