tmore35:
Catholics are expected to submit to papal authority on all things concerning faith and morals. It is understood that non-Catholics do not hold to the authority of Rome, and yet, Vatican II teaches that salvation for them is possible.
There’s a couple of things that bother me about Unam Sanctam and other doctrines coming from the infallible teaching authority of Pope and magesterium. One of them is that none of these doctrines which have been the backbone of the RCC for centuries and which I think, from reading various fights between Catholics, have legitimate arguments to be called infallible, are ever, to my knowledge, clearly rejected. They remain in the background of RCC doctrine and I’m wary, as are others, of the likely effects of disturbing these sleeping dogs. I can’t help but wonder if they’re deliberately being kept in reserve for possible use in some future scenario.
I vaguely recall someone linking the infallible ruling on the penalties that would be exacted for denying the Immaculate Conception with the execution of a heretic less than thirty years before, and, also something about the two swords in Unam Sanctam still being applicable doctrine. You wonder if Unam Sanctam was really inspired by the Holy Ghost and I wonder why it isn’t formally rejected.
You must remember that when Unam Sanctam was written there were no Protestant denominations. Unam Sanctam was more of an effort to control the actions of Catholic bishops than it was a statement on salvation. It did not address the fate of non-Catholic Christians. It was addressed to unruley bishops who didn’t want to pay their taxes.
Submit to the authority of the Roman Pontiff basically meant: Pay up or burn in hell.
This is where the argument that this Bull is particular to the events of the time falls down. The Greeks named here is the Orthodox Church.
papalencyclicals.net/Bon08/B8unam.htm
“Therefore, if the Greeks or others should say that they are not confided to Peter and to his successors, they must confess not being the sheep of Christ, since Our Lord says in John ‘
there is one sheepfold and one shepherd.’”
The very next line is the two swords one… :ehh:
Charlemagne and the Franks are responsible for calling the Eastern Romans, Greeks. Before that the Romans where both Western and Eastern although the official language by that time was Greek. The Franks bid for control of the empire but had to settle for the Western part and this bid included taking over the Church in the West which then got named Roman Catholic as opposed to the ‘Greek’ Church in the East.
What the Franks did was effectively separate out a part from the whole Roman Church and promote that part as supreme over all, the first claims to complete papal supremacy came from around this time and so did the forgeries to give this claim a history in the first three centuries of the Church.
The history of the ‘Greeks’ refusal to acknowledge papal supremacy through many centuries was as well known in the West as it was in the East, Boniface was well aware that he was writing an explanation of doctrine as held by the RCC to be applicable over a far greater area than that affected by his immediate problem. I think he was declaring the doctrine of ‘the Church in the world’ to impress the smaller players in dispute with him.
The Orthodox “not being the sheep of Christ” as explained by the milder ‘normative’ of Vatican II: “This is not because of any special quality of the pope himself, but because he is the leader Christ appointed for his Church, and because full membership in his Church is normatively necessary for being a Christian, which is normatively necessary for salvation.”
