Are Orthodox & the RCC the same thing?

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carol_marie

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In talking with a Protestant friend about my RCIA class, she suggested I become Orthodox. She said it would be more in line with my Protestant background (???) and also I’d run into less “problems” at those churches. I’m not really sure what she meant, never having been to an Orthodox church or known anyone of that faith, but I thought it was JUST like the RCC except for Greek or Russian people?? (both of which I’m not) Please clue me in here…
 
carol marie:
In talking with a Protestant friend about my RCIA class, she suggested I become Orthodox. She said it would be more in line with my Protestant background (???) and also I’d run into less “problems” at those churches. I’m not really sure what she meant, never having been to an Orthodox church or known anyone of that faith, but I thought it was JUST like the RCC except for Greek or Russian people?? (both of which I’m not) Please clue me in here…
NO they are not the same thing. The Orthodox broke away from Rome in 1058 (I think that’s the date)…and are in schism from the Catholic Church.

I certainly have no idea what your friend meant about ‘less problems’ …if she is Protestant then I wonder if she actually knows that much about the Orthodox and the Catholic Church.

SV
 
carol marie:
In talking with a Protestant friend about my RCIA class, she suggested I become Orthodox. She said it would be more in line with my Protestant background (???) and also I’d run into less “problems” at those churches. I’m not really sure what she meant, never having been to an Orthodox church or known anyone of that faith, but I thought it was JUST like the RCC except for Greek or Russian people?? (both of which I’m not) Please clue me in here…
The are not the same thing as the Catholic Church and you definitly would not be in better line with your protestant history. They have the same beliefs as the Catholic Church but they are not in communion with us. They pray to Mary and the saints, they believe in the true presence, they pray for the dead, they believe Mary was without sin and all other Catholic beliefs. They have a little bit of a different approach to it though. The main difference is that they do not follow the pope. There are a couple others like the filioque.

They are very similar though and there beliefs are the same basically.
 
The Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church have been speaking lately and are trying to work to reunion between the Churchs.

The date set for the schism is 1054 but it was a gradual process. There are a couple of articles about it on catholic.com.
The Orthodox are the same as the Byzantine Catholic except the Orthodox are in schism. They use the same liturgy as the Byzantines and they think the same way basically.
 
What is Byzantine?

Are their Priests allowed to get married? That’s the only thing I can think of that my friend might have been refering to? It seems as if the Preist abuse was mainly the RCC - not Orthodox ? Again, I could be totally off base here I’m just trying to understand what she meant. I wanted to ask her but then she got off on a tangent a different aspect of the RCC - and no, she’s not a big fan.

Also, are the people who like the mass in Latin Orthodox? I have know someone who drives 40 miles to attend a Latin mass but I think she still loves the Pope…

It seems that there are so many branches of the Catholic Church… it’s like the Protestant churches but on a much smaller scale. 😦
 
carol marie:
What is Byzantine?

Are their Priests allowed to get married? That’s the only thing I can think of that my friend might have been refering to? It seems as if the Preist abuse was mainly the RCC - not Orthodox ? Again, I could be totally off base here I’m just trying to understand what she meant. I wanted to ask her but then she got off on a tangent a different aspect of the RCC - and no, she’s not a big fan.

Also, are the people who like the mass in Latin Orthodox? I have know someone who drives 40 miles to attend a Latin mass but I think she still loves the Pope…

It seems that there are so many branches of the Catholic Church… it’s like the Protestant churches but on a much smaller scale. 😦
There are 22 rites in the Catholic Church. They all believe the same thing but the follow different traditions(with a small t). The The Latine Rite are the Roman Catholics. In the Byzantine rite the priests can get married. I don’t know whether there has been abuse by Orthodox priests but the Orthodox are not real big in the US, so you probably wouldn’t here about that like you would with the Catholic Church.

The people who go to the Latin mass are Latin rite Catholics, which are the Roman Catholics. You coulld only call them orthodox in that they are orthodox in faith meaning true. They are not Eastern Orthodox.

You must be careful when thinking of the different rites. They are not different branches, they are the same church, they just have a different liturgy and some different customs. They believe the same exact faith and all rites follow the Pope.

This is very different than protestantism. In protestantism all the churches believe different things and follow only the bible. The Catholic Church follows tradition and scrpture together, no matter what rite you are in.

Going to a Byzantine or Maronite liturgy or any other eastern rite would fulfill your sunday obligation. Going to an Orthodox church would not.
 
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ann:
What is a filioque?
Filioque is latin for “and the Son”. The Catholic Church has it in the Nicene Creed where it says the “Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (and the Son).” The Orthodox do not have it. They just say The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father.
 
Others are much better informed on the historical scoop. All I can say from a personal experience, taking in mind this is personal and is not neccessarily how all orthodox churches are.

I found an orthodox Church I went to, to be rather condescending. As a white, blond haired woman, I kind of stood out in the church. The priest even had a homily talking about those who came to his church to be feed because they weren’t getting it at “home”. Personally, I think there has been a romanticizing of the orthodox into a “more spiritual people”. I frankly found the same toads as at any other church.

The only reason you may be “more comfortable” is the rejection of the authority of the pope.

Just my opinion.

God Bless,
Maria
 
Ok, first of all this topic is pregnant with misinformation and knotted up with polemical attitudes. One can only hope that if we all keep an open mind some Truth might pop out.
Code:
 Most people will make statement calculated to pull us one way or another but are really OPINION, not FACT.
First, your friend thinks that Orthodoxy might be better for a Protestant, to convert to, why? Is it possibly because “anything is better than Rome”?
Code:
 The  fact is that the Protestant churches (*and* traditions) are a child of the  Western *Roman* Catholic church and that is why Protestants and Roman Catholics have such a grand time bucking heads against each other. They speak the same language!
We can have a polemical discussion with each other and automatically agree on many of the ground rules, thanks to Augustine. We share a similar notion of Original Sin, and therefore a similar idea of what it means to be saved, or redeemed. The arguments are all about how one becomes saved, but the baseline is already established, it is common.

The Eastern churches and the Western churches began to drift apart probably in the lifetime of Augustine. It is a huge topic but those who say that the Eastern churches left the Catholic church are being very polemical and distorting history.
Code:
 Some theological differences are: 
 -1- the nature of Original Sin (or Ancestral Sin)
 
 -2- Purgatory
 
 -3- Trinitarian issues
Please be aware that the Eastern churches prefer to accept revelation without defining it in great detail, so part of the problem is that the West has chosen to define things at a level of detail that the East has not. The West says: “we have already defined it so you might as well agree” and the East says: " :hmmm:"
Code:
 Rome excommunicated the Eastern patriarchate of Constantinople, so it *left communion* with that church behind. From the Eastern perspective it is Rome that schismed from the True church, and historically Rome actually made the first move. The rest of the Patriarchates interpreted it that way because eventually all of the Eastern churches viewed Rome as schismatic. Rome is thought of as the first Protestant church!
 
 The filioque is a trinitarian issue, it disagrees with the Orthodox (and Eastern Catholic) theology of the Trinity.
The Eastern Catholic churches are a result of various attempts to patch up our differences and become one again, as in the first millenium. The Byzantine churches are the Westernmost of the Eastern churches, having been derived from the Roman Empire, they share the same Graeco-Roman cultural roots as the Latin church, but there are those theological differences…:ehh:

All Eastern Catholic churches are in communion with the Pope, their liturgy is profoundly beautiful, it is the same as the Orthodox and non-Chalcedonian Orthodox counterparts, except that they are in communion with the Pope. They teach their own perspective on theology but accept that the Western theological viewpoint can also be another valid way of looking at God and His ways.

For instance, some people will say a glass is half empty, others will say a glass is half full. A few people will say “I think it is half full, but I can understand that from your perspective, you may also have a valid way of describing it!”

All in all, it’s that same mysterious glass of water.
Code:
 For more information, see[ this](http://www.cnewa.org/ecc-introduction.htm)
  [and this,](http://www.melkite.org/index.htm)
  and [this](http://www.thesyromalabarchurch.org/) and [this](http://www.byzcath.org/) and [this](http://www.romaniancatholic.org/) and [this](http://www.byzantinecatholic.com/)
 
:hmmm: If the Orthodox Church rejects the authority of the Pope, are they considered Protestant?

Also, you probably hit the nail on the head when you suggested my friend said, “Go be Orthodox…” (meaning, anything BUT RCC) I can’t believe she knows that much about either as she’s pure fundementalist through & through.

Thanks for explaining the small 't" thing with the various rites of the RCC - happy to know that they all aren’t schisms.
 
carol marie said:
:hmmm: If the Orthodox Church rejects the authority of the Pope, are they considered Protestant?

Also, you probably hit the nail on the head when you suggested my friend said, “Go be Orthodox…” (meaning, anything BUT RCC) I can’t believe she knows that much about either as she’s pure fundementalist through & through.

Thanks for explaining the small 't" thing with the various rites of the RCC - happy to know that they all aren’t schisms.

No not Protestant in the sense of the Churches who came during/after the Reformation.

They do have valid apostolic succession and valid Holy orders as someone else pointed out earlier…but they are in schism due to the break with the Church.

SV
 
carol marie said:
:hmmm: If the Orthodox Church rejects the authority of the Pope, are they considered Protestant?

Also, you probably hit the nail on the head when you suggested my friend said, “Go be Orthodox…” (meaning, anything BUT RCC) I can’t believe she knows that much about either as she’s pure fundementalist through & through.

Thanks for explaining the small 't" thing with the various rites of the RCC - happy to know that they all aren’t schisms.

The Orthodox aren’t Protestant. Protestants stemed from the actions of Luther and Calvin and Zwingley. The break between the Orthodox and the Catholic Church happened before then.
 
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jimmy:
There are 22 rites in the Catholic Church. They all believe the same thing but the follow different traditions(with a small t). The The Latine Rite are the Roman Catholics. In the Byzantine rite the priests can get married.

The people who go to the Latin mass are Latin rite Catholics, which are the Roman Catholics. You coulld only call them orthodox in that they are orthodox in faith meaning true. They are not Eastern Orthodox.

You must be careful when thinking of the different rites. They are not different branches, they are the same church, they just have a different liturgy and some different customs. They believe the same exact faith and all rites follow the Pope.
My brother Michael (Hesychios) spoke to some of the differences in doctrinal expression and understanding. Let me address a few other misconceptions regarding the Eastern Churches.

There are 23 Churches sui iuris (not rites) that, together, constitute the Catholic Church - 1 Western and 21 Eastern. The term sui iuris means, literally, “of their own law”, or self-governing. All 23 are in communion with Rome. The most well-known and largest is the Latin Church, the one I referred to as Western. (Note that the Latin Church includes not only those who attend sanctioned Latin Masses, but also those who attend the Novus Ordo Mass in the vernacular).

The 22 Eastern Catholic Churches use 5 (or 6, depending on how one breaks down the distinctions) different Rites among them. The largest group use the Byzantine Rite.

Eastern Catholic Churches generally represent bodies of persons who entered into communion with Rome from the Eastern or Oriental Orthodox Churches. As a consequence, there is a counterpart Eastern or Oriental Orthodox Church to every Eastern Catholic Church except two - the Maronite and Italo-Grieco-Albanian Byzantine Catholic Churches, neither of which were ever separated from Rome. (You will occasionally see assertions that some other Eastern Catholics never left communion with Rome, but those claims aren’t fully supported by historical fact.)

Strictly speaking, the Churches that utilize the Byzantine Rite are the Eastern Catholic Churches; the others are the Oriental Catholic Churches. This distinction reflects one that is made among our counterpart or Sister (Orthodox) Churches, where Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches are also distinguished by the Rite that each uses.

Originally, there were 3 Rites - Latin, Alexandrean, and Antiochene; the Byzantine (or Constantinoplian) Rite was added thereafter. These arose from the customs and style of worship in what were then the four most important Christian centers. The differences among them sprung from the fact that uniformity of worship and liturgical practice was difficult to maintain over time, as the number of clergy increased, local cultures and customs began to be woven into the rituals used, and both travel and communication were hampered by geography and the limited means available to make and maintain contact between churches and clerics.

Over time, the four were modified or developed further in new regions. Some variations were so distinctive as to be deemed separate Rites. The Maronite and Armenian Rites, both developed in relative isolation because of geography. The result is that most authorities term the Maronite as a Rite unto itself; while a minority place it within the West Syrian Tradition of the Antiochene Rite, where it originated. As to the Armenian, it is almost invariably deemed a separate Rite; it is uncommon to see it categorized within the Byzantine Rite, where it originated.

See: forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?p=112157#post112157 and the 3 or 4 posts immediately following for a breakdown of the Eastern Catholic Churches by Rites, Traditions, hierarchical structure, etc.

Many years,

Neil
 
Here’s an interesting question. If Eastern Orthodox churches follow the same teachings as the Roman Catholic Church, I wonder if they are protected by the same doctrine of infallibiltity.

Since they are not in union with Peter, I would assume not, but I wonder what you think?

Peace and God bless.

Eric
 
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enanneman:
Here’s an interesting question. If Eastern Orthodox churches follow the same teachings as the Roman Catholic Church, I wonder if they are protected by the same doctrine of infallibiltity.

Since they are not in union with Peter, I would assume not,
Eric,

The Eastern Orthodox have never declared a doctrine of infallibility and, honestly, wouldn’t because there is no one single leader of the Orthodox Churches in which to vest the concept.

Many years,

Neil
 
Irish Melkite:
There are 23 Churches sui iuris (not rites) that, together, constitute the Catholic Church - 1 Western and 21 Eastern.
That should say “22” Eastern. :o

ok, so we don’t add well :rolleyes:

Many years,

Neil
 
Thankyou for clearing up the difference between the rites and the sui iurus. I never knew that.
 
Irish Melkite:
That should say “22” Eastern. :o

ok, so we don’t add well :rolleyes:

Many years,

Neil
Neil, my brother,

You’re too quick for me! Finally, at long last, my first opportunity to clarify one of your posts, and you beat me to it! :rolleyes: 😃

Oh well… maybe I’ll get another chance in a few years or so… guess I’ll keep on watchin’…

Al
(who is both grateful for and a li’l bit envious of the seemingly endless font of knowledge you possess and share with us!)

P.S. MUCH more grateful than envious, my friend! 😉
 
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enanneman:
Here’s an interesting question. If Eastern Orthodox churches follow the same teachings as the Roman Catholic Church, I wonder if they are protected by the same doctrine of infallibiltity.

Since they are not in union with Peter, I would assume not, but I wonder what you think?

Peace and God bless.

Eric
It is my understanding that they share with Rome the position that the Church will forever be indefectible in matters of doctrine.
 
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