Catholic integralism is the true seamless garment.Nelson Chase, a Ruthenian Catholic, writes:
The big news in the Catholic and Orthodox Church is the historic meeting between Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia.At least my opinion: I don't believe there is such a thing as the Orthodox Church, spiritually speaking. These are dioceses (local churches) and even particular churches (such as the Russian), sharing a (wonderful traditional) rite and the first few centuries of our doctrine, so there is a small-t Orthodox tradition, but they don't form a whole with any spiritual authority we recognize, even though they retain bishops, the Mass, and the other sacraments. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia and the local Greek Orthodox metropolis are sisters. The Latin Church and the Russian Orthodox Church are sisters. The Catholic Church by nature has no sisters. Easy to misunderstand, as most Catholics are in the Latin Church.
Sadly, this historic event has brought to light some old prejudices towards Uniates.Long the reason recent Russian patriarchs gave for not meeting the Pope, understandable given their mirror true-church claim to ours. To them it's as if a Methodist minister put on a chasuble and claimed to have Mass for Mexican immigrants to America, trying to convert them. But it also was an excuse for Soviet atrocities against Uniates, of which the Russian Orthodox Church was a beneficiary. The Russians hate the Ukrainian Catholic Church because 1) they can't own it like they can the Russian Orthodox Church and 2) they believe their Ukrainian close cousins should be in their empire and church and are outraged they are not.
...laud the ideal of Christian unity (much to the displeasure I imagine of certain sectors of Orthodoxy).Same fear of a sellout some of us have, but not really a problem; the thing is each side of course hopes for the submission of the other. Our doctrine allows nothing less. I'm upfront about that.
...call for the sanctity of life and marriage. It also addresses a new (and frightening) development that of manipulation of human reproduction.Standard Catholic stuff, good to see, setting this statement apart from the usual bland ecumenicism.
You bring up a point I overlooked, which is significant: the patriarch is perhaps begrudgingly acknowledging the Ukrainian Catholic Church's right to be left in peace, which one may, seeing religious liberty as a relative good. Maybe the Russians are just being diplomatic, recognizing the independent Ukraine (Ukrainian Catholics being a minority there, concentrated in the western part of the country, and very patriotically Ukrainian).
What does "disloyal means" mean? That it's disloyal to become Catholic? That would be unacceptable. While we want to bring these estranged particular churches back all together, of course we accept individual conversions, passively and quietly.
"Ecclesial communities"? Sounds like a mistake. Normally in Vaticanese that refers to Protestant churches, that is, non-churches. Both our own particular churches and dioceses and the Orthodox ones are "churches."
Here I should bring up the dishonorable reason people such as Byz Anti-Cath Dot Org would cheer for this acknowledgment that the Ukrainian Catholic Church has the right to be. They don't really believe in Catholicism. They have the fantasy that Orthodoxy is right but the Uniates are already Orthodox; they want Catholicism to "acknowledge that" by dumping its post-schism definitions of doctrine (of course we can't do that and don't want to) and to walk into Orthodoxy with its clergy already recognized by the Orthodox. They want to just start intercommuning. Religious liberty makes a good cover for this agenda, as does their credal and liturgical conservatism getting conservative Catholics' trust. (Not to be confused with supporting unlatinized forms of Byzantine Catholicism, which is good; also, the latinized forms have the right to exist.)
The Russians aren't returning to the church any time soon but if they're not trying to kill or imprison us, at least that's a start.
By the way, I don't think Msgr. Kirill agreed to meet the Pope because he thought he needed clout in his particular church's power struggle with the Patriarch of Constantinople. Being geopolitically important, in a large empire with nukes, is enough clout.
You want us to respect you, yet you refer to Orthodox Bishops as Monsignor. That's a disgrace. The only reason you hate the Orthodox Church so much is because it's everything you wish the Roman Catholic Church was. Go head, keep deluding yourself into believing that the way they do things in your parish is the norm for the Latin church, or will one day become the norm. I'll keep a more realistic outlook.
ReplyDeleteDear Ex-Catholic:
DeleteYou want us to respect you, yet you refer to Orthodox Bishops as Monsignor.
You have a point. But so do I. The Orthodox certainly don't respect us. Bringing back this pre-Vatican II custom is harsh, but considering their bishops don't have to recognize our bishops as even baptized, let alone as bishops, I'm letting them off easy. Actually I don't have a problem with being polite, respecting these estranged churches (particular and diocesan) since most of their people aren't personally guilty of schism (as a priest said to me, they don't know they're schismatic), so "Patriarch Kirill" is fine. It would be his title by right if the Moscow Patriarchate reconciled with the church. The thinking behind our old custom: jurisdiction comes from the Pope, so the Orthodox have real bishops but not jurisdiction; only Catholic bishops are lawful bishops.
That's a disgrace.
No, denying we even have baptism because we're not part of an empire or culture is a disgrace, and something most people even remotely intellectual or spiritual eventually see through.
The only reason you hate the Orthodox Church so much is because it's everything you wish the Roman Catholic Church was.
Everything? No. Much of it? Yes and without apology. Their error regarding us, seeing us as a fraud despite holding the same faith (their doctrine is our first seven councils, entirely Catholic), is so offensive that I don't like most Orthodox, again without apology. That said, I still say what I tried to, awkwardly, when I came on the Web over 15 years ago: with an un-modern spirituality including a rite that's better than the Novus Ordo, plus the potential to "think outside the box" of much Catholic and Protestant thinking, this small-t tradition has much to offer the church. That's the tragedy of the Orthodox and the "Orthodox in communion with Rome" dissenting Catholics: all that potential is wasted AND they're risking people's souls by leading them out of the church. "Everything"? Divorce and remarriage? Contraception? Confusing culture with doctrine, a kind of idolatry? Certainly not.
Go [a]head; keep deluding yourself into believing that the way they do things in your parish is the norm for the Latin church, or will one day become the norm.
Sounds Philadelphian: "G'head!" The way they do things in my parish is the HISTORIC norm of the Latin Church and you know it, even better than in the '50s because here it's always done with great care by people who chose it, and ecumenical in a good way, using the music and having the after-services fellowship of Anglicanism. A far cry from being told my native tradition is crap. And spare me the Western Rite Orthodox shpiel. That's stunted and heavily byzantinized, buying into the same error as the regular Orthodox, fetishizing Byzantine culture, and it's clear the regular Orthodox don't want it. Eastern Catholics aren't perfect (you don't have to latinize to be Catholic) but they're whole peoples, real communities with their own bishops that have been around for centuries, not artificial like WRO.
Not only is the way they do things in my parish objectively right, but given the American church's changing demographic as the old liberals die and the young ones leave, it has a shot at becoming the norm again. We won't be big like 50-100 years ago but we'll be sound.
I'll keep a more realistic outlook.
I hear you. That bitterness led me out of the church 20 years ago. But substituting a culture for the universal church isn't the answer. Some Latin Catholics are called to move to the Christian East. But putting any small-t tradition above the church is a sin. By the way, for all the good the Society of St. Pius X does, it's on dangerous ground for that reason.
"Orthodox Bishops as Monsignor"; why do the Orthodox Byzantines despise the French so much? Monsignor is the proper address for a bishop in France, and means "My lord." The hatred of certain ethnic groups by the Byzantine Orthodox is virtually abnormal.
DeleteIn France, where I studied in seminary, the Orthodox, whilst speaking in French often address their bishops by this title.
"Ecclesial communities"? Sounds like a mistake. Normally in Vaticanese that refers to Protestant churches, that is, non-churches."
ReplyDeleteI have a few friends who are concerned over the usage of this word. I don't particularly have an issue with it because I know what the Church teaches about our Churches.
Who are we to sit in judgement of these ecclesiastics and their high policies? I bookmarked the declaration (I first saw it on the Moscow Patriarchate's website), but I now wonder if I'll even bother reading it. What does it say that hasn't already been said? The same old platitudes about putting away the sin of...pick one; the same old rhetoric about common goals, furtherance of civilization, and blah, blah. It won't make any difference, and if it does it will just play into the hands of the one world religion to which these progressive apes, erect and sapient (I'm sure both men believe in Darwinism), have a tendency. "We're all the same really." No, we're bloody well not!
ReplyDeleteExcept for the declaration's Catholic gumption about sex and bioethics, you're right.
DeleteThe Eastern Churches don't need permission from Rome to do anything. To believe so would be to completely ignore, or to be ignorant of the history of the Church. Catholic culture is fine, but I reject Roman Catholism because I realize that the papacy itself is a farse. The Orthodox have every good reason to reject Rome's papal claims, because they know that it's a human invention. The belief that one's salvation depends on their submission to the Pope, as was declared by Bonaface XIII, is completely heretical and blasphemous.
ReplyDeleteWe haven't substituted the Church for a culture or a nation. RCs can be nationalistic too, and some Catholics practically worship St. Mary. Whether the Orthodox have been under the dominion of the Turks, or Tsars, or whomever, the Orthodox faith has not changed at all. We can't say that about the Western church. The Immaculate Conception of Mary is an example something that Latin scholastics argued about after the split with the Orthodox, and the in the 19th C the Pope made it a dogma that must be believed by all. Why should a uniquely Latin theologumenon about the Theotokos be made into a dogma as if that's what Christ came here to reveal?
Catholics treat the Pope like he is some kind of pagan deity, or worship him like he's a rockstar when he comes to their country. And btw, You guys have divorce and remarriage too, under the guise of the annulment process. It's just a scholastic way to skirt the issue, like a pharasee straining at a gnat but swallowing a camel. As for contraception, I believe the church has good reasons to practice pastoral economy and, besides, your church gets around it by allowing NFP.
Sadly, you're the one who is always sounding bitter on here. It's your blog, so you can post whatever you want, but I'm just calling you out on your bull***t. Oh, and you betta' believe I sound Philadelphian!
Catholic culture is fine.
DeleteRight. As a born Catholic you don't really buy Orthodoxy then. Good.
You're mad at the church for some reason as I had been, and I'm still not one of those apologists who claims everything here is perfect. But what's so hard to understand about there being one church and thus having one chief bishop who under certain limited circumstances (as Fr. Hunwicke explains Vatican I) has churchwide authority including defining, not inventing or changing, doctrine? Part of the church's charism of infallibility. The Orthodox are bloody-minded.
The Eastern Churches don't need permission from Rome to do anything.
Sassing the chief bishop, the big daddy or top reverend father in God, even to preserve a good thing such as an Eastern Christian culture transplanted to America, is to make an idol of that culture, the sin, though understandable, of the OCA and ACROD. That schism cuts me to the bone even though I'm not Slavic. Fr. Chornock, for example, wasn't a heretic to begin with and, obvious based on ACROD's long keeping most of their practices from before the schism, originally they really didn't want to leave. But the church can make such rules as regarding clerical marriage in America. Still, we really shouldn't have changed that rule then for Eastern Catholics here. I hope it's true that Pope Francis has changed it back.
Having a chief bishop isn't a "farse." Making an idol of a good thing such as an Eastern European culture is; the third-generation Orthodox kids in America know it and vote with their feet, to Protestantism or nothing/political correctness like their friends.
Sure, Catholics can be nationalistic, such as Irish Catholicism (vs. English persecution) and Polish (vs. Russian), but no state can own the Catholic Church, which is why the Turks made sure to re-separate the Greeks from us once they'd taken them over, and why the Soviets were so brutal to us once they'd stolen far eastern Poland and far eastern Slovakia during World War II. (Which man stood up for Christ, Cardinal Wyszynski or Fr. Gabriel Kostelnyk?)
The Orthodox faith has not changed at all.
Strictly speaking that's true, "the Orthodox faith" really being the Catholic faith as expressed in the first seven councils and a Catholic liturgy. But these schismatic churchmen make a grander claim than those. So let's take them at their word for a moment and look at a well-known example.
Timothy Ware in 1963: Orthodoxy has always condemned artificial contraception.
Msgr. Kallistos (Ware) today: Orthodoxy allows married couples to use artificial contraception with the blessing of their priest. (The same position as 1950s mainline Protestants and modern evangelicals.)
So besides sassing the chief bishop in the name of some prince or other, even anti-Christian ones, and denying that we Westerners are even baptized Christians because we don't participate in some fetishized culture, the schismatics can't get their story straight on an issue that hits even secular people where they live. Not worth taking seriously. I've read Ware's The Orthodox Church cover to cover. Besides the creed and the Catholic liturgy, there's really nothing there intellectually. Sloppy theology as a Catholic friend put it.
Some Catholics practically worship St. Mary.
DeleteTrue but latreia to Mary isn't our doctrine, and may I point this out? "Most holy Mother of God, save us," says the Byzantine Rite. If that's not fun for scaring Protestants, I don't know what is. It sure needs explaining! The modern Orthodox playbook, helped by the Protestant converts, is to try so hard to deny they're really Catholic that they sound Protestant about St. Mary, for example, and even (Lutheran) about the Eucharist, as well as Pelagian about original sin. Denying the Assumption is particularly comical since that story is Eastern: sawing off the branch on which one is sitting! As for the Immaculate Conception, the method of explaining it is Western Catholic but the truth of it is required belief. God redeems unlimited by space and time; the Immaculate Conception is entirely believable because it's invisible. The fairy tale that Mary lived in the Holy of Holies, which at least some schismatics insist on, is not.
Catholics treat the Pope like he is some kind of pagan deity, or worship him like he's a rockstar when he comes to their country.
As you can see from all my posts of that nature. Please. I don't even watch EWTN. Guess I'm not Catholic, which surprises God and me. Who knew?
You guys have divorce and remarriage too, under the guise of the annulment process.
Parroting our Protestant hosts is the best argument the schismatics in America can scare up for their blessing adultery? No wonder so many Greek-American kids blow that popcorn stand.
As for contraception, I believe the church has good reasons to practice pastoral economy and, besides, your church gets around it by allowing NFP.
See my preceding comment. As recently as 1963 one of your top apologists agreed entirely with us on the matter, as indeed all Christian churches did before 1930. ALL!!!! "Economy": the concept is true in theory but in the schismatics' case it means winging it, doing what one feels like because one's precious canons are a contradictory, outdated, unenforceable jumble.
Sadly, you're the one who is always sounding bitter on here.
Bitter about some things, sure. My misadventure in schism wasted years of my life and cost me some Catholic friends I'll probably never get back. Always? Nah. I made a point to wait a year after coming back to the church before writing about this topic, to avoid a kind of convertitis. But some of it is getting to say what I'd wanted to for well over 10 years but holding back for the sake of protecting my old priest. I know I should have left many years earlier but didn't out of human respect, a sin. God's patient. Now that this priest has retired and moved away, I don't have to cover for him anymore and thus can speak my mind. So sure, in the sense of odium theologicum, not trying to get back at former fellow parishioners, etc. (it's not that at all), I DO hate the Orthodox and am upfront about it. Few Catholics switch now; those in the now-passé convert boomlet are usually uncatechized ones who came to schismatic Christianity via evangelicalism. But the hatred and lies that spew from online Orthodoxy, both the obnoxious stuff from the old-country churchmen (which, blessedly, American ethnodox rarely say; they're nice with nothing to prove) and the regurgitated Protestant stuff from the converts, who feed on the filth from the old countries, trying to get us to leave the church (including the lies of the "Orthodox in communion with Rome" dissenting Catholics, even more damnable because their liturgical, etc. conservatism gets conservative Catholics' confidence), makes me angry.
It's your blog, so you can post whatever you want, but I'm just calling you out on your bull***t.
That's OK. You're hitting above the belt.
And regarding the few American ethnodox who do talk trash about us, I know I can't really do anything because we have freedom of religion, but I'd tell them to give back everything this culturally Christian country gave them and get on the first plane home to the old country, one-way. On me. Just like Muslims who rape, shoot, and machete people here. Russian? By any chance did we take you in after World War II, literally saving your life? Strip. Here's a Soviet flag you can wear on your flight.
Delete"The Immaculate Conception of Mary is an example"; personally, I am opposed to this doctrine, following the teachings of Aquinas on this issue, but several years ago I had a fascinating conversation with an Old Rite Old Orthodox priest, and according to him, this doctrine is believed by Old Believers and represents the old faith of Russia before the introduction of more Hellenistic theological thought.
DeleteOne must also be careful in stating that theology does not change in Byzantium, that may be true of the Oriental Orthodox, where, as an example is Palamism to be found in the ancient church or in the councils?
"Catholics treat the Pope like he is some kind of pagan deity, or worship him like he's a rockstar when he comes to their country. And btw, You guys have divorce and remarriage too, under the guise of the annulment process"; on these issues, the poster is correct. Personally, I am appalled at the Pope's recent attack against an American presidential candidate, declaring he is not a Christian. This is especially troublesome since the Pope himself lives behind a high, stone wall protected by guards.
"[S]ome Catholics practically worship St. Mary"; you have to be a Byzantine rite Protestant of some sort to say something quite this ludicrous. If you bother to read Lossky on the Immaculate Conception, he will say just the opposite of this. By making the BVM simply into a pre-prepared vessel to receive the Godhood of Christ through the Incarnation, the participation of the BVM in the process of both the Incarnation and Salvation has been greatly diminished by modern Roman Catholicism.
DeleteI cannot believe that any educated Orthodox would even deign to say something this blasphemous.
Dale, what I said about SOME Catholics practically worshiping Mary had nothing to do with official RC teaching. It's just been my observation, living within Catholic culture, that some seam to "cross over the boundary." But I also used the word PRACTICALLY, because I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they probably don't actually worship Mary. Some seem to put Mary at the center of their universe instead of Jesus. Also, I'm not comfortable with the devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Seems like a pagan devotion, and unbalanced, to me.
ReplyDelete