Posted on 06/30/2003 2:53:51 PM PDT by NYer
VATICAN CITY Pope John Paul II again reached out to the Orthodox Church on Sunday, saying his efforts at reconciliation weren't just "ecclesiastic courtesy" but a sign of his profound desire to unite the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches.
John Paul made the comments during his regular appearance to pilgrims and tourists in St. Peter's Square. Later Sunday, he welcomed a delegation from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople at a traditional Mass marking the feast day of St. Peter and St. Paul.
"The exchange of delegations between Rome and Constantinople, for the respective patron feasts, goes beyond just an act of ecclesiastic courtesy," the pontiff said. "It reflects the profound and rooted intention to re-establish the full communion between East and West."
John Paul has made improving relations with the Orthodox Church a hallmark of his nearly 25-year papacy, visiting several mostly Orthodox countries and expressing regret for the wrongs committed by the Catholic Church against Orthodox Christians.
Despite his efforts at healing the 1,000-year-old schism, he hasn't yet visited Russia because of objections from the Russian Orthodox Church.
During the Mass on Sunday, 42 new archbishops received the pallium, a band of white wool decorated with black crosses that symbolizes their bond with the Vatican. Two of the archbishops received the pallium in their home parishes; the rest took part in the Mass in St. Peter's Basilica.
Once again a Franko-Latin Catholic confuses the role of a worldy authority with what should be the authority of Bishop of Rome. Then again a true supporter of the Throne of St. Peter would not imagine a Bishop of Rome wearing armor and leading armies in battle on campaigns of worldly conquest....
Drop the filioque clause, and get some of your priests married off.
We won't repudiate the teaching of the Fathers from the beginning.
Then you have a recent beginning relative to the Orthodox because the Nicean Creed-THE ONLY AUTHORITY on the matter (even the then Pope said so) has no filioque clause. I dare you to find it. Double dare you.
Complete the quote: "and embrace Islam." That's what so many Orthodox did. That's why there are so many "Turks" who look like Greeks.
In response to my goading him for using Lukas Notaras' infamous phrase: "better the turban of the Sultan, than the tiara of the Pope!" TexConfederate1861 wrote:
"I prefer, like my forefathers to reject heresy."
So I needled him with the above. His use of the quote is he would rather see Byzantine Christendom destroyed than have it subject to the Pope. So I completed the quote and thought again for him.
Its not "hatred of the Greeks" to observe that many of them converted to Islam, some voluntarily, many more not so voluntarily, thanks to Jannissary Laws and White Slavery. But lets go back to the cause of this - the rejection by the Greek people of all western aid in preference for Muslim subjugation to the slightest whiff of union with Rome.
TexConfederate1861 line can essentially be restated to modern English: "Better slaves of Islam than subjects of Roman Catholicism."
I deplore this attitude. First, in making Catholics heretics, when the Catholic and Orthodox heirarchies describe our seperation as a schism, not a heretical cleaving. Second, the preference for Islam to Christianity, when the attitude of Islam for 1400 years has been to seek the utter annhilation and extermination of Christianity in all lands that it controls, a project which has suceeded in modern Turkey, Algeria, Arabia, Tunisia, Central Asia, Iran, and elsewhere.
At a time when a Holy War brews in Sudan and Chechnya between Catholic and Orthodox Christians respectively on the one hand, and Muslims on the other, the slightest extension of sympathy to this line of thought is to be thoroughly deplored.
The Good Shepherd goes out in search of his lost sheep. The very fact that Orthodoxy has never felt an imperative towards seeking reunion, even on its terms, is a black mark against it in my book.
And now the man who blessed the campaign is a Saint!
What is unity? Must it carry the rubberstamp of a human?
No one, other than a few bigots, wants "unity" to mean "sameness". We want unity to mean we live together in peace in the same Church. If the Roman Catholics can live together with Eastern Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox with Western Orthodox, why not?
We want an acknowledgment that because we share the same faith, we should share the same government and share communion with each other. Our saints are one, but we are not.
The polemical distortion and exaggeration by both sides of differences over items like the filioque, immaculate conception, azymes, celibacy, and all the rest of it shed much heat but little light.
I dare say that the recipe for union is one part Papal humility mixed with one part Orthodox acceptance.
It is better to die a martyr at the hands of Muslims then be converted to the heretical Christianity of the Latins. The Latins who sacked the City and then enthroned a prostitute on the throne of the Patriarch in St. Sophia and called themselves "true" Christians in the process.
No matter how many of you kill next time, you will never force us to bend the knee to your Pope.
Our Lord is Jesus Christ and we will not put any faith in your prince of this world!
Amen!
Amen!
Amen!
No matter how many of us they kill the next time!
Orthodoxy has and does convert whole nations. Orthodoxy is the nectar of Christ, its scent attracts. You do not need to force spoon feed it to people like it is castor oil.
Ok, reject your western heresies and have the Pope denounce his supremacy and infallibility and we'll talk.
And admit to your complicity in the forced conversion of the Serbs.
Those are our terms. 10 to 1 says you'll reject 'em! LOL!
Our Lord is Jesus Christ and we will not put any faith in their prince of this world!
The Orthodox for example translated the Greek New Testament into the languages of their flock, be they Slavs or Arabs, etc. While the Latins until Vatican II insisted that the only words to be used to worship God was in Latin (after it was translated into Latin from the Greek of course).
In Anna Comnena's description of Orthodox English refugees' last stand against the Normans at the Battle of Durazzo (present-day Albania) in 1081. "The axe-bearing barbarians from the Isle of Thule", as Anna called them, thrust back an attack on their part of the line, and then pursued the Normans into the sea up to their necks. But they had advanced too far, and a Norman cavalry attack threw them back again. "It seems that in their tired condition they were less strong than the Kelts [Normans]. At any rate the barbarian force was massacred there, except for survivors who fled for safety to the sanctuary of the Archangel Michael; all who could went inside the building: the rest climbed to the roof and stood there, thinking that would save their lives. The Latins merely set fire to them and burned the lot, together with the sanctuary..."
Thus did the chant of the English Orthodox warriors, "Holy Cross! Holy Cross!" fall silent on earth. And thus did the Lord accept their sacrifice as a whole-burnt offering to Himself in heaven. “May Michael the standard-bearer lead them into the holy Light, which Thou didst promise of old to Abraham and his seed."
In 1383 John Wyclif wrote: "The pride of the Pope is the reason why the Greeks are divided from the so-called faithful... It is we westerners, too fanatical by far, who have been divided from the faithful Greeks and the Faith of our Lord Jesus Christ..."
I dare you to find the filioque clause in the original Nicean Creed--I double dare you.
The Nicene Creed to which the Councils referred said simply:
We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible; and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten of his Father, of the substance of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father. By whom all things were made, both which be in heaven and in earth. Who for us men and for our salvation came down, and was incarnate and was made man. He suffered and the third day he rose again, and ascended into heaven. And he shall come again to judge both the living and the dead. And in the Holy Ghost.
It mentions ZILCH about the Holy Spirit. You are confusing the Constantinopolitan embellishment of that Creed from AD 381, which is where the phrase "Proceeds from the Father" was added by the Greeks along with a number of other phrases, with the original Nicene creed. Of course, if the Creed was truly untouchable, than Constantinople sinned in embellishing it. If Constainople I did not sin in embellishing Nicea, neither did the Council of Toledo in adding the filioque to the Constantinopolitan Creed.
In any case, the Fathers did not forbid elaborating the creed to more fully explain the faith, as was necessarly done at Chalcedon and Constantinople III, but the introduction of a new Creed. And as I pointed out, Constantinople II explicitly accepts and endorses as Orthodox the works of Sts. Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, Hilary of Poitiers, Augustine of Hippo, Pope Leo the Great, and Ambrose of Milan, all of whom explicitly taught the double procession called the filioque. Rejecting the filioque as heresy is casting these saintly Fathers out of the Church along with it and making in error the 5th Ecumenical Council.
"We further declare that we hold fast to the decrees of the four Councils, and in every way follow the holy Fathers, Athanasius, Hilary, Basil, Gregory the Theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, Theophilus, John (Chrysostom) of Constantinople, Cyril, Augustine, Proclus, Leo and their writings on the true faith." (Second Council of Constantinople)
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