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Maranatha
Guest
It all comes down to pride. Every schism has been caused by a person or group who thought that Rome has made a theological mistake and that they know better. To be Catholic is to give up your pride.
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oat_soda
Guest
edwin, no one is saying that the visible church is holy. like judas, calvin, henry 8th, and luther, there will always be dissenters. it’s not the actions of the church members that are always holy, but its sacraments and teachings. this is what separtes the one holy and apostolic church from all others. you are arguing against something the church doesn’t claim, namely that it is perfect.
who cares what you or i personally believe when it comes to faith and morals. what matters is what has been handed down to us, not what we decide to believe. ultimately, we must conform our wills to God.
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Fr_Ambrose
Guest
Pride! Yes, this is exactly the Orthodox take on the matter and why Christendom was split in two.
It was, from the Orthodox viewpoint, indeed pride which caused one bishop to assume the position of Universal Bishop and attempt to assume supreme and immediate authority over every bishop in the Church,and to reckon himself superior to Ecumenical Councils.
Allied with that pride was a failure of charity. Lack of charity resulted in bringing about a schism which split Christendom in two. Charity and humility would never have permitted one bishop to go against the Ecumenical Councils and change the Creed with no consultation with the rest of the Church. That could happen only though pride and lack of charity.
So I agree with you -pride lies at the root of our division.
“Remove not the ancient landmarks which your fathers have set”
-Proverbs 22.28
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Scott_Lafrance
Guest
You gave this answer already, self-plagarizer.
Fr Ambrose:
Fr Ambrose:
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dennisknapp
Guest
Fr Ambrose:
Peace
Let’s not get too personal now. I have great respect for the Eastern Orthodox. May the Lord help us both.
Peace
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Fr_Ambrose
Guest
It’s old age. One tends to repeat, and especially when the same questions come up
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Contarini
Guest
Well, that’s about as hard to answer as when Protestant friends (especially ex-Catholics!) ask me why I thought (and sometimes still think) about becoming Catholic. The reasons on both sides are many, and to try to list a few makes things seem simpler than they are. But here are some of the main issues:
First of all, I have personal reasons for remaining Protestant as long as my conscience will permit me. I still love and honor the evangelical traditions in which I was raised, and becoming Catholic would cut me off (to some degree at least) from my parents and more importantly from my wife. That means that I need to be absolutely sure before taking a step like this.
Second, I’m not convinced of the priorities that lead people to become Catholic. As I said to Joannes, I’m not convinced that official doctrine and visible unity are the two ways in which the Church must necessarily be perfect, even though it is clearly far from perfect in other respects. This, I’ve come to realize, is an aspect of my evangelical Wesleyan tradition that I continue to find convincing. Some of the fuzzy subjective issues on which various forms of Protestantism express the reality of the Church better than Catholicism have considerable weight with me. There are doctrinal issues that bother me, but none of them are huge in themselves. Generally I find I can go about 90% of the way on any single issue. So it’s the sum of a bunch of little doubts that has held me back.
Here is a list of some of the specific issues. I don’t claim that any of them are huge in themselves, but they all have at least some weight. I could name more, but I’ll be content with ten.
- Papal infallibility and universal ordinary jurisdiction
- Dogmatization of doctrines such as Purgatory, the Assumption, etc., which may be true opinions but don’t seem to have sufficient support in Scripture and Tradition to be made binding on the whole Church. A related issue is the Catholic insistence on a relatively narrow range of legitimate interpretations of doctrines such as the Real Presence. This can be defended by analogy with the development of Trinitarian doctrine, but I’m not sure that the Real Presence is in quite the same category (not to speak of the fact that I’m not sure the analogy is even correct–after all, many people who initially fell in the “Semi-Arian” camp eventually were able to reconcile themselves to the followers of Athanasius and their position found expression in what became orthodoxy).
- A tendency in the early Church to disparage marriage and sexuality unduly, which the Reformers rightly rejected. I think they overreacted–I’m not claiming Protestantism is perfect on this score.
- Which leads me to one of the big issues. Protestants have the luxury of admitting that the Reformation was seriously flawed, not just practically but doctrinally. Catholics are bound to a view of the Church’s infallibility (this is distinct from the issue of papal infallibility per se) that prevents them from this kind of admission. So, in the issue above, as a Protestant I can say that we have made serious mistakes in undervaluing celibacy. But orthodox Catholics have great difficulty admitting that they have historically undervalued legitimate sexuality. Doctrines like the Perpetual Virginity were clearly formed by the attitude mentioned in no. 3. But that’s impossible for Catholics to admit. I’m not sure the PV is mistaken–I have far too much respect for tradition simply to dismiss it. But given my broader concerns about the whole idea of infallibility, I do think that this is one doctrine against which I have to put a question mark.
- Another huge issue is the Catholic refusal to recognize the validity of Protestant sacraments, particularly the Eucharist. I believe Christ is truly present in Protestant Eucharists, whether they have episcopal succession or not, and whether they believe in the Real Presence or not. To doubt this would be for me to kick out the ladder on which I climbed (in terms of my own sacramental piety).
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Contarini
Guest
- Protestants, including Anglicans, seem on a regular basis to have a better grasp of what it means for a local community of Christians to be the Body of Christ. Catholic ecclesiology seems to emphasize the formal, universal aspects of the Visible Church to a point that risks turning the Church into just a big corporation. I think this lies behind a lot of the scandals of recent years.
- While I think the rejection outright of the idea of a ministerial priesthood was a serious mistake (I don’t think Anglicans did this, but many Protestants did), it does seem to me that traditional Catholic theology fails to recognize adequately the intimate connection between the baptismal priesthood and the ministerial priesthood. I think this still needs to be worked out more clearly through ecumenical dialogue, but I lean toward the view that ordination “activates” what is latent in all the baptized. I don’t think it’s faithful to the New Testament to portray the ministerial priesthood as something added on to the universal priesthood–the Epistle to the Hebrews doesn’t seem to give any room for that. This is not something I would insist on, but it’s an issue on which I’m unwilling to say Protestants are simply and totally wrong. The practical stifling of the legitimate role of the laity in much of Catholicism confirms me in this suspicion. This is also the category under which to put the women’s ordination issue. I cannot accept the Catholic doctrine on this because I cannot accept that any baptized person is simply incapable of being ordained (as opposed to not being a fit person for ordination, which is a different issue entirely). I have personal reasons for giving this issue partticular importance, but in terms of my own thinking it’s a subset of this broader question of the universal priesthood.
- Protestant Eucharistic piety, for all its flaws, rightly puts the focus on reception. Again, I’m not saying that the Catholic doctrine of Eucharistic sacrifice is mistaken or that the practice of Eucharistic Adoration is wrong. But finding myself part of a tradition that rather emphasizes reception, I’m not willing simply to abandon that emphasis.
- I do not believe that faith unformed by charity is a supernatural gift of God, and I do not believe that saving faith can be rightly broken down into unformed faith plus charity as a distinct thing added to faith. Rather, I think that the Reformers had a legitimate insight in insisting that saving faith is one unified act of trust in the mercy of God in Christ, which necessarily includes in it love for God and neighbor with resulting good works. Yet again, I’m not saying that I think the Catholic view is heretical–I think what is true in the Protestant insight can probably be reconciled with the decrees of Trent. But that is not for me to decide unilaterally by abandoning a tradition of piety that clearly maintains some truth lacking in the way Catholics have traditionally understood their doctrine (if this were not so, there would not be so many Catholics who abandon Catholicism for what they describe as a “personal relationship with Jesus”).
- Finally, I’m not convinced that the Tridentine formula, or even the preferable wording of Vatican II, adequately expresses the traditional Christian understanding of the primacy of Scripture. “Sola Scriptura,” like “sola fide,” is an empty slogan that can mean a lot of different things. But there is strong support in the Fathers and for that matter in the medieval theologians for the view that Scripture is materially sufficient and has absolute primacy over all other manifestations of Apostolic Tradition.
In Christ,
Edwin
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dennisknapp
Guest
Contarini said:
Interesting, thanks!
What are the more subject issues? If I may be so bold?
Peace
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Ignatius
Guest
I would suggest something a little closer to the actual events, such as The History of the Church by Eusebios. Eusebios was born around 260 A.D. and so was aquainted with some whos life was within living memory of the Apostles.
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Maranatha
Guest
Fr Ambrose:
You can’t have two heads of one family. Jesus gave us one. To become Catholic is to let go your pride.
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