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Devoted_to_Jude
Guest
I think one thing I inadvertently said at the end that may last comment, that may make the problem much simple than I had anticipated, is if we regard heresy to mean taking only a portion of the truth for all of it, then as I said who among us isn’t a material heretic? What keeps any of us from then formal heresy is obedience to the Magesterium.That’s hard to provide because in all honesty that understanding of full communion has been gathered from reading the catechism and the writings of the saints and doctors of the church as well as papal decrees. But I’m pretty sure I can I find it in the catechism. By the end of tomorrow I will surely provide something for you to read over
However, the Orthodox on the other hand could still perhaps make the case they are obedient to the Church’s magisterium, and that it is those who have rejected the college of bishops still faithful to the Orthodox faith for a much mistaken understanding of the primacy of Peter.
I don’t know how the Orthodox might formulate it, but it is my understanding that they don’t outright reject the primacy of Peter so much as understand it differently.
For me the reason why I side with Rome is for two primary reasons:
First, everything in salvation history seems to be preserved. The primacy as Catholics understand it reflects back on the Davidic Kingdom in a way largely missing in Orthodoxy. This leads to a fuller understanding not only of the Church, but also of the Queen mother–not just Theotokos, but now also Queen of heaven. This in turn has many additional corollaries. So between the two the fullness of faith is found in the Catholic churches.
Second, if we understand Papal infallibility to mean that the Bishop of Rome alone is able to speak, by himself, for the whole college of bishops, and if we understand this infallibility as something not to be used to introduce new doctrine so much as to certify doctrines that have already come to be believed by the faithful, as truly inspired by the Holy Spirit. In this sense we understand that doctrines like the Immaculate Conception really come into the Church from the bottom up (sensus fidelium) and not from the top down (innovation of the bishops), and therefore what Papal Primacy really means is that we have three checks (the sensus fidelium, the college of bishops and Bishop of Rome) on the orthodoxy of any “new” dogma and not just two checks (the sensus fidelium and the college of bishops).
Three checks are obviously better than just two and what this means is that in coming to understand Revelation more fully we are assured that this is by the guidance of the Holy Spirit and remains true to the faith Jesus revealed to the Apostles.
However, the problem in the Latin church is how insufficiently developed is the local church as an institution. In the U.S many Romans have replaced an actual practice of faith for an ideology. Progressives and so-called Traditionalists are really just two sides of the same modernist coin. While the progressive imagines a future Utopia that they strive for politically (through their own effort) the “traditionalist” imagines a past “golden age” and then attempts to do the exact same thing. Obviously this understanding of tradition only overlaps with what Catholics mean by tradition in the most superficial sense of the term. Tradition is really only encountered in the present through the local church. In other words, tradition isn’t something in the past at all, it is rather something to be encountered right here and now. Such ideological orientation whether progressive or traditional, leads to a cascade of issues that lends us to look to the Pope as a type of political party head, and what we are looking for is someone to move forward our own ideological agenda so that we can try and shape the world in terms of our own desires.
In any case it seems that distortion in both the Catholic and Orthodox churches is a product of the schism that lends the local church in Orthodoxy to be developed at the expense of the Universal Church and just the opposite in Catholicism leading to the problems for Catholics just mentioned above.
However in saying all of this the problem still remains what does it mean exactly to say that Catholic Church is in the Orthodox churches even though they are not part of the Catholic Church. Because, of course, the Orthodox recognize themselves as the Magisterium proper the real question for me is if you reading of that formulation is actually coherent when we examine it closely.