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To: Vicomte13
There is virtually nothing in your post that I disagree with. But we shouldn't decide to ignore very real differences which the world has raised up between us.
The HMC (I have loved that term ever since I was little; its what the Irish side of the family has always called the Church. I wish we used it more)did civilize the West. It preserved and inculcated Greco/Roman civilization in our mutual, howling savage ancestors. But not all of that civilization came from monarchic, Roman monks, priests or prelates. The civilization of the Irish came from St. Patrick, who brought us "the gift of God's Faith, the sweet light of His love." St. Patrick planted, as was the way then, a distinctly Irish Church, orthodox in its Christian beliefs and by no means a vassal of Rome (well, the Church at Rome really didn't have any "vassals then, truth be told) His successors converted vast swaths of northern Europe, all the way to Lithuania, even before the Council of Whitby when Rome finally triumphed in at least England and Scotland.

The Roman Church civilized much of the West. There can be no argument about that. But the monarchic system which the times may required the Church to assume in order to advance and protect that civilization, and the Faith, had some grievous consequences which you are experiencing today. I am not prepared to say that the Church had a choice in this, but you know, the Church in the East spent centuries under the heel of Islam and survived. The Saracens, and the Turks after a while, may have been a rather more "sophisticated" than our barbarian ancestors, but they were just as deadly, and for a much longer time.

As for today, of course the West has civilized, perhaps too much. But the effects on the Western Church of what the Church there perhaps had to do, means for us in the East that there would have to be an openness, no a visceral commitment, on the part of the whole Church in the West to lay aside organizational forms and mindsets perhaps appropriate to another time and return to the phronema of the Church of the 7 Councils. This would be good for the East too, I have no doubt. But what I am suggesting is not easy, nor is there any quick, institutional fix that some group of "old men" can work out. It must come, first, from the Laos tou Theou and the clergy, no mean feat, by the way. Because the Holy Spirit is with the Church in the West, the hierarchs will come around. But it won't happen in our lifetimes unless Rome, in what might be its last exercise of monarchic power, exercises its authority within the Western Church to return it to that older way.
47 posted on 09/23/2004 7:43:16 PM PDT by Kolokotronis (Nuke the Cube!)
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To: Kolokotronis

I am responding here to your first response to my letter of last night (I haven't read the others yet).

What you write here is fair.


50 posted on 09/24/2004 7:08:24 AM PDT by Vicomte13
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