...for me to disembark (or at least to give serious thought to anyway) a vast sinking ship...what sort of ship do I hear you ask? Well, it used to be grand and beautiful, mistress of the seas and guided by Eärendil, but is now old and shabby, not even a shadow of its ancient glory, and one of its old captains (now retired) steered it wrong and collided with an iceberg. I'd just like to get out to shore and wave it goodbye (and its deluded passengers) before I go down to the depths with it. I wonder how long before it sinks though? I'm surprised it's still on the surface to be honest, but there is only so much damage it can take...
The ship has a strange of habit of somehow continuing to float, even with the worst captains sailing it. I hope you'll at least swim fairly near by? Prayers.
ReplyDeleteOnly Peter was called to walk on water.
ReplyDeleteThinking you are on the Normandie only to discover you are really sailing on the Titanic can be disconcerting. In any even I was going o write a long comment and then recalled having discussed this on an earlier thread. So I will just reiterate what I wrote here.
ReplyDeletehttp://tinyurl.com/2dvc4k3
In ICXC
John
True, Athanasius. I am even willing to bet that her Owner will be more forgiving of her on the day of her judgment seeing that He entrusted her to imperfect captains.
ReplyDeletecontrarian
Prayers.
ReplyDeleteYou have to address Berenike's point honestly - very difficult for a cradle Catholic raised "under the dome" as it were (of new St Peters - circumscribed by that colossal proof-text). If her persepctive is authentic, and the Roman bishop does indeed succeed to some exclusive, ontologically unique Petrine office (as formulated with dogmatic clarity by Vatican I), you'll simply have to eschew judging the tree by its fruits and make up your mind to believe that black is white. The ship's unsinkable.
ReplyDeleteIf on the other hand, the claims are a human fabrication, ratcheted up over several centuries, fatally distorting the Apostolic constitution of the Church, with consequences consistent with what you can see with your own eyes, every day and in every direction, then you know what you HAVE to do.
My God people, how do you know that I didn't have my dead-end job in mind when I composed this post!
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure anybody knew. However, as it isn't the usual stuff of your posts, it was a fair assumption, I think.
ReplyDeleteI never thought Morrisons were a patch on Waitrose I must admit!
ReplyDeleteI think that J. R. R. Tolkien would ask to be removed forthwith as patron of this website, given its increasingly overt anti-papal tone and contents.
ReplyDeleteProfessor Tighe,
ReplyDeleteHopefully Tolkien would have realised by now that Dr. Wickham-Legg was correct in his assessment "Because a practice is Roman, it is not therefore of necessity good, or ancient, or Catholic."
We should do well to reflect on those words of wisdom, especially considering the current situation in Rome.
Professor Tighe,
ReplyDeleteWelcome to my blog...
J.R.R Tolkien was a faithful Catholic all his life and was bewildered and distressed to see, in the twilight of his years, the collapse of the Sacred Liturgy before his very eyes, and the Pope himself holding the instruments of destruction. His more intelligent (than my own, that is) response to this was simply to pray for the Pope...and perhaps wait for a change of days. As for me, I have lived at variance with the Vatican now for some years, having gone through several stages. The first, as new to Tradworld, blaming the Council for everything. This was when I was 14-15 years old. The next, seeing the Council as orthodox but stupidly believing that it was liberal-modernist-demons subverting the teaching authority of the Church. After that I had serious thoughts of joining the SSPX (I am so glad I didn't), I was about 17 or 18 by this time. Then I just gave up and stopped going to Mass completely (I used to go regularly to the 9:00am Low Mass at the London Oratory - my first impressions, understandably, were ''no wonder they desired reform!''), although I started reading the newly-created New Liturgical Movement blog by this point. Then, after about a year, I started going to Mass again, this time in my parish church, and was a typical Trad. It was only about a year ago that I reached the stage where I was finding that my views as a Traditionalist were upsetting good people, and I realised it was a load of crap anyway...I have moved beyond Traditionalism to...an ante-room, leading to something greater.
This is just in the hope of giving you some perspective. I have thrown in the towel, I have no faith left in the Roman Church - it is showing no signs of changing, or reversing we should say, its attitude towards the Sacred Liturgy, nor is it showing any signs of making void the last 60 years (at least) of liturgical wreckage. Perhaps Tolkien would forgive me for having lost all patience, and being filled with wrath at the Papacy. I remain, however, devoted to his work - a great contribution it is to the vast tapestry of Catholic literature.
Rubricarius, or even the Pope of Rome Gregory the Great himself: ''Things are not to be loved for the sake of a place, but places are to be loved for the sake of their good things.'' (Bede).
Well, then, shouldn't you seriously consider becoming Orthodox if you've come to believe that the "Church in communion with Rome" is not "The Church?" As for me, if I were in that position, as in a sense I was from about 1975 to 1979, and if I reached the conclusion that the "papal claims" were false, or falsified by history, as I did not, then I would probably become a Copt, since I think that the only real basis for accepting the Council of Chalcedon as an ecumenical council is its acceptance and upholding by Rome, as almost all of the East Roman world (with some loud but not very sizeable exceptions) had acquiesced in its tacit repudiation by ca. 515; and Justinian brought a world of difficulty upon himself, as well as permanently dividing East Rome, when he (or, on paper, his uncle the Emperor Justin) "brought it back" in 519. I think such considerations led my old acquaintance John Moultrie (who lived in the Byelorussian Catholic Marian House on Holden Avenue in northern London) to "turn Copt" some 21 years ago.
ReplyDeleteProfessor Tighe, with respect but I think you oversimplify the history of the Ecumenical Councils if you attach too great importance to Papal ratification. There were no legates at all at Constantinople (381), and I think that St Cyril of Alexandria was of considerable more importance to the Eastern Fathers at Chalcedon than St Leo the Great - who refused to recognise the Council until long after, because of the famous Canon 28 (curiously not included in Dr Price's translation of the Acts). The Tome had, you must remember, to agree with the teaching of St Cyril, and was not readily accepted by all (most notably, as you yourself have said, the Copts) as an independant, infallible, and authoritative treatise on Christology. It was, after all, a contribution more to rhetoric (the Latin is exquisite) than theology - and didn't really address the issues at stake at Chalcedon.
ReplyDeleteI don't know what to make of the Copts myself - we're not really supposed to call them Monophysites. I personally doubt that they are heretics to this day - one of the great misfortunes of the early Christian world was, after all, the differences between Latin and Greek. Probably there are subtle nuances of expression at stake more than real doctrine - though prejudice and ignorance present more of a problem here.
"There were no legates at all at Constantinople (381)"
ReplyDeleteTrue, and just as true that that council was not called as an "ecumenical council" and did not consider itself as such. It wasn't even an "eastern" council, as it was only bishops from the regions of Constantinpole, Anatolia and Antioch who were summoned to it (the Archbishop of Alexandria and a few of his bishops turned up to make trouble but, when unsuccessful, soon left). Rome refused to accept its "ecumenicity" until 534, and Alexandria (both "orthodox" and "dissenting") took even longer.
"and I think that St Cyril of Alexandria was of considerable more importance to the Eastern Fathers at Chalcedon than St Leo the Great - who refused to recognise the Council until long after, because of the famous Canon 28 (curiously not included in Dr Price's translation of the Acts)."
This is partly accurate, and partly not. You are quite right about the importance of St. Cyril (have you read McGuckin's brilliant study, *Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy*?), but not about St. Leo's attitude. He accepted the Chalcedonian definition immediately -- indeed, one may argue that its was the Roman position of absolute intransigeance on the binding nature of the Chalcedonian definition (cf. the Acacian Schism of 484-519) that, when Justin/Justinian decided to accept the "Roman perspective," wrecked the religious unity of East Rome, which otherwise might well have settled into a more definite Cyrillian miaphysitism, and so have anticipated the events of 1054 by 500 years. What Leo did was to reject and "annul" (his own word) Canon 28 of Chalcedon -- and after a fraught correspondence both Patriarch Anatolius of Constantinople and the Eastern Emperor Marcian explicitly acquiesced in Leo's decision. Canon 28 did, of course, come back -- it was reissued in 478 as part of the Emperor Zeno's "Henotikon" (which was to result in the Acacian Schism). Justinian, and later Justinian II (at the time of the papal visit to Constantinople in 713, the last until 1965) sought papal agreement to Canon 28, but in vain. It was not until Lateran IV in 1215 that Rome accepted it, at the same time insisting that it merely stated the "honorofic precedence" among these sees.