I am offended by something I read

[Contarini]

The original letter that you received was, quite frankly, accurate in its very brief description of one of the differences between the Catholic and Protestant approaches to Christianity. It is so that Catholics rely upon the institution and hierarchy of Bishops and their authority; and it is so that Protestants do not. I’m therefore a bit confused as to what, precisely, there is in this letter that you seek to address. What, exactly, is offensive to you, Reaganjn?

The argument was a specifically Anglican one (not unique to us but particularly dear to us), and it was certainly overly simplistic. Catholics do not simply rely on the decrees of Rome blindly, and they certainly do believe that how we pray shapes how we believe and vice versa. However, the relative weight of ecclesiastical authority vs. liturgy in shaping doctrine is very different in the two traditions, and that’s where I think the newsletter was accurate. One of the 20th-century popes (I think Pius XII but it might have been an earlier one) explicitly criticized the “lex orandi lex credendi” principle because he thought modernists were using it to undermine the importance of dogma.

Edwin