The filioque is a matter of theology which is and will remain completely above my head. I’ll leave sorting it out up to the experts, who have enough advil to keep the migraines at bay (if not, they’d have gone into retirement decades ago).
Likewise.
If I were a monk, and if I were also as brilliant as someone like St. Thomas Aquinas,
then I’d have a little more confidence in my ability to have a responsible opinion on the filioque.
I choose to be Catholic for other reasons, and so I simply trust that the filioque is orthodox.
Unworthy as I am and as unworthy as my prayers are, I will pray for you.
Thank you, Constantine. Mine too are unworthy, but they are yours.
Well, the Church excommunicated the Bishop of the SSPX, which essentially is pushing them out of communion.
That was Abp.Lefebvre’s choice. Pope John Paul II had very clearly warned him that he explicitly disapproved of his intention to ordain to the episcopate four of his society’s priests. He strongly and quite clearly made it known to him that should he proceed in this action, he and his bishops would incur excommunication.
He did it anyway. He did it because he feared that without younger bishops to keep his society going, the traditions he wanted to preserve would die out. He put the weight of what he thought was a crucial objective on his own actions rather than trusting Christ; he chose disobedience and possibly schism instead of trusting in the unfailing guidance of the Church by the Holy Spirit.
So I still say no one pushed the SSPX out of communion. Lefebvre and the men he ordained bishops did it to themselves 100%.
But then why wait for the Patriarch to gather support and schism the entire Church when you can salvage the situation by replacing him with a loyal Bishop?
I don’t think I can overemphasize the importance of the fact that no one knew at the time how it would turn out. The history of the Church is a history of many schisms - some short, some long. I don’t believe for a second that
anyone in 1054 could have predicted that these actions would be the symbolic beginning of a lasting schism that would endure for a majority of the history of the Christian era.
Well, we will never know what is on the minds of the people of the time but it does trouble me that a number of Churches went into schism (non-Chalcedonians, Nestorians) without much resistance from the Pope. If he had the authority to prevent the schism at all costs, why didn’t he do anything?
Well, didn’t the Church sometimes act against schism? For instance, after the formation of Oriental Orthodoxy, there were Chalcedonian rival claimants to non-Chalcedonian sees. Thus the reason that today the Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Orthodox churches both have a patriarch/pope of Alexandria and a patriarch of Antioch.
When the Church didn’t do this, I’m guessing they didn’t want to split the Church like that. Especially if heresy is not involved, as the Catholic Church has traditionally believed concerning the situation with the eastern/Chalcedonian Orthodox.
Yet the Pope could still have salvaged some ground in Constantinople with a loyal bishop. Even if he loses half of all Christians there, half is better than all. Constantinople was pretty much an important city at this point of history.
I haven’t researched the history enough to know if we know an answer to that. But the answer is definitely not that the pope didn’t think he had that authority; after all, his predecessor had just tried to make Patriarch Cerularius acknowledge that he
did have universal authority. So the idea was clearly already in place by the eleventh century.
For one thing the Catholic Patriarchate of Alexandria is pretty small. Plus they are heavily Latinized, they’d welcome the Pope’s actions one way or another.
I see your point. Bad example on my part.
