D
dzheremi
Guest
I can think of no better examples of why it is not in the interests of the Greeks (or any of the Orthodox churches or jurisdictions) to unite with the Roman communion than the attitudes of some posters in this thread. I know, I know…you can’t judge a church of over a billion communicants by some posts on an internet forum, but one thing I have learned is that for every one person making inflammatory, short-sighted, and arrogant posts on the internet, there are thousands not on the internet (since on a global level the RCC tends to be a very poor, third world church) who echo those same opinions due to lack of exposure to Orthodoxy. This is one of the reasons why the missionary imperative is so important to bringing the true faith to every person, and in that the Greeks (and others) are seeing results. It would be interesting if instead of arguing over who has big/little brother syndrome we could instead see who is doing the work of the apostles. At least from the ex-Catholics turned Orthodox I’ve talked to from places like Mexico, Bolivia, and other traditionally Catholic countries, it seems like one of the things that makes Orthodoxy attractive is that it is not an institutional religion in their countries and cultures, while RCism is. It’s sort of like the argument against (business) monopolies, y’know…when there’s only one game in town, the incentive to be responsive to customers’ needs and concerns is essentially not there.
I know that’s not a fair depiction of Catholicism in absolutely every case, but it does put Randy Carson’s number game in a new light.
And, although I know the answer is already “it doesn’t matter how many; the objection will remain, since it bears no relation to what you actually do”, I do have to wonder exactly how many places Orthodoxy needs to reach before amateur RC apologists drop this whole “Catholicism is found in more places than Orthodoxy, so it is true and Orthodoxy is false” non-argument. Even my communion, which is much smaller than the EO, has had great success recently in Latin America – a Roman Catholic stronghold – as well as in the Caribbean and in certain parts of subsaharan Africa. I mean, if hundreds of new Orthodox Christians in Bolivia, South Africa, Pakistan, Trinidad, France, Britain, Fiji, Guatemala, and many, many other places do not prove that people who say that Orthodoxy is somehow not universal or less universal than Catholicism are either lying or at best extremely ignorant, then what will? If you can dismiss all evidence to the contrary as neophytes, historical accidents, and offshoots of “ethnic” churches that hence shouldn’t count, what can you reasonably say about the Catholic Church in literally every single place outside of Europe – that is to say, in every thing that you take as evidence of your own communion’s “catholicity”? So this is definitely not an argument that anyone of the Roman Catholic communion should want to make, and yet as this thread shows, it is persistently made by the same people over and over. Enough already .You are hurting your own church with your weak, ham-fisted pseudo-apologetics from numbers and atlases.
I know that’s not a fair depiction of Catholicism in absolutely every case, but it does put Randy Carson’s number game in a new light.
And, although I know the answer is already “it doesn’t matter how many; the objection will remain, since it bears no relation to what you actually do”, I do have to wonder exactly how many places Orthodoxy needs to reach before amateur RC apologists drop this whole “Catholicism is found in more places than Orthodoxy, so it is true and Orthodoxy is false” non-argument. Even my communion, which is much smaller than the EO, has had great success recently in Latin America – a Roman Catholic stronghold – as well as in the Caribbean and in certain parts of subsaharan Africa. I mean, if hundreds of new Orthodox Christians in Bolivia, South Africa, Pakistan, Trinidad, France, Britain, Fiji, Guatemala, and many, many other places do not prove that people who say that Orthodoxy is somehow not universal or less universal than Catholicism are either lying or at best extremely ignorant, then what will? If you can dismiss all evidence to the contrary as neophytes, historical accidents, and offshoots of “ethnic” churches that hence shouldn’t count, what can you reasonably say about the Catholic Church in literally every single place outside of Europe – that is to say, in every thing that you take as evidence of your own communion’s “catholicity”? So this is definitely not an argument that anyone of the Roman Catholic communion should want to make, and yet as this thread shows, it is persistently made by the same people over and over. Enough already .You are hurting your own church with your weak, ham-fisted pseudo-apologetics from numbers and atlases.
), then you might want to go back and visit the table I linked earlier from Wikipedia about Coptic Orthodox missions and parishes in Subsaharan Africa. In it, you will find at the bottom a total of 400,000+ faithful across all the listed countries. This messageboard has about 468,000 members. So, slightly larger, but roughly comparable (after all, we don’t know how many are included in that “+”). Can I then take this roughly similar amount of Orthodox Christian worshipers in Subsaharan Africa (keeping in mind that these are Coptic Orthodox Christians only; if we add in the Ethiopians, the Armenians, and the Eastern Orthodox, the number undoubtedly becomes much higher) as evidence that Orthodoxy is in fact known, and that you are wrong to not take the roughly comparable number of people who obviously know it as evidence of the reality of the situation, given that you have no trouble taking a similarly-sized sample from one internet website as evidence of your own assertions?