[Graves]

" In the end the one true Church can only be found in a dozen monks of the Esphigmenou Monastery on Mount Athos." I don't think I said that but, were this the case, it would not be the first time in history that the Church has been outwardly reduced to a pitiful looking few.

G. K. Chesterton had an interesting remark on this conundrum. Writing as an Anglican but shortly before his conversion to Roman Catholcism, he said in ORTHODOXY,
"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around."

Here, here, I say!

[Petrosius]

G. K. Chesterton had an interesting remark on this conundrum. Writing as an Anglican but shortly before his conversion to Roman Catholcism, he said in ORTHODOXY, "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around."

Here, here, I say!

Here, here, I say also! It was indeed Chesterton's respect for Tradition that led him into the Catholic Church recognizing that only she was completely faithful to it:

The difficulty of explaining why I am a Catholic, is that there are 10,000 reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.

But Tradition can be no infallible guide unless the visible Church which produced it is itself infallible. But if the visible Church was infallible two thousand years ago, it is infallible still today!