tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8192580971664762668.post5915427957295141976..comments2023-06-01T09:22:18.917+01:00Comments on Liturgiae Causa: Truth, constancy and relativism...Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8192580971664762668.post-27402158856191447392011-05-29T22:49:03.880+01:002011-05-29T22:49:03.880+01:00Well said, Anagnostis! However, there is always t...Well said, Anagnostis! However, there is always the question of practical life. I have no doubt that the papal claims had no impact on the spiritual and practical life of a Carthusian until the 1970's, within the Roman Church. The implications of the dogmatic definitions of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, are below the radar for most practicing Catholics even now, even if they do know what is being defined.<br />The practical disorder in the Orthodox Church is also disconcerting to a tidy western mind, and this does have effects on the spiritual life of the people, and on the monastic order.<br />Real theology is written in blood, sweat, and tears indeed, as you write. But that is what taking up one's cross to follow Christ implies.<br />To conceive of the Church as having many genuine bishops in one place, with competing claims and agenda, is grotesque, but that is what the "two lungs" theory, like the "branch " theory, gives us. I still believe that to consciously leave the Church is to cast oneself adrift, and to drown very soon; or to be like the sheep that has left the flock and gone astray where it is an easy prey to the Predator of man. The question is: Where is The Church to be found by one living in England? Be patient Patricius; the slavery of your patron was hard too, but did not last forever.B flathttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17611595580578224726noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8192580971664762668.post-7411574714560804712011-05-29T09:51:54.234+01:002011-05-29T09:51:54.234+01:00Patricius
I'm very glad you're attempting...Patricius<br /><br />I'm very glad you're attempting to rid yourself of the spirit of anger and vituperation. You've embarked on a dark and arduous journey and you need the light of the Holy Spirit, Who simply cannot inhabit a soul filled with rage and resentment. Let the dead bury the dead. Harbouring resentment is, as somebody pointed out, "taking poison and expecting the other guy to die of it". To bring it with you on the voyage is to court absolute shipwreck.<br /><br />There are no easy answers. Everything is layered over with perspectives and agendas, many of which are as undetectable to us as water to a fish. Getting out from under the dome, as it were, of new St Peter's, circumscribed by that colossal proof-text, is a dreadful and onerous endeavour, tearing viscerally at every instinct wired into us from infancy. I remember living for weeks on end in a state of actual physical nausea; real theology is, however, written in blood sweat and tears. Everything glib is delusion.<br /><br />Roman Catholicism (“development of doctrine”) imposes a template on the past which forces us to read it in the light of the present. You can attempt manfully to prize this template off, all at once, or you can wait for it quietly to dissolve. I'm very much more in favour of the latter course, but in any case one does in fact attain to the position of being able genuinely to marvel that anyone engaging seriously with the early centuries, the Fathers, the Councils and their canons, could imagine it's Roman Catholicism and not Orthodoxy they're looking at. That's the point after which any lingering temptation, any atavistic instinct to creep back under the dome vanishes utterly and forever. As in an icon, the perspective is reversed. As the stale air is supplanted by fresh, all that cumbrous Heath-Robinson apparatus one has dragged around for years also falls away like so much spurious, worm-eaten junk and one discovers the ability, freely and intuitively, to connect causes with effects and thus to take realistic stock of the present in the light of the past.<br /><br /><i>Receive the tiara adorned with three crowns and know that thou art Father of Princes and Kings, Ruler of the World, Vicar of Our Saviour Jesus Christ on earth.</i> <br /><br />Is this, or Pastor Aeternus, or Unam Sanctam, a reasonable exegesis of Matthew 16:18/18:18 consistent with what one sees in the early centuries? - or is it rather a key that unlocks the negative course of Western Christianity in the second millenium, having enthroned a falsehood at the centre of everything? Each of us has to decide for himself.Anagnostishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03706938507885553293noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8192580971664762668.post-42018857467402288812011-05-29T04:56:52.891+01:002011-05-29T04:56:52.891+01:00There are just two possibilities - either the clai...<i>There are just two possibilities - either the claims of the Pope are true, and therefore it is necessary to be subject to him; or they are a damnable falsehood inimical to the Gospel.</i><br /><br />Or the whole thing is a pack of lies.<br /><br />Perhaps we are all just wasting our precious, finite time worrying over ancient superstition of questionable origins.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8192580971664762668.post-74864906730311418752011-05-28T22:08:01.741+01:002011-05-28T22:08:01.741+01:00I can’t even begin to engage with much of the theo...I can’t even begin to engage with much of the theology and philosophy contained in Patrick’s post above; all I can do is make a few observations. <br /><br />Atheism—perforce—involves faith to an equal degree as ‘Belief’: to say “There is NO God” requires just as much faith as to say “There IS a God”; neither assertion can be proved as fact by means of human reason alone. <br /><br />Truth, by its very nature, is immutable—it cannot be dependent on history or geography. <br /><br />With regard to the papal “dogmas” of 1854 and 1950, the first was blasphemous (not to mention ‘promulgated’ before papal “infallibility” had even been invented in 1870), the second superfluous—it stated what the Church had always believed.Lector Orientalishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04636623875524253174noreply@blogger.com