Posted on 02/04/2006 4:55:13 AM PST by bornacatholic
you wrote: The Catholic Church officially teaches that non-catholics can be saved.
So then SSPXers can be in Heaven too? So then why all the polemic against them?
If you couldn't tell he was joking, then you are really dense.
I see the "church" as nothing more or less than the world wide body of believers. "He who is last, will be first." I only spread God's word, I have no authority over any man, I have no authority in a building called a church, or an orginization called a church.
So, while you may accurately describe my posts about the sspx as polemical in nature you ought not refrain from adding - I do so because I care about souls and that schism, riven as it is with hatrted of the Jews, heterodox ideas about Mass, and refection of an Ecumenical Council, among other things, is a positive danger to Christian souls. The schism is leading them to Hell
Thanks, brother
Wouldn't a teaching by a Pope that came along some time after a teaching from a previous Pope take precident? So, if Pope Bonaface says one must be Roman Catholic and submit to the Roman Pontiff's authority and JPII comes along some centruies later and says via his imprimatur on the Catechism, that people of good will who of no fault of their own are ignorant of the gospel can be saved, wouldn't JPII's statement take precedent according to Catholic Tradition?
In principle, isn't it like the rule on fasting on Fridays? That was the rule for ages until Pope Paul changed it via Vatican II.
Rob
Yes indeed.
"Peter never claimed to be catholic, nor did Christ, as a matter of fact I challenge you to show me one scripture that calls Catholicism the only or true church, no instead, I don't believe Catholicism was ever even mentioned in the scriptures, and if you read for yourself scriptures, Peter was commissioned to preach to the Jews, and Paul to the Gentiles. But they all were to preach under the same Gospel. Also you will find that it was Paul who condemned Peter for hypocrisy, if Peter was the final authority, then what prey tell was is that made him accountable to Paul?"
There are couple of problems with your comment, historically and scripturally. First, the tern "Catholic" or "catholic" was the term used by Christians from at the very latest about 107 AD to describe The Church and denotes its universality. In the West, for the most part, the term has come to mean the Roman Catholic Church and traditionally since the Great Schism in 1054, the Latin Church has claimed to be "The Church" and thus has, in its view, the only valid claim to be called the Catholic Church. The Anglicans also claim to be the "Catholic Church", though not with the same implications as the Latins do. In the East, both before and after the Great Schism, The Church has always called itself "the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church" because it believes that it has preserved the Faith of The Church inviolate since Pentecost. My point is that the exclusivity with which the Latin Church has, until probably very recently, used the term "Catholic" is because, in contradiction to the Orthodox belief, it has preserved inviolate the Faith. Thus, this issue about what or who is the Catholic Church is a product of the Great Schism.
Now you say that scripture does not mention the pope or the catholic (or Catholic) church. You are quite right, those words are not used. Where your analysis falls apart is in forgetting that it was the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, pre Great Schism, which determined the canon of scripture and all those hierarchs who over nearly 400 years struggled and prayed over what was canonical scripture and what wasn't were hierarchs of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church and called themselves "Catholics" and their Church the "Catholic Church". I suggest, therefore, that you are reading something into scripture which isn't there, which is to say that because scripture doesn't speak of popes or the Catholic Church, there is not basis for either. Clearly the men who by divine inspiration established the canon of the NT didn't see that problem. Indeed, until the Protestant Reformation, nobody saw that problem.
Talk about audacious....read before discussing? Obviously you are a rigorist or a lawyer
"Talk about audacious....read before discussing? Obviously you are a rigorist or a lawyer"
LOL! Both, as you know. In any event, there has been quite enough uninformed commentary going on around these threads of late. :)
It seems that it depends on what "confided to Peter" means. I could interpret it to include those who accept a primacy of honor but reject a primacy of jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome. I would also not be surprised if some Catholics interpreted it to be aimed at the Eastern Orthodox. Your school teacher certainly interpreted it that way, as did the Feeneyites. But the Feeneyites were condemned for interpreting it that way.
I would think that your schoolteacher should be condemned for interpreting it the way he did--depending on how old you are, this would have been at the time that Fr. Feeney had been condemned for the hardline interpretation of extra ecclesiam nulla salus. I'm sorry that your teacher interpreted it wrongly and that it has been a burr under your saddle all these years.
But I do dispute your claim that the only way Catholics can interpret "deny that they are confided to Peter" is to say that it targets Eastern Orthodox. I don't really think that that's what Boniface VIII himself meant by it, but even if he did, that interpretation of it has been rejected since Boniface.
I am not glossing over this line. I think it's a valid question as to whether it means rejection of jurisdiction or means rejection of all honor and respect for the bishop of Rome. Surely there were Orthodox at that time and since that time who did the latter and could be the target of the phrase whereas others did not and were not the targets.
You see, dear Kolokotronis, not only Latin Catholics have had some variation in how they view these matters over the centuries, but so too have the Orthodox. In the heat of polemics, some Orthodox have said some pretty absolutist things about the Bishop of Rome, such that they would be denying any sense of their being "confided to Peter." But at other times, and in the present general viewpoing of most Orthodox, a distinction between primacy of honor and of jurisdiction is widespread. So if Orthodox are permitted to disown the strictest, most anti-Latin claims of the past and give more benign interpretations to them, then surely we Latin Catholics should not be accused of disingenuity if we interpret Unam Sanctam in such a way as to exclude Orthodox who accept Petrine primacy of honor but not primacy of jurisdiction and to suggest that perhaps even Boniface meant that.
I don't have time right now, but I will take a look at the Latin some time and see what's being translated as "confided to" here.
Could you not agree?
FYI alert to a thread explaining Unam Sanctam Bull
"Nearly 50 years ago as a first grader in Catholic school,"
Heh. We must be just about the same age, Jack.
You piqued my curiosity, so I looked it up in Denzinger 468. It reads "Si ergo Graeci sive alii se dicant Petro eiusque successoribus non esse commissos: fateantur necesse se de ovibus Christi non esse, . . ."
To me it is utterly clear that what Boniface is saying here is that anyone who says that they were not committed by Christ to the care of Peter, thereby denies being the sheep of Christ and cannot be saved.
But that is exactly what the Orthodox who make a primacy of honor/jurisdiction do not deny. They do not deny being committed in any sense whatsoever to the pastoral care of Peter. They deny being committed to that pastoral care in the way that others believe they should acknowledge being committed.
The dispute between Orthodox and Latin Catholics is not over whether all Christians are committed to the care of Peter. You do not deny (unlike some extreme Protestants) that in Mt. 16 and in John 21 Christ committed his Church/sheep to the care of Peter, do you? At one time it was common among most Protestants to deny this absolutely but a wholesale denial of it has never been characteristic of the Orthodox-Catholic schism. We are in schism, not in communion fellowship not because you deny any and all Petrine authority but because we disagree over the exact nature of that authority.
Boniface did not intend this as a blanket rejection of all Greeks. He wrote "si (if)" the Greeks or others deny all committedness to Peter they thereby deny being sheep of Christ. If he meant that the fundamental position of the Orthodox involves a denial of being committed to Peter, he should have written, "Since" ("Quia" or "Quoniam" or something like that) the Greeks and (not or) others deny that they are committed to Peter.
Even strictly grammatically the passage implies a distinction between those Greeks who make a blanket deny of any special authority for Peter given him by Christ (as some Protestants still do to this day) and those Greeks who acknowledge some sense of being confided to the pastoral ministry of Peter. I would assume you are included in the latter.
So the more "benign" interpretation of Unam Sanctam upon which Fr. Feeney was condemned in the late 1940s, a few years before the time you were in grade school (do I have it approximately right), is not a later whitewashing of an objectionable passage in Unam Sanctam but a fairly decent prima facie interpretation of the plain words. Your first grade nun (sorry for missing the fact that it was a nun, rather than "he" as I wrote in my earlier post) was teaching a crypto-Feeneyism. The Irish pastor was not just smoothing over your father's ire while secretly approving of the nun's Feeneyism. If the priest was familiar with the recent condemnations of the Feeneyites, then he was in fact giving your father the straight dope on the matter and was in fact condemning the nun's false, Feeneyite interpretation, though in a nice way!
I hope that this might make some sense to you now, after all these years of anger at what truly was an insult to you by the nun who was not accurately representing her own church's teaching but, like the priest said, may not have realized she was teaching condemned Feeneyism. (Or maybe she did realize it?)
Some Protestants acknowledge that Mt. 16 and Jn 21 teach a Petrine primacy; many even recognize that Mt. 16's reference to Isaiah means that Peter's successors are included. Others give a blanket denial. So some Protestants come within the excluded category in this line from Unam Sanctam but other Protestants do not fall into that excluded category. The same would apply to Orthodox, depending on whether they reject absolutely any Petrine primacy or any primacy of honor to his sucessors.
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