Do Eastern Catholics have a better sense of God's love and mercy than Western Catholics?

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I don’t know that I would say the EO posters here are hostile. ReaderT has, from what I’ve seen, been uniformly respectful and pleasant to talk to.

I think it’s just a little different because they actually do believe the Catholic Church is deficient in some way and have substantive disagreements about doctrine. At some point we just hit a crossroads and they have to say “yeah, well, the Catholic Church is wrong about that” whether they want to be rude or not. The Eastern Catholics are just filtering doctrine through a different lens.
 
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Oh come on… this is the sort of thing “traditionalist” always say on the Internet that just makes me scratch my head. While I appreciate the TLM, 99.9% of the Masses I’ve gone to in my Catholic life have been OF and sin comes up ALL the time. I’m sure these Uber liberal parishes that I hear about online (but have rarely if ever encountered in real life) do exist and do avoid talking about sin, but that doesn’t mean it’s the norm…

“No one goes to confession” is another one I always hear online. My pastor (OF only) hears confessions before every Mass - 7 days a week. Our cathedral (OF only) has scheduled confession 12 times a week and there’s always a line. So no this whole “sin is never mentioned outside of the TLM” thing is just rubbish.
 
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Not totally true. There have been Eastern Orthodox theological manuals that distinguish between venial and mortal sin. St. John the Evangelist himself (I believe in his first letter) says that “these is a sin which is mortal” (although biblical scholars believe he’s referring to apostacy).

This is only true if you’re referring to the Byzantine East. The Syriac East has always been highly skeptical of the use and value of philosophical models (in regard to doing theology), preferring instead to remain closer to a biblical way of thinking and following the wisdom found in the “Wisdom literature” of Scripture.

I’m totally with you here. One of the things that’s bothered me about many modern Thomists is that they try to be more Thomistic than Thomas himself (hence I call them “neo-Thomists”). Thomas was quite comfortable with mystery, and I believe if one wants to have a proper understanding of his theology, then one should read the Summa through the lens of his commentaries on Scripture and his liturgical hymns.
 
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Gottcha.

I just wanted to point out that the Byzantine view does not equal the Eastern view. It’s simply an Eastern view.

Does your Ukrainian mission use the blue book published by the Sheptytsky Institute?
 
twf said:
“No one goes to confession” is another one I always hear online. My pastor (OF only) hears confessions before every Mass - 7 days a week. Our cathedral (OF only) has scheduled confession 12 times a week and there’s always a line.
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We’ve had threads on the “no one goes to confession” thing before and all I can say is, OF churches seem to vary greatly in this respect.

Cathedrals almost always have a line for confession. I suspect one reason for that is people coming to confess at the cathedral who aren’t regular churchgoers there. If you need to drop a load of embarrassing sin-bombs and feel uncomfortable telling them to your parish priest, even with the screen, then the Cathedral is usually accessible, has frequent confession times, and is totally anonymous. You can bet that when I decided to go to confession after almost 2 decades I didn’t go to the parish priest who knew me (from me being on a trip to see the Pope with his tour group, where I probably received unworthy communions all over the place, not having cleaned up my act yet). I went to the Cathedral at 6 in the morning to tell my sins to a priest I didn’t know and would probably not see again.

Large Catholic parishes almost always have a line for confession as well, because when you have 2000 families there’s a high probabily that 20 or 30 individuals might wish to confess on any given Saturday and that makes a good sized line for an hour. For First Saturday you’ll get 40 people.

At the same time I’ve gone to one or two parishes and found no one in line. I have no idea why. Often I was over there because the First Saturday line was too long at my regular joint for me to get in to see the priest, so I had to find a church out of my normal way. Maybe they have a smaller parish size there.
 
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From a birds-eye view, three (I think): the Byzantine; the Antiochian (mostly represented by the Syriac traditions); and the Alexandrian (mostly represented by the Coptic traditions).
 
Tis_Bearself said:
Yes, well, that’s not the kind of discussion I’m looking to have on my own threads.
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Totally fair, just saying you can’t really fault them for it, provided they’re making whatever argument they want to make in a respectful way.
 
RolandThompsonGunner said:
respectful way.
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I find a great deal of the discourse critical of the Church on here, from many quarters, to be disrespectful. I do not flag such posts unless they’re really over the top, but too many use this forum as a vehicle for Church-bashing. “Well, my belief system is EF Hutton, and EF Hutton says…” Which is fine, when the topic is, “What do other belief systems/ EF Hutton think about ABC?” But usually that’s not the topic. There are 1000 other forums for that and they should go take it there IMHO. But, I don’t get to make the rules.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
I find a great deal of the discourse critical of the Church on here, from many quarters, to be disrespectful. I do not flag such posts unless they’re really over the top, but too many use this forum as a vehicle for Church-bashing. “Well, my belief system is EF Hutton, and EF Hutton says…” Which is fine, when the topic is, “What do other belief systems/ EF Hutton think about ABC?” But usually that’s not the topic. There are 1000 other forums for that and they should go take it there IMHO. But, I don’t get to make the rules.
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Yeah, I definitely know the threads/type of poster you’re talking about.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
Sadly I think some of the reason why I used to sin big is that I didn’t want to be like them, although that’s not an excuse and I also had other self-interested reasons
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Also, totally get that. “Bob, who believes X is wrong, is a prissy, self-satisfied little scold, so therefore I’m gonna do X, because I don’t want to be like Bob.”
 
twf said:
Oh come on… this is the sort of thing “traditionalist” always say on the Internet that just makes me scratch my head. While I appreciate the TLM, 99.9% of the Masses I’ve gone to in my Catholic life have been OF and sin comes up ALL the time. I’m sure these Uber liberal parishes that I hear about online (but have rarely if ever encountered in real life) do exist and do avoid talking about sin, but that doesn’t mean it’s the norm…

“No one goes to confession” is another one I always hear online. My pastor (OF only) hears confessions before every Mass - 7 days a week. Our cathedral (OF only) has scheduled confession 12 times a week and there’s always a line. So no this whole “sin is never mentioned outside of the TLM” thing is just rubbish.
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Come to my neck of the woods. I’ve never heard hell mentioned in a single homily I’ve ever heard and I’ve been going since 2012. Sin only mentioned sparingly with an immediate emphasis on mercy. And even then sin was only mentioned in a general way.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
Do Eastern Catholics have a better balance on this? Not trying to start an argument, just wondering.
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That difference is a huge part of what drew me east.

Accept, and trust in God’s mercy.
StudentMI said:
If they do you can partially blame the Western Church for it.
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I think that needs to be qualified, though. It’s not a particular “fault” of the west, but the focus on detail and explanation seems to inevitably lead to this difference. Leading to . . .
Angel_Gabriel said:
The Church is viewed as a hospital for sinners; the bar is set high(fasting) and is seen as something to strive for not necessarily a sin if one doesn’t do the extreme; God as all merciful and all loving etc.
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I explain it as the western approach being more judicial, and the eastern more medical. Is sin a “crime”, or an illness? related: while both focus on both (and neither can be without the other), the West is relatively more focused on the Crucifixion, and the East on the Resurrection. (as my priest likes to ask, “Are you living on Good Friday or Pascha?”)
Tis_Bearself said:
Yeah, I’ve been to some Eastern parishes, they’re very nice, but I am not going to be joining them any time soon other than as a visitor.
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Come for the food. Stay for the theology!
😱 🤣 😜

(I think my parish requires visitors to consume at least 500 calories at the social before leaving . . .)
Angel_Gabriel said:
Well, true if you mean that the West = scholasticism and the East = mysticism.
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That’s a reasonably fair statement of the causes, yess.
RolandThompsonGunner said:
From what I understand, the East is just much more comfortable saying “we’re not exactly sure/we’re not going to try to define it in a way that you could put on an excel spreadsheet.”
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“Yes” is a perfectly reasonable way to answer a theological either/or question!
 
Tis_Bearself said:
I was focusing more on Eastern Catholics here because it can be hard to have discussions with Eastern Orthodox as they seem to often come at it from a standpoint of wanting to criticize or make negative comments about the Catholic Church.
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There tends to be a huge difference here between the EO you meet on the internet and those in real life.

Years ago, during a client interview with a Russian, i was asked if I was Orthodox when he noted my tribar cross lapel pin.

I replied that I was Eastern Catholic. He shrugged and said, “same thing.”

Or when my son in law was in an apprentice program with a union and some folks decided to bully him (OK, itself a bad move, considering his size and that he was still in football shape, but anyway . . .), and a couple of the ROC workers simply took him in and defended him as one of their own.
Phillip_Rolfes said:
I’m totally with you here. One of the things that’s bothered me about many modern Thomists is that they try to be more Thomistic than Thomas himself (hence I call them “neo-Thomists”).
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so they don’t understand “straw” . . .

(i had a friend who managed to get his entire class to conclude their final exam in a class on Aquinas with that quote !"
🤣 😜 🤔

* * *

I want to re-emphasize that when we talk about things like reason/mysticism, law/medicine, Crucifixion/Resurrection, etc., both are present in both east and west, but the emphasis is different.
 
(Forgive me, Tis - I see you wanted EC opinions so I’ll refrain from giving one, but I do have a question)
dochawk said:
That difference is a huge part of what drew me east.

Accept, and trust in God’s mercy.
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Do EC’s not believe in the distinction between mortal and venial sins (which would necessarily include all the conditions/definitions around them - the very things Tis thinks Westerners are getting legally tied up in)?
 
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ReaderT said:
Do EC’s not believe in the distinction between mortal and venial sins
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we’re not supposed to, but . . . it hasn’t stopped some of our theologians from writing volumes on the subject anymore than it has stopped the EO.

Just one more of those “yes” things, i suppose . . .
 
dochawk said:
explain it as the western approach being more judicial, and the eastern more medical. Is sin a “crime”, or an illness? related: while both focus on both (and neither can be without the other), the West is relatively more focused on the Crucifixion, and the East on the Resurrection. (as my priest likes to ask, “Are you living on Good Friday or Pascha?”)
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This was always obviously an over simplification…but I think its much more applicable to pre-Vatican II Latin Catholicism vs Eastern Catholicism/Orthodoxy. There’s definitely been a renewed emphasis on the Resurrection over the Crucifixion (so much so that many “Traditionalist” Latins raise this as a major point of contention) and the “hospital for sinners” approach to the Church since Vatican II…
 
twf said:
There’s definitely been a renewed emphasis on the Resurrection over the Crucifixion (so much so that many “Traditionalist” Latins raise this as a major point of contention) and the “hospital for sinners” approach to the Church since Vatican II…
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Agree on both points, although the Western post-V2 emphasis on resurrection was seen more as leaning towards Protestantism than leaning towards the East.
 
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