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

I assume paragraph 7 is a non starter to Young Fogey? Should the Roman Catholic authors to this document be disciplined or discredited in some manner, from the Archbishop on down?

There are plenty of Orthodox who would agree as to the Orthodox involved, from Metropolitan Maximos (since retired) on down.

Or, as I suspect, are the issues finally being viewed in a less black and white manner, with honest attempts being made to find a Patristic basis around them?

The church can no more revoke papal infallibility than it can approve gay marriage; it's not mainline or Mormon; it can't revoke a doctrine. That said, I appreciate what Vatican II ostensibly was trying to do by balancing out/completing Vatican I by emphasizing local bishops. But it's still a non-starter in Orthodox theological opinion, so after a schism 75 years ago that never should have happened (in a way nothing to do with doctrine, you're right, DMD; the church did abandon your family; I can't tell you how sorry I am), DMD and I are talking about a canyon an inch wide but infinitely deep: the nature and scope of the papacy, the ONLY real difference IMO between Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

It was not conceived as such by the Kyivan bishops who initiated the push towards union. They believed it possible to be in communion both with Rome and with the Orthodox commonwealth; they did not seek to break communion with either Moscow or Constantinople, but felt only communion with Rome under terms similar to those of the Union of Florence, could ensure their survival at a time when they were under severe legal, social and economic pressure within the Kingdom of Poland. With Constantinople enfeebled under the Ottoman thumb, and Moscow actually hostile to Poland, Rome was the only Church that could provide them with protection.

Unfortunately for the Kyivan bishops, much had changed in the world since Florence, mainly the Reformation and the Council of Trent, whose exclusionary ecclesiology could not admit to the existence of other true Churches outside of the Church of Rome. Corporate reception of the "Ruteni" as an ecclesial entity was thus rejected, and in the end (per the Bull Magnus Dominus of 1598), they were received only as an aggregation of repentant schismatics, "Roman Catholics" who were allowed to retain their unique liturgical and disciplinary customs by "dispensation". Thus, the phenomenon of "uniatism" was born.

The Orthodox Churches responded to this development by breaking communion with the Uniates (though never completely, as any honest history of the region will acknowledge), and hardening their attitudes towards Rome. The real losers in all this were the Uniates themselves, who lost their ecclesial connection with their Mother Church, while at the same time being reduced to "spiritual helots" (Fr. Serge Kelleher's term) of the Church of Rome.

The emergence of the Unia is one of those areas in which, to use Fr. Robert Taft's expression, everybody--Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic and Orthodox--must take great pains to avoid swallowing the "Disneyland" view of their own history.

At what point, I wonder, will the Young Fogey disown Pope Francis I?

By the way, Catholic doesn't necessarily mean ultramontanist. As a traditionalist I'm actually a papal minimalist, more interested in organic immemorial custom just like the Orthodox. The Pope is a distant figure to most Catholics; he's rarely used his office's infallibility; in 200 years he's used it twice, and to define things Catholics already believed. So it doesn't make sense to us when non-Catholics get upset over papal power.

Don't make me come over there. [Linked Image]

But seriously ...

Not so fast. I agree with Branch Theory is wrong ... but I don't think it can be dismissed as easily as you (and, let's face it, most Catholics and Orthodox) think. After all, there were many times in the first millennium when Rome and Constantinople were not in communion.

While I miss Pope Benedict, and realize Francis probably isn't a friend, so what? The nature of his office is he can't teach heresy. So I'm not leaving the church because of him or declaring him an antipope (sedevacantism). But I'm realistic. He's not high-church traditionalist and not interested in that. So I hope he leaves us alone.

He's not interested in the Eastern churches either. Much has been made in parts of the Catholic press of his role in Argentina as the default ordinary of Eastern Catholics there but that was just part of his job due to circumstances (no Eastern Catholic bishops there).

Or, as I suspect, are the issues finally being viewed in a less black and white manner, with honest attempts being made to find a Patristic basis around them?

What is happening, at last, is we are beginning to examine the issues through the lens of ecumenical scholarship, the development of which owes much to Archimandrite Robert Taft, who not only coined the term, but defined many of its guiding principles, as shown below:

Ecumenical scholarship

Let us begin with ecumenical scholarship. All scholarship worthy of the name is historico-critical, objective, fair, and representatively comprehensive. But ecumenical scholarship is not content with these purely natural virtues of honesty and fairness that one should be able to expect from any true scholar. Ecumenical scholarship takes things along step further. I consider ecumenical scholarship a new and specifically Christian way of studying Christian tradition in order to reconcile and unite, rather than to confute and dominate. Its deliberate intention is to emphasize the common tradition underlying differences which, though real, may be the accidental product of history, culture, language, rather than essential differences in the doctrine of the apostolic faith. Of course to remain scholarly, this effort must be carried out realistically, without in any way glossing over real differences. But even in recognizing differences, ecumenical scholarship seeks to describe the beliefs, traditions, and usages of other confessions in ways their own objective spokespersons would recognize as reliable and fair.

So ecumenical scholarship seeks not confrontation but agreement and understanding. It strives to enter into the other’s point of view, to understand it insofar as possible with sympathy and agreement. It is a contest in reverse, a contest of love, one in which the parties seek to understand and justify not their own point of view, but that of their interlocutor. Such an effort and method, far from being baseless romanticism, is rooted in generally accepted evangelical and Catholic theological principles:

1. The theological foundation for this method is our faith that the Holy Spirit is with God’s Church, protecting the integrity of its witness, above all in the centuries of its undivided unity. Since some of the issues that divide us go right back to those centuries, one must ineluctably conclude that these differences do not affect the substance of the apostolic faith. For if they did, then contrary to Jesus’ promise (Mt 16:18), the “gates of hell” would indeed have prevailed against the Church.

2. Secondly, the Catholic Church recognizes the Eastern Churches to be the historic apostolic Christianity of the East, and Sister Churches of the Catholic Church. Consequently, no view of Christian tradition can be considered anything but partial that does not take full account of the age-old, traditional teaching of these Sister Churches. Any theology must be measured not only against the common tradition of the undivided Church, but also against the ongoing witness of the Spirit-guided apostolic christendom of the East. That does not mean that East or West has never been wrong. It does mean that neither can be ignored.

3. An authentic magisterium cannot contradict itself. Therefore, without denying the legitimate development of doctrine, in the case of apparently conflicting traditions of East and West, preferential consideration must be given to the witness of the undivided Church. This is especially true with respect to later polemics resulting from unilateral departures from or developments out of the common tradition during the period of divided christendom.

3. Those who have unilaterally modified a commonly accepted tradition of the undivided Church bear the principal responsibility for any divisions caused thereby. So it is incumbent first of all on them to seek an acceptable solution to that problem. This is especially true when those developments, albeit legitimate, maybe perceived by others as a narrowing of the tradition, or have been forged in the crucible of polemics, never a reliable pedagogue.

4. Within a single Church, any legitimate view of its own particular tradition must encompass the complete spectrum of its witnesses throughout the whole continuum of its history, and not just its most recent or currently popular expression.

5. Finally, doctrinal formulations produced in the heat of polemics must be construed narrowly, within the strict compass of the errors they were meant to confute.

Someone is whistling past the graveyard. Someone who has no clue as to what's actually happening in the Catholic Church these days. Someone who wants desperately to cling to both a Disneyland view of Church history and the convenience of theology by cliche.

By the way, there ARE Eastern Catholic exarchs and eparchs throughout Latin America, and right now there are far more Melkites down there (300,000 according to Fr. Ron Roberson's survey from the Annuario Pontifico) than there are Eastern Catholics in the whole of the United States (by about a factor of three).

fogey,

The real 'ad infinitum' here is your endless move to crown your own positions with the name 'Catholic doctrine' and dismiss your interlocutors by miscasting them as strawmen heretics and dissenters.

I do not regard your positions as 'Catholic doctrine,' nor do I understand the ease with which you seem to have appointed yourself as the arbiter of it.

Actually, the "it" in the sentence you quoted didn't refer to the UoBL. But regardless, I basically agree ... I only wonder that you didn't go a step further and point out who appointed those bishops in the first place.

Taft's a dissenter, a sophist. I work for a living and go to Mass; I don't follow the cool academic conferences on clever ways to subvert church teaching. Seriously, this is National Catholic Reporter liberalism in Orthodox drag. I think Jorge Bergoglio was default ordinary because the people in question didn't have a bishop in Buenos Aires, his archdiocese.

'The Catholic Church is only a branch of the church' and 'I don't have to believe anything it has defined as doctrine since 1054' so 'the Pope is fallible' are dissent from Catholic teaching, even from conservatives who love the Eastern churches. Not arrogant of me to point out. Just fact.

Fair enough.

On a side note, I think it's just sad how web-forums (actually, I have a particular one in mind, but I won't name it) always seem to pit "traditionalist" Catholics and EC/EO against each other. In my own life, it was really exposure to ECism/EOism that helped me to appreciate traditional Catholicism.

I don't know the forum you're referring to but know what you mean. Lots to talk about here. I think both Orthodox anti-Westernism/anti-Catholicism and our Protestant-turned-politically correct host culture's anti-Catholicism feed the phenomenon of fora like these snottily maligning trads as idiots and/or ignorant. Liberal academic Orthodox and pseudo-Orthodox dissenter Catholics want to sit with the cool kids, going to conferences to give talks on 'Women Deacons Would Be Neat' and 'Why My Reading of the Fathers Is Right and the Catholic Church Is Wrong'. They don't want to be embarrassed by a bunch of conservative Catholics fleeing the abuses in the Novus Ordo by coming to their church. They can push all the right political-correctness buttons: anything but Rome and anything but '50s America. They're exotic (diversity coolness points; Westerners converting to Orthodoxy is a boutique religion like becoming a Buddhist) and can claim to have been oppressed (as sometimes Eastern Catholics were, as in the case of the Chornock schism).

Same here. The first traditional Catholic liturgy I went to (not counting high and highish Anglican services) was a WWII-refugee Ukrainian Catholic one 30 years ago.