P
Peter_J
Guest
I’m wondering if anyone can help me steel-up my resolve to remain a traditional Catholic. I ask this in reference to the following post from the well-known blogger “The young fogey” (Serge).
Note: All quotes are from HW Crocker III’s review of “The Russian Church and the Papacy” by Vladimir Soloviev, (2002 issue of The Latin Mass).
I am dumbstruck by this - worse than New Oxford Review’s attack nearly two years ago.
That a traditional liturgical Christian in the Catholic Church would attack other Christians with the same core orthodox beliefs and a similar commitment to a traditional rite seems to me the height of bloody-mindedness.
However, the charges of uncharity and the narcissism of small diferences do apply to people in the East as well as the West, inventing differences where there really aren’t any. Every time when in English I hear ’ The-o-TO-kos!’ where ‘Mother of God’ will work, I think of this.
I wonder if he hates Eastern Catholics too.
Note: All quotes are from HW Crocker III’s review of “The Russian Church and the Papacy” by Vladimir Soloviev, (2002 issue of The Latin Mass).
I am dumbstruck by this - worse than New Oxford Review’s attack nearly two years ago.
That a traditional liturgical Christian in the Catholic Church would attack other Christians with the same core orthodox beliefs and a similar commitment to a traditional rite seems to me the height of bloody-mindedness.
Soloviev got some of his ideas from Jacob Boehme — an unlikely hero for Catholics.
Uncharity/defamation aside, this can’t be the position of the Catholic Church because all of Eastern Orthodoxy’s positive doctrinal statements are completely Catholic. IOW, to Catholics, Orthodoxy IS Catholicism circa 1000 in Greek theological language. So to attack Eastern Orthodoxy is to attack the foundational beliefs of their own church.
Has this person never read Dostoevsky? He went over my head (I admit I don’t get The Brothers Karamazov) but the simple Christianity - humility, forgiveness - of Russian Orthodoxy is obvious.
However, the charges of uncharity and the narcissism of small diferences do apply to people in the East as well as the West, inventing differences where there really aren’t any. Every time when in English I hear ’ The-o-TO-kos!’ where ‘Mother of God’ will work, I think of this.
What ‘surrender’? The emperor and czar were Orthodox too. Did Catholics ‘surrender’ the secular realm to the Hapsburgs?
OMG. Ironically he sounds just like a liberal church-worker in his own church making fun of people like him — Tridentine people. ‘Give up that artsy-fartsy old-fashioned stuff and live in the modern world — give up those silly devotions and work for PEACE and JUSTICE, man.’ I have had something a lot like this thrown in my face, to my face, by an angry Catholic of the conservative persuasion. Makes Khomiakov and Popovich look right — that for all their complaints these people really are part of the same entity as Amchurch and even the Protestants. All on the same team.
Aha. The writer hates the Orthodox because he sees them as competition.
Too true in practice - I find it hard to believe that God meant for the one true Church to be several jurisdictions trying to blackguard each other. And while too often Catholics like this fellow reduce Catholicity to Romanness, there exists Byzantine Rite chauvinism as well.
The same thing Novus Ordo types say about the writer of this screed and his kind, and the same thing liberal, feminist, homosexualist, etc. Episcopalians say about those Episcopalians who stick to historic liturgies, the Bible and the creeds. Again, bitterly ironic, like this guy is inadvertently sawing off the branch he is sitting on.
Again, this writer sounds just like his enemies in the Catholic Church.
One wishes the writer is visited by apparitions of Leonid Feodorov and Metropolitans Andrew (Sheptytsky) and Joseph (Slipyj), who can take turns whacking him upside the head.
I wonder if he hates Eastern Catholics too.
