www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West If Eastern Catholicism did not exist

Originally posted by carson daniel lauffer:
I take it that you are pretty new at this. If you actually represented Orthodoxy I would be greatly offended and wonder why on earth Eastern Catholics would wish anything at all to do with you. But you really don't. So I will resist being offended.

Originally posted by Rilian:
I can't agree to several things the RCC proclaims about itself. I regard them as untrue, and it is because of these things that I could not in conscience be in communion with that church. I think it has erected barriers to unity that are basically unassailable. Again, you may feel I am not representative of Orthodoxy in this regard, but my own experience tells me that is not that case.

Andrew

Originally posted by Rilian:
if there is no impetus and desire to join back with Orthodoxy, the Eastern Catholic bodies will not represent models of unity but permanent fixtures of disunity.

Andrew

Well what are you and the others who do think as you do going to do when a communion is renewed and the things you say are unassailable barriers are still in place?

I never waste my time with loaded questions. It is better for you not to waste your time asking them of me.

Originally posted by Isaac:

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Well what are you and the others who do think as you do going to do when a communion is renewed and the things you say are unassailable barriers are still in place?

and

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I never waste my time with loaded questions. It is better for you not to waste your time asking them of me.

:p

~Isaac

Originally posted by Thepeug:
If I may chime in to what seems to be an increasingly heated debate,

Andrew: I suppose ideas of "unity" vary according to one's perspective. For the eastern Catholic, the eastern Catholic Churches epitomize unity, a union ideally defined as communion with the whole (Catholic) Church and the bishop of Rome without the sacrifice of one's spiritual heritage.

God bless,

Chris

I suppose ideas of "unity" vary according to one's perspective. For the eastern Catholic, the eastern Catholic Churches epitomize unity, a union ideally defined as communion with the whole (Catholic) Church

But unity with the Orthodox cannot mean separation from that Church which, for the eastern Catholic, is the locus of unity itself.

Well what are you and the others who do think as you do going to do when a communion is renewed and the things you say are unassailable barriers are still in place?

Originally posted by Orthodox Pyrohy.:
Ok Dan, Can I suggest a few books?
I may pm you a little list if you wish.

At least one Orthodox position is that the successor to Peter, the bishop of Rome, is in fact the elder brother of all the disciples.

It is nice to have a relationship with one or two of the younger brothers but without a relationship with the elder brother as he is commonly called, how can Orthodoxy claim a fullness of faith?

I don't know how other Orthodox ignore that

No matter what you may or may not call the successor of Peter you are not in communion with him.

Yet you ignore this inconvenient truth.

I note that you still ignore the question.

No matter what you may or may not call the successor of Peter you are not in communion with him.

Within the local Church the primacy of the bishop is unconditional and uncontested. For the Orthodox tradition, founded both on the theological legacy of the Fathers of the ancient Church (such as St. Cyprian of Carthage), as well as on later polemical writings of Byzantine theologians, each bishop, and not only the Bishop of Rome, is the successor of Apostle Peter. Barlaam of Calabria, an important Byzantine theologian of the 14th century (who, incidentally, ended his life in the Catholic Church), writes: 'Each Orthodox bishop is the vicar of Christ and the successor of the apostles, so that if all bishops of the world were to apostasize from the true faith and only one were to remain the keeper of the correct dogmas. the faith of the divine Peter would be saved in him.' He further writes: 'The bishops ordained by Peter are the successors not only of Peter, but also of the other Apostles; to the same degree bishops ordained by others are the successors of Peter.'

From its very beginnings, the papacy has been surrounded with the mantle of timelessness, or rather, with a particular historical myth, whose vulnerability, considered simply as history, is every bit as problematic for Catholics as for anyone else. At least since the high Middle Ages the papacy has been understood as an institution directly created by Jesus Christ in his own lifetime: he willed that his Church should be ruled by the Apostles and their successors, and he gave to Peter, as leader of the apostles, the fullness of spiritual power, the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Peter came to Rome, and there appointed his own successors, whose names are recited to this day in the canon of the Mass � Linus, Cletus, Clement, and so on down to John Paul II. All that the modern Church claims for the pope, his authority in doctrine and his power over institutions, is on this account a simple unfolding of the dominical bestowal of the keys, and the post-resurrection command to Peter to feed Christ�s sheep.

We have known for more than a century that the historical underpinning of this account is unfortunately not quite so simple. The Church of Rome during its first two centuries based its claims to precedence not on the Lord�s words to Peter, but on the preaching and death in Rome of two apostles, Peter and Paul. The commission in Matthew 16:18, "Thou art Peter, and upon this Rock I will build my Church, and I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven", is quoted in no Roman source before the time of the Decian persecution, in the middle of the third century, and even then the claims which the Pope of the time tried to base on that quotation were indignantly rejected by the Churches of Africa to whom he was addressing himself.

And indeed, the very roots of what may be called the foundation myth of the papacy are themselves uncomfortably complicated. The Church established itself in Rome some time in the AD 40s: we now know that for the best part of the century that followed, there was nothing and nobody in Rome who could recognisably be called a pope. Christianity in Rome evolved out of the Roman synagogues, and to begin with it was not so much a single Church as a constellation of independent churches, meeting in the houses of wealthy converts or in hired halls and public baths, without any central ruler or bishop. The Roman synagogues � there were 14 of them in the first century � unlike the synagogues in other great Mediterranean cities like Antioch . . . were all independent, with no central organisation or single president, and to begin with at least, the churches of Rome also functioned independently. Many of them were in any case ethnic or regional churches, groups of Syrian, Greek, Asian residents in Rome, using their own languages, following the customs of the Christian communities back in their home regions.

Elsewhere in the first century, episcopacy emerged as the dominant form of church order � the rule of each church by a single senior presbyter who took the lead in ordinations and the celebration of the Eucharist, and who was the focus of unity for all the Christians of a city or region. But Rome, probably because of the complexity and ethnic and cultural diversity of the Christian communities of the capital of the world, was very slow to adopt this system.

In the conventional accounts of the history of the papacy, the letter of Clement, written from Rome to the Church at Corinth around the year AD 95, is often thought of as the first papal encyclical, attributed to Pope Clement, Peter�s third successor and the last pope personally known to the Prince of the Apostles. In fact, the letter is written on behalf of the whole Roman Church, it is unsigned, and the author speaks unequivocally of "the elders who rule the Church", in the plural.

EVERYTHING we know about the Church at Rome in its first century or so points in the same direction, to a community which certainly thought of itself as one Church, but which was in practice a loose and often divided federation of widely different communities, each with its own pastors and its own distinctive and often conflicting liturgies, calendars and customs. It was in fact the threat of heresy within this seething diversity, and the Roman need to impose some sort of unity and coherence on the Church in the city, that led to the emergence of the Roman episcopate, and the firming up of the Roman community�s pride in the life and death among them of the two greatest apostles, into a succession narrative. By the 160s the graves of Peter and Paul had shrines built over them and were being shown to Christian visitors to Rome: by the early third century the bishops of Rome were being buried in a single crypt in what is now the catacomb of San Callisto, as a sort of visible family tree stretching back, it was believed, to the apostolic age. But all this was a construct, tidying the mess and confusion of real history into a neat and orderly relay race, with the baton of apostolic authority being handed from one bishop to another.

This symbolic rearrangement of the past is of course an unavoidable aspect of all human attempts to make sense of the present, and it is a notable feature of the New Testament itself. My point is not that any of this disproves the claims we would wish to make for the papacy: it is perfectly open to us to read this process as providential. Nevertheless, the recognition that the emergence of the bishops of Rome was the result not straightforwardly of a direct and immediate act of the incarnate word of God in his own lifetime, but rather of a long and uncertain evolutionary process, which might conceivably have run a different way, surely rules out any absolutist understanding of the nature of papal authority.

And it seems to me not only to rule out absolutism, the bully�s version of papal theory, but even the poignant and noble understanding of the loneliness of office which is the most inspiring and admirable side of the ultramontane understanding of the papal office.

This mission for any Church, Andrew, is to bring the people into the life of Christ in communion with the Body of Christ, to provide sacraments ... to guide an initiate through mystagogy, to provide liturgies and a guidance on the Way.