Posted on 10/30/2010 6:11:12 AM PDT by Pride_of_the_Bluegrass
“Catholic Church: Christ nullified God’s promises to the Jews,” reads the headline on the Israel Today website. That is not quite true: At the just-concluded Synod of Middle East Bishops, a cleric from the tiny group of Melkite Greeks, Archbishop Cyril Salim Bustros, made such a statement on behalf of the Melkites, not the Catholic Church.
The head of the same church, the Syrian-based Patriarch Gregorios III Laham, also attacked priestly celibacy before the Synod. He wasn’t speaking for Rome, either. Clerical marriage hasn’t helped the Melkites; they claim just 1.3 million members worldwide, fewer than the Korean Methodist Church or the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Papua New Guinea. Their actual numbers are much smaller.
The concerns of Greek Christians will fade before long, for in two or three generations there will be no Greek Christians in the Middle East, nor indeed Christians of any sort in the Middle East. Nor, for that matter, will there be many Greeks; with a fertility rate of only 1.37 children per female, one of the world’s lowest, Greece by mid-century will have a population two-thirds of which exceeds the age of sixty, and very little population at all by the end of the century. In a hundred years, modern Greek will be a dying language.
(Excerpt) Read more at firstthings.com ...
Interesting analysis. Pretty much every Orthodox Christian population has a negative growth rate - some of this is probably due to Orthodox Christianity’s official acceptance of artificial birth control. And since Orthodoxy has had very little missionary presence outside of Alaska and Japan in the past thousand years, it does not have the Catholic situation where disobedient and infertile Europeans are at least being replaced by devout Africans, Asians and Hispanics.
The rest of the article is also fascinating - this is an excellent column.
Ping
Since Vatican II, pretty much every White and Middle Eastern Christian population has had a negative growth rate, but the Melkites are Roman Catholic, not Orthodox.
This is a ridiculous statement for an article in a magazine that once purported to be Catholic. The Roman Catholic Church includes many ancient eastern rites in addition to the largest group, the Roman Rite. The bishops of eastern rites are the full equal in authority to the bishops from the Roman Rite.
Archbishop Bustros, speaking from Rome in his capacity as authorized spokesman for the Synod, described the meaning of the official synod conclusions. No other bishops of the synod or ranking Vatican officials have contradicted +Bustros, so it is inaccurate to say he was not speaking in official capacity for the Catholic Church.
Catholic apologists play a game of ‘plausible deniability’ whereby Bishops’ activism on behalf of evil is never the fault of the Church itself. You’d think all those Churchmen were Protestant television prophets with ‘no controlling authority’!
Archbishop Bustros was speaking in English and term "nullified" is probably an inaccurate translation. However, it correct that the Church does not view the promise of ancient Israel to Abraham as applying to modern Jews more than to Palestinians.
That's one of the main features of having a Pope.
He is not an official spokesman for the Catholic Church. He is an official spokesman for his diocese.
No Catholic outside of his diocese has to listen to a single thing he has to say.
Also, there are four Melkite Churches. One is Catholic, three are Orthodox.
Archbishop Bustros served as official spokesman for a synod called by the Pope. Are you disputing any part of his statement on Catholic teaching?
That is irrelevant to the discussion here. Archbishop Bustros and is diocese are fully Catholic.
Bustros is a Louvain-educated modernist whose teaching on Jews has no basis in orthodox Catholic theology, but in liberationist, anticolonialist 70s nonsense.
Thank you for your refreshing honesty.
Not in their teaching.
However, I was responding to your statement above, namely that "the Melkites are Roman Catholic not Orthodox."
You were wrong.
I corrected your erroneous statement.
Which doctrinal teaching of Melkite Greek Rite is not fully Catholic?
It's not honest.
It's simply incorrect.
The Scriptures do not say this.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church does not say this.
The Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas - the most respected work of Catholic systematic theology - does not say this.
The Catholic Church has never taught that the promises made by God to the Jews do not apply to the Jews.
More beer please's statement's are his personal opinions and his attempt to tar the entire Catholic Church with them is simply dishonest.
Their patriarch's denigration of clerical celibacy, for one. That's pretty much the opposite of "fully Catholic" teaching.
You are welcome. I do not see how the ambiguity of the past few decades is beneficial to anybody.
“Ave Maria in Chaldean”: only dimly related but I’ll post it anyway.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jPMVZCg5V8
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