I lean toward “The Catholic Church must accept all of the essential Orthodox teachings.”
However…this is perhaps not exactly a fully correct way of putting it…
To my knowledge…
All the essential Orthodox teachings of the present are all the essential Catholic teachings of the past…
The elephant in the living room no one here mentions is this:
LITURGY LITURGY LITURGY
Until Catholics and Orthodox are on the same page here…NOTHING can happen.
No union will have ANY HOPE at all without this being the same viewpoint.
This is very far off from happening anytime soon…give yourself at least a few decades, if ever.
the (papal) modern western and ancient (orthodox) eastern views of what it is are fundamentally different in the present time :
If traditionalists (and Orthodox) today are at variance with the Holy See, it is because they are convinced that the modern Popes have done exactly what the Jansenists wanted Pope Pius VI to do on the eve of the French Revolution. But the dilemma of traditionalists is that there is absolutely no appeal against Papal legislation on liturgical matters, as far as the modern Vatican is concerned.37 Indeed Mediator Dei, so often cited by traditionalists, makes it clear that the Pope “alone has the right to permit or establish any liturgical practice, to introduce or approve new rites, or to make any changes in them he considers necessary”.38 The tragedy is that in making this forceful statement with the evident intention of safeguarding our liturgical inheritance, Pius XII set before the Church a Pandora’s box which his successors were tempted to open, and did. Gone forever are the days when one could serenely subscribe to this teaching in the knowledge that the Roman Popes, whatever their failings, always uphold and protect liturgical tradition from the wanton vandalism of would-be reformers. Whereas the traditional rites of the Church had been constructed by apostles and saints, Roman-rite (and Ambrosian-rite) Catholics have today a Mass which is the work of theorists and committees of ‘experts’.
This rigorously conservative attitude on the question of ritual reform is also the constant teaching of the Eastern Churches. The Russian Orthodox theologian George Florovsky makes the same point rather more bluntly when he says that “Christianity is a liturgical religion. The Church is first of all a worshipping community. Worship comes first, doctrine and discipline second”.44 It is the Christians of the East, Uniates and dissidents alike, who have best preserved the classical Catholic approach to worship and who consequently have preserved their litugical traditions intact in modern times.
The present liturgical chaos in the Western Church is due in no small part to the emphasis that Latin Christians have always placed on dogma, with the consequent tendency to regard the liturgical texts as a mere locus theologicus,
a means to an end, rather than a living source of doctrinal truth. Thus orthodoxia, which originally meant ‘right worship’, gives way to orthopistis ‘right believing’, or orthodidascalia ‘right teaching’.45 When taken to the extreme, this exclusive emphasis on the rational culminates in that heresy which rejects the living components of tradition in favour of the written records of the Early Church, the Bible and Patristic writings, and which we know as Protestantism and full-blown Jansenism. The rejection of the liturgical tradition thus implies a rejection of the Church itself.
In the light of this typically Western aberration one can understand the Orthodox jibe that
Protestantism was hatched from the egg that Rome had laid. For according to Timothy Ware,
Code:
"**The Orthodox approach to religion is fundamentally a liturgical approach,** which understands doctrine in the context of divine worship: it is no coincidence that the word ‘Orthodoxy’ should signify alike right belief and right worship, for the two things are inseparable. It has truly been; said of the Byzantines: ‘Dogma with them is not only an intellectual system. Apprehended by the clergy and expounded to the laity, but a field of vision **wherein all things on earth are seen** in their relation to things in heaven, **first and foremost through liturgical celebration**’"46
A similar outlook is by no means absent in the Latin West today, even if it is a minority view. Commenting on Pius XII’s reversal of Prosper of Aquitaine’s dictum, American Benedictine liturgist Dom Aidan Kavanagh notes that:
Code:
"To reverse the maxim, subordinating the standard of worship to the standard of belief, makes a shambles of the dialectic of revelation. **It was a Presence, not faith, which drew Moses to the burning bush, and what happened there was a revelation, not a seminar**. **It was a Presence, not faith, which drew the disciples to Jesus, and what happened there was not an educational program but His revelation to them of Himself** as the long-promised Anointed One, the redeeming because reconciling Messiah-Christos".41
Indeed the radical impulse to destroy the entire liturgical tradition and go back to Eucharists in the manner of the Last Supper is the inevitable consequence of applying the criteria of theological analysis to the sacred liturgy which, as a slowly growing humanly-ordered thing, cannot possibly have “come from the Lord complete and perfect” as Bossuet the elder said of the deposit of faith.
) and it also considers it to be any ungodly loyalty that draws people away from the word of God. Economia can, when used with proper discretion, actually bring people CLOSER to God, since, when it is applied to marriage doctrine, there must be confession, repentance, and, ultimately, the person may be saved from the loss of eternal life. I, personally, don’t believe God wants us to reconcile with Satan, and we are instructed to flee from evil. Forgiveness is a completely different story.
