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

Yeah, I'm serious. I know of the kind of Catholic you mean, but that's not me nor the ethnic cultural Catholics I know (such as Italian-Americans).

Like good po-nashomu folk, I have my Mass as it's been done for centuries, I send the Pope my Peter's Pence offering money, he leaves me alone, and I leave him alone.

A friend writes that actually I got it backwards:

The idea was to revive Sarum as (solely and exclusively) the rite of Westminster Cathedral. Rome was, apparently, quite open to the idea; it was the (then ultramontane) English Catholic bishops who turned the idea down. Since the cathedral was built between 1885 ans 1903, it must have been at that time that the Sarum suggestion was mooted.

In fact, all evidence is to the contrary. Moscow was considered, at that time, to be, as the Kyivan Orthodox Metropolitans referred to it, "Barbaric Muscovy" and its clergy to be illiterate and culturally inferior.

Bishop (then-Professor) Borys Gudziak's book, Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metr...le and the Origins of the Union of Brest [amazon.com] is extensively documented and is considered definitive.

That's Patriarch Svyatoslav, bub.

The typical Roman Catholic knows more about the Pope than about his diocesan bishop--assuming he knows the name of his bishop at all. One of Pope Francis' objectives seems to be the dismantling of the cult of personality that has grown up around modern Popes. Both he and Pope Benedict were more than a little dismayed by the phenomenon of "John Paul II Superstar".

Now you're just being an ass. You aren't even old enough to remember the fifties, so what you really miss is the Ozzy & Harriet caricature of the fifties. Try to remember that there are no golden ages, and that any time described as one had as many real problems as the present day.

"The Pope is a distant figure to most Catholics". Are you speaking just of how things are now (since Vatican II), or are you saying that's been true for a while?


Frankly, I could never understand why tickets for "John Paul II Superstar" always sold out. ("Joseph Ratizinger and the Coat of Many Colors" was pretty good though.)

That's a tough one, that is. One the hand, far be it from me to think that we should flat-out disregard the sentiments of the Orthodox ... but on the other hand, sometimes it seems like we're inviting the Orthodox to put a finger in our pie, so to speak.

I think you meant "Joseph Ratzinger and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Surplice".

I'm saying that's been true for a long time. The church isn't a cult; the Pope couldn't micromanage you now even if he wanted to. Certainly true in the centuries of poor means of communication and travel. Again, we're puzzled when non-Catholics go on about the Pope being a tyrant. How it really works, including in the wonderful big tent of pre-conciliar Catholicism: there are lots of nominal and ignorant Catholics who don't agree with the church. The church doesn't go after them. It only bothers to excommunicate you for heresy if you're educated enough to know better, are in a position of trust such as a bishop or a professor, and have been warned (the church's version of due process).

Pseudo-Orthodox dissenter Catholics who preach on the Internet are a modern equivalent of a pro-abortion Catholic politician or a theologian spreading his error in the high levels of academia. Arguably worse because the Internet is a global mass medium, a powerful pulpit. Unlike the legions of ornery lapsed Catholics, they cause scandal, so they should be excommunicated.

The Pope as modern media star is shallow and a Novus Ordo conservative thing, not a trad or ethnic one. Interestingly, that wasn't Benedict, the high-church, shy German professor happy with playing Mozart on his piano and playing with his cats. He was never ultramontane. Although I wish he stayed, it fits his views that his last lesson as Pope, the act of stepping down, was about the limits of the man holding the office.

Again I'm all for good relations with the Orthodox with the goal of bringing all of them in. That said, I have no problem calling Svyatoslav a patriarch out of courtesy nor his becoming one in name as well as fact.

Oh right. (I didn't have the playbill in front of me, and apparently my memory isn't as sharp as it once was.)

DMD, this [sergesblog.blogspot.com] is what I was talking about: my first traditional Catholic Mass, first Byzantine Rite Divine Liturgy, and first experience of East Slavic Christianity, all the same service.

You really expect to be taken seriously putting out such trash as this?

There's the calling of Greek Catholics, according to Rome, to bear witness to the one Catholic faith in an Orthodox way, which I think is the mission of this board, and then there's dissent. If you are Catholic and preaching against church teaching online, you deserve the same scrutiny as a ranking churchman, professor, or politician, including, when deserved, excommunication.

The comparison to the promotion of abortion is absurd. Stuart wad right in a recent post--you're just being an ass.