In the “mote in your eye/plank in mine” department, the Holy Office of the Inquisition has reaffirmed the idea that only the Roman Church is, you know, Church. The rest of us are wounded, deficient and not really worthy of the name “church” at all.
I feel so happy I could just plotz.
Mind you, the Orthodox feel the same about everyone too, and certainly for much the same reasons.
And I think the Southern Baptists might, admit to feeling the same in most cases, if pressed.
Goodness knows there are quite a few others who also feel that way: correct me if I’m wrong but are there not some Orthodox Sects that think their three presbyters and two bishops are the only real Christians left in the world? I may be wrong: they may only have one bishop.
The Anglicans, of course, are rent asunder by those who insist only *they* are true Anglicans: this, coupled with all of the above, is why I’ve not “institutionally” rejoined the Anglican communion since my departure from Orthodoxy.
There must be some way to live a life Godward or loveward (they are the same thing) in the way of Jesus without getting tied into this denominational pissing contest?
Of course to the world - and to a few others, like myself - none of the petty issues of man-made doctrine matter at all. If the sign says “church” then your just another of them !@#$% crazy Christians. For we can just point and say see how the Christians love each other?
Mind you, I have my own unloving issues with all the uberfrum conservatives and mistrust of most hyperliberal folks, too - whereby I fail to measure up to my own understanding of the Gospel. At times I think the only Christians left are John Michael Talbot, up in Arkansas, the bothers at Taize, and the food pantry folks at SGN.
In other words it is our very defectiveness - including Rome’s judgementalism - that marks us as Church: humans doing the best we can to live after God in the way of Jesus. The Church is wounded. Thank God. I like that term and I’m glad the Inquisition used it, although they’d probably not like the way I’ve co-opted it. Let all who deny this truth be confined to the Comfy Chair!
Update tmatt, momentarily forgetting RC teaching on Anglican Orders, seems to make this document into a new slam on Anglicans.
In the NeoPlatonic world of many Vatican officials, the “Church” exists in isolation from grubby material and earthly reality. The problem seems to be that the Vatican (and as you so wisely point out, other churches as well)tend to identify themselves with that NeoPlatonic ideal and then compare that ideal to the grubby material and earthly reality of other communities. It would be appropriate, one might think, and even helpful if the Vatican had noted that the Roman communion is also wounded and defective in some sense in its earthly manifestation — what with pedophilia, misogyny, power hunger and on and on.
Speaking as if only other churches are defective sounds a lot like pointing out that homosexuals are “intrinsically disordered”, as though heterosexuals have somehow retained Adamic innocence.
The late (great) Kenneth Untner, Bishop of Saginaw, once said that we should be no more surprised to see sinners in church than we would be to see fat people at WeightWatchers. Sinners are the ones who need church, just as overweight people need help regulating their weight.
Theophoboumenos
Yes, the Roman Church should have said so: or, if the Roman Church *is* the Church, she is wounded by the sunderance of her brethren. Broken communion wounds both ways. Although he didn’t mean it so, that is how many people have heard JP2’s call to “breathe with both lungs”. I’d go further and say the head needs the rest of the body: arms, hands, social activists, legs, feet. The absence of feet on the ground and hands in the air is why the RCC is loosing South America. All that cold theology means nothing.
Mmm. This rant is kinda off topic from the post (yours was fine!), but….
Neoplatonic… I tend to see a problem with the whole Hellenism thing since they refuse to follow through and Celticise or Americanise or Francocise - least officially. I know all those things happen, but everyone once in a while they “pull back” to Greek. Which is silly because if they want to pull back at all, it should be to Judaism, not pseudo-paganism.
Otherwise don’t tell me I have to think with a 4th Century, pre-modern brain in order to be a Christian, as if theology has not advanced in 1600 years.
Well, while we Anglicans are having much turmoil, I have to say that I’ve never come across any Anglican/Episcopalian who said that *we* are the only Church/Christians/etc.
Speaking of the comfy chair, have you seen Eddie Izzard’s hysterical take on Church of England? “No one says “You must have tea and cake with the vicar or you DIE!”"
I fail to see how saying “the Catholic Church is the true Church founded by Christ” is the same as saying “the Catholic Church is perfect and doesn’t need any other Christians and is not wounded by division among Christians.”
Mountain, molehill.
It is interesting that at times you think none of the only Christians left are Orthodox.
Dave - at times I have ever felt that. Even when I was Orthodox. The list has only changed slightly and there are living people on it who are not “famous” enough to be listed: hard working, loving and kind people well known to me, whose Christian love is an inspiration. Some are Orthodox. And I didn’t list the departed, Some of them are, too, Orthodox.
Tope the rest of us are “wounded” and not worthy of the name “church” and I forget the other term. We’re all invited to become Roman Catholic, of course, but none of us are accorded as equals.
That’s no molehill: that’s Bullshit.
I knew you were worshipping with the Episcopalians, but I didn’t realise you no longer consider yourself Orthodox.
And the UCC and whoever else I feel like worshipping with… although I’m teaching Sunday School at the ECUSA place this fall. I thought I’d been rather clear back in lent, having taken communion from someone else… that kinda cinches it, no?
I either forgot or missed the communion bit. Sorry.
Blog is like a soap opera :-) You can’t miss even one episode or the whole story line falls apart! (Sorry it wasn’t Lent… Lent is when I stopped taking communion in the OC tho.)
To act as though a reaffirmation of the Catholic ecclesiology is the end of Christian ecumenism and an attack on Vatican II is making a mountain out of a molehill.
Be honest. Don’t you think Catholic doctrine and practices are “defective” in some way? Don’t you think the Catholic Church is “wounded” in some way? And if so, isn’t it a bit hypocritical to be offended when the Church speaks of deficiencies or wounds in other Christian traditions?
I’ve stopped commenting basically because this is your blog - your living room - and to be offended every time you criticize the Catholic Church is poor form. Much of your commentary on the Church in this blog is about all the things you find awful about Catholicism, which is absolutely your right. But I think your reaction to this statement - which also affirms that the Spirit is at work in other Christian communities and that honest ecumenism is a good and worthy thing - is a bit disingenuous.
Tope - The post was prompted by the recent reaffirmation of official Catholic doctrine… but the body of the post was, in fact, pointing out that most of us do it. And i pointed out how I fail in that as well. I think… I can be more explicit if you want.
But then I asked if there was a way around that… not just the Roman “that”, but the same sectarian “that” that infects all of us.
PS: If it seems Rome provokes more from me it is perhaps because of all the ecclessial communities out there she is the most institutionally organised. When one of her officials speaks, no one else can say “nay” officially. This is not true in Orthodoxy. For example I see one Russian Metropolitan welcomes this document. That won’t stop any other Metropolitan - Russian or not - from disagreeing with him. And all of them have equal authority outside of their diocese - nil. Likewise Anglicanism or the Southern Baptists or even the UCC. No other community has such a strong official line at which one may make marked disagreement.
That’s true, you did. I criticized things you didn’t actually say; I apologize.
I’ll be honest, the response to this statement is driving me absolutely nuts. I don’t think it’s necessarily unloving or judgmental to believe that there are true and false propositions about Christianity - which in the end is what the statement boils down to.
I like what Chesterton has to say on this - Bigotry isn’t believing one is right; any sane person thinks that. Bigotry is failing to understand how any other person could come to be wrong.
Re: your PS, my aim wasn’t to complain about your criticism of the Church. What I understood you to be saying just seemed inconsistent with the general tenor of your comments about Catholicism.
I finally went to the Vatican website and read the English translation of a response statement issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the body that Benedict headed as a Cardinal.
Interestingly enough, I found that the first sentence cites three of the ecumenical documents issued in the last 40 years. There was a brief introduction and a question and answer type of presentation. One of the answers was:
“It is possible, according to Catholic doctrine, to affirm correctly that the Church of Christ is present and operative in the churches and ecclesial Communities not yet fully in communion with the Catholic Church, on account of the elements of sanctification and truth that are present in them. Nevertheless, the word ’subsists’ can only be attributed to the Catholic Church alone precisely because it refers to the mark of unity that we profess in the symbols of the faith (I believe… in the ‘one’ Church); and this ‘one’ Church subsists in the Catholic Church.”
You know, actually saying that the “Church of Christ is present and operative …” in other communities is not exactly your mama’s Inquisitional Church. I disagree with the claim that the Church “subsists” in them, but they were NOT saying that the Church is not present anywhere else.
Here is another quote: “It follows that these separated churches and Communities, though we believe they suffer from defects, are deprived neither of significance nor importance in the mystery of salvation. In fact the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as instruments of salvation, whose value derives from that fullness of grace and of truth which has been entrusted to the Catholic Church”
None of the above sounds exactly hyper-exclusive. You know, if simply making the claim that you are right, while still saying that God works through everyone else, is a bad thing, then we have gone too far in being offended over anything and everything.
Fr E - That’s easy for you to say: you belong to a “real church“.
I’m pleased to see that Christ can be active anywhere he wants. Some Orthodox say the same thing - although with slightly different phraseology.
I’d go so far as to say that’s Church.
I don’t think anyone’s being offended at the idea that God can work through them: that’s the whole point of King Cyrus being called “God’s Messiah” in the OT, isn’t it?
The problem comes in the fifth question:
Yes, it is a reaffirmation of what the Church has taught since Martin Luther made his choices, but that only means it is another step in the wrong direction rather than the right one.
Side note: it’s kinda funny to read that document and see footnotes, which clicking, only relate to other Vatican documents. It’s kind of like a blogger only linking to other blog posts written by her self. One kind of expects scripture citations or even quotes from the saints, not just self-reference.
I don’t see why the citations are so odd. It’s a digest of other documents outlining Catholic teaching.
I seem to recall a while ago you asked something along the lines of, “how/where do we draw the line between when we can break break with other Christians and when we can’t?” This is something that I struggled with before becoming Catholic, but I’m now convinced that the nature of the Eucharist is really *the* dividing issue (and was convinced of that before I became Catholic). Either Catholics/Orthodox/Anglo-Catholics are right, and it’s really truly Jesus, or we’re wrong. How can we break bread with each other when we disagree fundamentally as to what breaking bread is, what it means, what it requires? That’s really the heart of this document, that the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life.
Interesting that you included Anglicans there - which the document specifically does not. Exactly because they lack Apostolic Succession and so have a defective Eucharist. I think that makes the Apostolic Succession the “source and summit of the Christian life.”
It’s also one that we all read backwards. Our understandings of what “Apostolic Succession” actually means are recent - and we read them backwards.
How are we to differentiate between doctrines that evolved over the last 2000 years and doctrines that were, seemingly, important to the earliest Christians? How are we to tell when our current understanding is being read backwards? Is that a good thing?
Most historically Protestant doctrines are a reaction to what they saw as RC Abuses in the middle ages. The Anglican Doctrine (in the 39 Articles) is rather lower than some Anglicans would like to admit - their doctrine has, of course, evolved too. But it was in the beginning simply a reaction to the RC.
I only meant that Anglo-Catholics, specifically, have a belief in the Real Presence that is similar to what Catholics believe and what Orthodox believe. Certainly the Anglo-Catholic understanding of the Eucharist is far more high church than what is laid out in the 39 articles. I didn’t mean to suggest that I consider the Anglican Communion to constitute a true Church. In fact the lack of consensus and clear teaching among Anglicans over what the Eucharist really is, in my mind, makes it rather difficult to consider them a true Church according under a Catholic ecclesiological model - even beside the question of Apostolic Succession.
The state of modern Christianity is such that - to a greater degree than at other points in Church history - even those of us in more authoritarian churches have to do a great deal of personal/communal interpretation and looking back to determine how to worship and practice our faith. So I agree with you that there’s always (and always has been) some measure of retrospective interpretation involved in hammering out Christian doctrine, liturgy, and practice.
However - one of the reasons I converted to Catholicism was that in my studies as a medieval historian, it became increasingly clear that certain things were rather important from very early on in the life of the Church - the Eucharist and Apostolic Tradition among them. And very early on there emerged a skeletal but definite notion of what it meant to be an Orthodox Christian in the Church Catholic.
Re: your comment about Martin Luther - the document is a reaffirmation of Church teaching that dates well before Martin Luther. This is not a relic of the Reformation. You’ll see the same ideas expressed in the Church Father’s commentaries on heretics.
*shrugs* One could debate endlessly on this topic. One either believes Tradition is binding or one does not. I don’t see what the point is in getting upset with people for proclaiming clearly belief in one or the other.