“This won’t wash.”
What specifically?
“From Christianity’s beginnings, the Church has been attacked by those introducing false teachings, or heresies.
The Bible warned us this would happen. Paul told his young protégé, Timothy, “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths” (2 Tim. 4:3–4).”
No argument here.
“Faiths outside the Catholic Church are not just two sides of the same coin as you earlier posted. There is the genuine coin that established ONE truth and the rest are all cheap counterfeits just as Paul warned.”
The problem is that the Catholic Church is outside the Church. The One True Church is the Orthodox Church. Rome is at best in schism and arguably is heretical. So I see no contradiction at all.
Two sides of the same heretical coin.
So Petrine Infallibility suddenly vanishes with the Great Schism?
The Orthodox Church is an accident of history. The Byzantine Empire collapsed suddenly in 1453. A soldier forgot to lock one of the gates of the fortified city of Constantinople, and the Turks sacked the city. With the Turks in control of the capital city, the rest of the empire crumbled quickly. Under pressure from Muslims, most of the Eastern churches repudiated their union with Rome, and this is the split that persists to this day.
The patriarch of Constantinople sided with the heretical, iconoclastic emperors.
The current Eastern Orthodox communion dates from the 1450s, making it a mere six decades older than the Protestant Reformation.
Ironically, in the Church’s eighth-century struggle against the Iconoclastic heresy (which sought to eliminate all sacred images), it was the pope and the Western bishops mainly who fought for the Catholic practice of venerating icons, which is still very much a part of Orthodox liturgy and spirituality.