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.يا رب يسوع المسيح ابن اللّه الحيّ إرحمني أنا الخاطئ

Thursday, October 12, 2006

On reading the Abbé Guettée
When I filter out the hate and spite, which make him seem Jack Chicky (Jean Poussinish?) at times, he helps me clarify what I really believe.

As Monsieur l’Abbé writes early on, in an irenical mood:

Every Christian heart must be saddened in view of this separation... which exists between the Oriental Catholic Church and the Roman Catholic Church, which has subsisted for so many centuries between churches which have alike an apostolic origin; which have, save one word, the same creed; which have the same sacraments, the same priesthood, the same ethics, the same worship.

That said, if you filter Guettée’s polemic through history and tradition, his point and that of the Christian East at its best is that the historic episcopate is of divine origin, of the substance or esse of the church; ranks of bishops — Pope, patriarch, metropolitan, archbishop — are man-made for the good order of the churches, their well-being or bene esse. (The papacy is not a holy order unto itself like the episcopate.) Guettée isn’t clear enough on the latter (that there can be, was and is a man-made hierarchy among the bishops, as the Eastern Orthodox have got) at least in the beginning, which makes him sound like a Protestant. That’s the honour Eastern Orthodoxy is willing in theory to give to the Pope of Rome, to use the title they use for him liturgically (in commemorating saints) to this day (not an insult at all). If there is one communion of churches that makes up the true church why not a super-patriarch? The spanners in the works are universal jurisdiction and the ability to define doctrine ex cathedra. Looking at it as a function of church infallibility (the office is infallible not the man, says RC doctrine) and knowing he is bound by rule of law (past defined doctrine and even traditions) I have no problem with the latter. I see the issue with the former. (RC apologists fall back on ‘development of doctrine’ here.) The early church simply didn’t work that way (as Guettée describes) and couldn’t have done even if it wanted to. If universal jurisdiction why bishops?

None of this is foreign to non-papalist (unlike ‘papist’ that p-word is not an insult historically either) Anglo-Catholics.

The abbé describes the row over the re-baptism of heretics, a practice supported by St Cyprian, Dionysius and Firmilian against Pope St Stephen I. He intends to show that the Eastern bishops did not treat the Pope like a superior but also shows his hand, admitting the Pope was right. In the early church baptised heretics were brought into the church through the laying on of hands; the Oriental bishops were the innovators this time based on their own pious ideas and thus are seen to have bent the truth!

I haven’t got to the parts about the filioque or Photius yet but looked ahead and saw an amusing footnote pointing out that Guettée was not a Protestant and thus believed in the veneration of icons, the editor notes in horror!

Here I have to make a distinction between those who say the modern papacy is historically wrong and those Western liberals (including RCs) who hate Rome because Rome is Catholic.

The guiding principle is tradition and practice* > nominally being under Rome.

Salus animarum lex suprema.

- St Thomas Aquinas

I like Rome when it’s Catholic.

Doubts about the modern form of the papacy ≠ ‘the papacy and all of its practices are evil’! Heavens, no! Quite the opposite is true.

Most modern Orthodox are dead wrong about allowing contraception.

I like the Orthodox when they’re Catholic.

There are no perfect solutions on earth, only in cælo. Often it’s a matter of choosing the conscience problems you can live with over the ones you can’t.

For 11 years I’ve been a Russian Orthodox communicant (out of obedience I don’t receive at churches not in communion with them but do visit) but this is not an Eastern Orthodox blog. They’ve got a good rite**; I speak the language and like the people (I worship with Russians not converts). But I still honour those who gave me the Catholic faith (I think that echoes the commandments) and obviously don’t hate Western Catholicism (that or ‘pretending to be Russian’ are nothing to do with it — never were really) nor feel a need to steal its history and practice and re-package them as ‘Western Rite Orthodoxy’*** as if the Eastern Orthodox owned them all along or they needed legitimising. My native tradition is not crap.

Some of us (myself among them) really didn’t want to leave; we hoped as we’d been taught that it would be reunited with the rest of the Catholic world (maybe like St Tikhon or Cardinal Mercier imagined) but the events of history (from a Vatican council to a General Convention or General Synod) drove us elsewhere. (Life, innit?)

(That said I also don’t believe in mixing up the rites in church vagante fashion! Obeying that**** — it’s actually what Rome teaches — is not necessarily disparaging the other rite. One can not live fully in two rites at the same time. Practice at home is freer of course, and I’ve got the Prayer Books, breviaries and rosaries to prove it.)

A few people, from my father confessor to Fr Patrick Reardon in Chicago of Touchstone magazine, understand all this. The local Byzantine Catholic priests know me and do. I think Huw now does too.

Others don’t.

In those 11 years I’ve taken stick from both sides, from obnoxious ex-friends† in person who happened to be RCs to the filth from (mostly barking convert) online Orthodox‡ (early on I made mistakes based on their bad example: the remembrance of them is grievous unto us!), the worst of ethnic chauvinism mixed with the anti-Romanism of America’s Bible Belt. (Oh, good. Bookends.)

(And you thought I had a bad habit of trying to clobber people.)

Not my problem. Never was really. Took me a while to realise that.

*What the enemies of the faith might call Romanism, popery, etc. In that context I’d wear those names as a badge of honour like the big C word as they’re being used synonymously.

**If you like Freddie Mercury and Queen (yes, I’m that old) you really like Gilbert & Sullivan; if you like the cadences and some of the content of the Prayer Book you really like liturgy with the prayers of the church fathers.

***There are WROs I like whose approach is not like this. Like Occidentalis, which reports you can download and read Guettée’s book and judge his claims for yourself.

****For example following one calendar of saints’ days and not the other. It’s not a judgement against their holiness!

†They remind me of the truly hateful (and condescending) people now rubbishing Rod Dreher, whom I never egged on and in fact I politely criticised his main motive, running away from the gay-priest atrocities. (There are also nice comments.) There is a whole blog written by people dedicated to hating him; they must be cackling! If one is some kind of Catholic and asks I usually tell him to go to something traditional but not to change churches except as a last resort. I never want to go through it again.

‡The late RC-turned-Orthodox-turned-RC Gerard Bugge — an annoying online personality nobody could accuse of not loving God — called this their ‘anti-’ spirit not without justification. I find it eerily reminiscent of Protestantism.

Labels: books, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Catholic faith