Thanks for your posts Iron Donkey
What do you mean by saying if one knows ‘the Pope is the Pope’?
Do you mean like hes the Visible head of the Church and Chief Pastor and all should remain in unity with him?
Why would someone break union with Rome or the Pope on purpose,if they believed that the RC was the real Church of Christ.
I know alot of Catholics that have become Orthodox,most had negative experiences with the Catholics when they were young or at the seminary which caused them to leave,some left firstly for Anglicanism then after found Orthodoxy
Seeing them leave Rome for Anglicanism first,i wonder if they were really taking the right path anyhow.Would a true Catholic really leave their Church for Anglicanism??
I left Rome for many years for Orthodoxy as well,i wasnt a regular practicing Catholic and emotionally got close with and involved with a greek girl and her family and got swept away to Orthodoxy
Now ive become lately a practicing Catholic and im really enjoying it and love the Church and all its devotions and Mass
anyway God Bless
I think I was writing primarily in response to the idea that because the Catholic Church considers Orthodox sacraments valid that this should mean that the Catholic Church considers Orthodoxy correct to the point where it makes no difference whether one is Orthodox or Catholic.
I’m not sure that anyone actually held this view, but it appeared that there was some confusion over what various posters meant (in particular with reference to the word “valid”) that caused one of the posters to be writing that Catholics consider Orthodox sacraments valid as though this were a counter to the idea that Catholics don’t think that the Orthodox contain the fullness of Christianity, and the other way around.
This has grown somewhat since I started typing, and may not be exactly what you were asking, but what I was trying to say is this:
i-We must live by God’s truth as best we understand it.
ii-We must put forth reasonable (by which I mean proportionate to importance, not ‘a medium amount’) of effort to form our understanding.
iii-Acting contradictory to our understanding of the God’s truth is in fact putting our will against God’s will, and hence sinful.
iv-Leaving the Church for any reason other than being convinced that it is false is either 1) making a decision that should be based on truth without considering it or attempting to figure out what the truth is (ie failure of ii and/or i) or 2) doing something we actually believe to be wrong (failure of iii).
Since these are pretty standard, it follows that the only reason that should even seem reasonable to a Catholic to leave the Church is because that Catholic has come, after a reasonable amount (which in this case means a whole lot) of time and effort, to be believe with reasonable certainty and based on actual arguments, logic, and reason (and discussion with knowledgeable Catholics on any problems they see, etc), that the Church is wrong.
Obviously, as a Catholic, I believe that anyone who does so has made an error in their reasoning, but error in reasoning is not necessarily sinful.
On the other hand, we have those people who were hurt by members of the Church. These people do not have, and for the most part don’t really believe they have, a logical reason for believing the teachings of the Church to be false, but will sometimes leave because the hurt that was done to them (understandably) tarnishes their image of the Church and makes it appear to be other than it is. These people are hence deceived by those who hurt them - and that deception will have to be answered for. But not, primarily, by the deceived.
So there are two basic reasons (and perhaps some more variations of them) that I can see a person using semi-legitimately to leave the Church - faulty (from my perspective, which I obviously hold to be true) reasoning, or a perception of the Church as other than what it is, typically brought about by some sort of (often emotional) deception. In each case the person should in fact not leave the Church (because they’re wrong) but it is understandable that they would, and probably not sinful assuming a reasonable (again, reasonable being large) amount of time and thought went into it.
What this does
not allow is for people to leave just because they don’t like a particular result of Church teaching, or because they like somewhere else better for some reason. For instance the people who leave the Catholic Church for a protestant church because the protestant sermons are better or the service leaves them with a certain emotional feeling they happen to associate with Holy Stuff without even considering whether or not this sort of thing makes sense, or those that spout off nonsense about the Church discriminating against women without pausing for half a second to to think about what the priesthood actually is or considering that maybe there is more going on than they are aware.
That is the long version of what I was trying to say by “if you believe the Pope is the Pope” (or in general believe the Church to be true) then you can not leave without problems, while trying not to imply implying that all former Catholics are necessarily in deep, ahem, trouble.
Sorry for the length, I’ve often been accused of being unable to introduce myself in less than a thousand words, and I may have been beating on a horse that should have been buried weeks ago, but I wanted to reason through my whole point (partially so I could know what it is).
On something like this where the Catholic Church spells out so clearly in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a book so easily accessible to every Catholic, and non-Catholic, provided at a low cost in so many languages and even free on the internet website of the Vatican, gives me the boldness to speak or rather write firmly on the issue.
And Protestants have Jesus Only also. Thats not saying much. In fact its the problem. Everyone has a different agenda, all their own, and none ever align with each other. Fact is this is why evil in the world grows. If both operate on a dysfunctional level, whom will attract the unthinking mass? As we see its not Christianity.