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Dear Serge,

Sorry if what I said sounded like "baiting." It was not intended to be - and I had no idea that what I dredged up was something you didn't want mentioned. I thought it was all public - I apologise.

And it is not "the Ukraine" in English. "The Ukraine" is the old term used by Ukraine's former masters who saw it as "the borderland."

That was based on a misunderstanding of "Oukrayiny" (truly meaning "borderland") and "Ukrayina" (meaning "a place cut out" i.e. cut out by battle etc.). Things change and you can change along too. Using what is now an internationally accepted convention in referring to Ukraine as such won't kill you.

I thought you were zealous - you are someone, even though I don't know you personally, who doesn't do things by half. My point in raising that was simply to call attention to how truth is mediated to us. Yes, there is objective truth but we as human beings are in possession of imperfect abilities to comprehend it. We give ourselves in zeal to what we perceive to be the truth, even though what we perceive can change over time.

The Union of Brest was a complex issue and to say that the Ruthenian bishops came "to us" isn't as simple as that. For example, the Orthodox bishops of the Ruthenian Church (meaning both Ukrainian and Byelorusyan) were always appointed by the Polish King - who invariably chose the most loyal persons from among episcopal candidates. The Polish kingdom, in this manner, prepared the way for the Union of Brest as a way to Polonize and Latinize its East Slavic subjects. (Poland would later repent of its actions in this regard when the only thing it succeeded in doing was creating an upheaval among the East Slavs as a result of the Union).

Rome today acknowledges that the historic Unias were a mistake which has caused a contemporary setback for its ecumenical approach to Orthooxy. At the same time, there is much naivete demonstrated by Rome in that same approach - another topic.

Your view on denominationalism or, now in your extreme take, "there's no church" is simply that - an unreasonablly extreme position.

Your view has more to do with medieval Catholicism than it does with contemporary Catholic ecumenism with respect to Orthodoxy.

You tend to use "schismatic" more often than anyone while, at the same time, saying you wouldn't call an Orthodox Christian a "schismatic." Same difference?

Would you describe yourself as a possible papal triumphalist?

Alex

Dear Peter,

Very good points, sir!

Alex

"Papal triumphalist"? Bait. No. See, "papal triumphalist" sounds to me like the kind of conservative Catholic for whom the person of the Pope was his rallying point during the disaster after Vatican II: "the diocese and parish are going to hell but we have our saint in Rome." I'm not like that. For one thing, I don't have a lick of devotion to John Paul II. Fine, the church says he's a saint. He wasn't a heretic, he took the hit in the culture wars, and he was a moral authority behind the fall of Communism. All that's great. No, I'm actually a "papal minimalist," an ecclesiology simpatico with the East; it's not schism. As Benedict XVI taught, the Pope's just a caretaker of the apostolic faith.

I thought the Union of Užhorod in 1646 was only priests coming under Rome, not bishops, because they wanted to save their faith; a Hungarian Calvinist prince was persecuting them. There is no written record/charter of that unia.

Treating the Orthodox like a denomination is hip in this forum but it encourages frustrated Catholics who love the unlatinized form of the Byzantine Rite to leave the church, and it's not fair to the Orthodox' true-church claim.

Dear Serge,

So I can't ask you anything about the grounds of your views without you sayig it's "bait?" Sorry, don't understand.

You say you don't have a lick of devotion to John Paul II - but you don't make clear why you don't? Do you mean you didn't like aspects of his pontificate or what? You raise the issue but you don't explain the grounds of your position. So why don't you have a lick of devotion to him? (Hopefully, that's not bait either.)

Misunderstanding on the Ruthenian unia here. At the union of Brest, there were no "Ukrainians" referenced. The union was signed with the Ruthenian bishops of the Kyivan Metropolia which, at that time, referred to both Ukrainian and Belarusyan bishops.

Can you please explain clearly why you think the Orthodox are being treated as a denomination here? Can you define what you mean by "denomination?"

As for "bait" - how is any of this, including the papal triumphalism question, bait?

I was a papal triumphalist for years and I don't think that it has anything to do with "our saint in Rome." It has everything to do with an over-arching role for an exaggerated position of the Successor of Peter in the Church.

Alex

I'll give you my take on it (you can all stop holding your breath now ). Typically -- almost always really, excepting the Kasper example -- Catholics and Orthodox, respectively, each refer to the other as a Church, singular. That's not a practice that I want to suddenly drop in the trash can, but it's worth noting that if we were to say what we mean (without being PC) we would use different terms. I.e. we could each call the other "Churches" or a "Communion".

Edit: Having said that, there is something that bothers me about the Kasper quote ("We are increasingly conscious of the fact that an Orthodox Church does not really exist" etc): I think he makes it sound like a one-way street, I.e. that we should start calling the Orthodox "Churches" but they should keep calling us "Church" (singular). I realize he didn't say all that, but that's what he makes it sound like.

Dear Peter,

So what does "denominationalism" mean here?

Alex

Dear Serge,

Your point on what Benedict XVI taught - the pope is not just the caretaker of the Apostolic Faith. He also defines and articulates the Apostolic Faith with infallible dogma, including the papal jurisdiction and infallibility dogmas.

He may also extrapolate from that Faith re; the development of doctrine.

So there's much more to it than that - something Pope Benedict would never, of course, deny.

Alex

That's because the word "church" has more than one meaning. It depends on the context. The church as in "the true church" has no sisters, no branches; there is only one. One level below that you have "particular churches": communities with bishops and the Mass. These are the Roman Rite Church, the Eastern Catholic churches, the Orthodox and other Eastern churches out of communion with us (estranged parts of us), and our Western splinters such as the Polish National Catholics (ditto). (Protestants, communities without real bishops so no Mass, are "ecclesial communities" in Vaticanspeak, which means "not churches.") I have no problem talking about "the Orthodox Church" in the second sense but Cardinal Kasper still makes an interesting point, more so because Orthodox jurisdictions sometimes go out of communion with each other. You can also talk about "the church of Philadelphia" like in biblical times; the Archdiocese of Philadelphia as a church. Then there's the parish church.

Also, the Orthodox have the options of referring to us in their opinion as a church in the second sense as we do them, or as an ecclesial community (Christians with some kind of grace but a non-church), or as graceless heretics. We have our Augustinian theory of valid orders so our defined doctrine includes them; they don't dogmatize on this, instead favoring St. Cyprian's view of holy orders and the church, so to be Orthodox is to be in communion with people who think Catholicism is a sham. (A spiritual dead end not worth it when all one wanted to do was save one's culture, in my opinion.)

As you know I'm 100% on board with this. His powers are an application of the charism of church infallibility, of his caretaker's job.

Unlike Benedict XVI's reign, John Paul II's wasn't hospitable to traditionalists. He sold out on altar girls. Liberals still ran the American Roman Rite church under his watch in the '80s. To be fair, the turnaround started late in his reign. But I don't remember his reign fondly.

I've already explained what I mean by treating the Orthodox like a denomination: like they're just another option for Catholics while remaining in the fullness of the church. That's relativistic and unfair to the Orthodox.

The Catholic Church is "the church" in the first, fullest sense; the true church. The Orthodox are not, but they are "churches" in the second sense: particular churches, albeit estranged ones.

"Ruthenian" is a word whose meaning has shifted, a Latin word for, broadly, "Russian." (We would say East Slavic now.) I knew that Brest in 1596 called the Ukrainians and Byelorussians "Ruthenians," what we now call the Ukrainian Catholic Church, which in the beginning was much bigger than now. By "Ruthenian" I meant the unia that's now the Byzantine Catholic Church in eastern Slovakia/the Carpathian Mountains, etc., the one that unofficially hosts this forum. They're not in the Ukrainian Catholic Church.

Thank you, John. Not true for many. The loudest on line don't necessarily represent the majority in the real world.

The confusion is because some use "Orthodox in communion with Rome" in a Catholic sense; I've met the authentically Catholic version. For example, the priests trained in Rome itself who teach 100% Catholicism but in 100% Orthodox terms and are enthusiastic about the unlatinized form of the rite. The way the Melkites and the Russian Catholics are.

But the expression online has come to mean dissent: siding with Orthodox opinion against Catholicism yet still nominally Catholic; when enthusiasm for the rite changes to anti-Westernism. Usually it's somebody frustrated that others - his bishop, his parish - don't share his love of the unlatinized form so he's seriously thinking about leaving the church for Orthodoxy.

I think there are many more variations on how one might understand "Orthodox in communion with Rome" then you realize*. But if we want one heading to put over the various problematic uses of it, perhaps the best descriptor would be Conflation of Easternness with Orthodoxy.

* I can't help thinking of conversation with a Latin priest several years ago. I've mostly forgotten it, excepting that at one point, after saying "...the Orthodox" he suddenly caught himself as though he couldn't believe he had referred to the Orthodox as "the Orthodox" and added "I mean the schismatic Orthodox".

Right. The dissenter I'm describing takes "Conflation of Easternness with Orthodoxy" too far, usually while on his way out of the church.

There's a moderate, truly Catholic way of identifying Byzantine Easternness with Orthodoxy, which is good because it matches reality; the Orthodox are most of Byzantine Easternness just as Roman Catholics are most of apostolic Western Christianity. The Russian Catholic non-Russians: "We have a patriarch and bishops! It's just that they're not Catholic right now."

Then there's the allowable Catholic approach of that priest, loath to acknowledge the Orthodox (I also saw that among Ukrainian Catholic exiles from World War II: never call them Orthodox; also, after the schisms in America, Ruthenian Greek Catholics not using the word Orthodox in their English liturgical texts), mirroring many Orthodox' contempt for us ("the Latins," "the papists," etc.), which I think is unfair to the Orthodox, heading into rewriting history the way some Orthodox do ("the English were Orthodox until the French forced them to be papists"). Once when I was explaining Byzantine Catholicism to someone I said, "They worship like the Orthodox"; a well-meaning Roman Riter who overheard me stepped in and said, "No, the Orthodox worship like us!" Allowable - I see his point of course, but unfortunate.

Dear Peter,

I've heard that from RC priests as well. It does show that Catholics and Orthodox need a new, shared paradigm of relating to one another that is based on a true appreciation for the subtleties of historical and socio-cultural context that has led both sides to the enduring separation that continues to keep us apart.

Both sides,at present, assume that their own perspectives are the absolutely correct ones and then proceed to see how the other can be "brought back" to the "true faith."

The so-called "ecumenical openness" of the Latin West toward Orthodoxy really has more to do with public relations than reality.

And ultimately what the theologians in ecumenical commissions publish is not going to influence their respective Church hierarchies any time soon.

True unity will come about only with both sides acknowledging that they have each contributed to the estrangement and are at fault for it. Also, that each without the other is less than the fullness of the Catholic Church (meaning East and West) in accordance with the Will of Christ.

We require the abiding sense that we need each other and that without each other we are incomplete as the Church.

There was a Russian holy man who prayed the Jesus Prayer 12,000 times daily without fail. He told his friends that the difference between Catholics and Orthodox comes down to one letter. In Russian, an Orthodox Christian would refer to himself as a "KaFolik" while a Latin Catholic would be called a "KaTolik."

That is real food for thought, wouldn't you say?

Alex

Yes, axios, axios, axios. Best to the new bishop.

I'm with the near consensus in this forum; that's great. That and, say, the laity visiting Orthodox churches and getting to know Orthodox. For example, supplementing your liturgical life by, rather than trying to restart Saturday Vespers at a Greek Catholic parish that's frankly not interested, going to Vespers at an Orthodox church in town (maybe in a little way working to heal a parish split). Unthinkable to the Ruthenians and Ukrainians I knew 20-30 years ago ("Don't call us Orthodox!"), but among the converts and remnant now, not that unusual anymore. Fantastic! I've stood at the kliros of a Metropolia/OCA schism from a Greek Catholic parish, with the Greek Catholic priest, singing Vespers. Priceless. As I like to say to such Orthodox, "we're trying to set this right for you"; we're trying to right historic wrongs that are in living memory.

That can be true depending on who you're talking about, but in practice, again with the Slavic Greek Catholics I used to know, very much not. They were another valid option rather looked down on in places like this forum, "latiniaks," older latinized Greek Catholics, that is, Roman Riters with a different Mass. Sometimes that causes another kind of assimilation besides the kind that hurts the Orthodox too (they leave when they're American and not ethnic anymore): "Catholic is Catholic" means you lose people to the Roman Rite when they move away and/or marry out.

Sort of like the myths that inquirers and sometimes converts believe about Orthodox parish life, that everybody strictly keeps the fasts (I'm not a big faster; neither are most of them), has a spiritual father (no, they have a father confessor, if they go to confession at all, just like Catholics - smart Orthodox priests don't play staretz; those who do are running a cult - run), and prays the Jesus Prayer as their main devotion.

Which is true - the church can say nothing less - but should be done with the sensitivity you describe, which should be part of what this forum is about.

Of course I wish that weren't true. Most Catholics are Roman Riters and don't have that much need to know about the Orthodox, so they don't give them much thought if any. Clergy and theologians sometimes use them for academic credibility to prove a point, sometimes sound, sometimes not. If the Roman Rite Church took the Orthodox seriously, the Novus Ordo never would have been written. (Spare me the garbage about some changes being inspired by the East - it was obvious protestantization.)

I grieve the separation because we're so close. But the Catholic Church is not "incomplete."

Also a good point. I.e. we also don't want to go to the other extreme and treat as mere coincidence the fact that Eastern Orthodox greatly outnumber Greek Catholics (and Latin Catholics vastly outnumber Western-rite Orthodox).

Well I would only call it unfortunate if/because he/she said it in a strictly non-rhetorical, non-tongue-in-cheek way. In my experience, such things are often said to "give them a taste of their own medicine" ... Though not always: not too long ago I heard an LC(?) say that the Orthodox stole the Byzantine liturgy from us ... and I'm pretty sure this wasn't tongue-in-cheek.