I hope that you are right.
Truly I do.
Obviously I buy into the THEOLOGY of papal supremacy and infallibility (or else I would not bother to remain a Catholic), and so I have faith that the Pope cannot ultimately fail, because God won't let him.
But it's faith.
I could be dead wrong. The Renaissance Popes, after all, included some pretty bad actors. They never made doctrinal pronouncements that changed any of the sacraments or reversed the sacred traditions...but they certainly had a lot of people killed and committed grotesque acts of evil. For me, there is comfort in the fact that, as bad as they were, the Renaissance Popes never attempted to unwind the sacred traditions or to proclaim their own apostate infallible doctrines.
So, paradoxical as it might seem, I look at the really bad popes of the 1400s and 1500s as proof that God won't let the Church fail. Murderers wore the miter in some cases, and by doing so they damaged the reputation of the Church, but none of them ever was moved to use his power to actually pull apart the foundations of the Church.
It could be that this was indeed the divine protection I believe it to be.
But it could also be luck, conservatism, and even the fact that there wasn't money to be made or power to be gained for those bad men by tampering with esoteric religious doctrines. Why stir up a hornet's nest over trans-substantiation when you can sell indulgences at will and entertain your mistresses in the papal apartments.
There has not yet been a pope, however bad, who has gone down the road that the American Episcopalian Bishops have. If one ever does, then we know that there is no Papal Infallibility, or infallibility of the Church, and that Satan can even take that over.
We don't know that yet, though, because at the very worst moment, the immediate Reformation Era papacy, those awful popes were venal and violent, but they weren't theologians and didn't attempt to do what the Episcopalian bishops are attempting.
Now, again thinking theologically, from a Catholic perspective, in the anchor at Rome against what is happening with the ECUSA, I believe I see the REASON God made Peter the Pope and invested him and his successor with the monarchical power over the Church that Catholicism claims he has. I think it is precisely to have the final authority of God's vicar on earth, who cannot fail, and who can literally command the rest of Christianity to desist from an error with the authority of God Himself. "What you bind on earth shall be bound in Heaven" and all that.
I look and see the problem in ECUSA of having the sacraments and having the priests, having the right traditions, being holy, but having nobody with the literal authority of God to command and compel obedience on a spiritual issue when Satan erupts and starts possessing souls. Canterbury cannot exorcise the Devil from the Church, because he can only advise his brother bishops. He cannot hold the power of the Keys, granted by Jesus to Peter, over them and pronounce words with the authority of God.
I don't think that human law itself can hold up without the appeal to revelation, and I don't think revelation itself holds up if all men are equal to interpret it. I really do believe that God foresaw all of this, which is why he provided a single monarch for Christianity, who would be the oracle of God in such matters and be God's vicar on earth, to loose and to bind.
This is the theological interpretation of the Church and the Papacy.
Thus far, no Pope has erred on the sacred so far as to prove it wrong, although they certainly have proved that they too can be possessed by the Devil. Does the Devil have the power to use the lips of a Pope he possesses to command the Church to break with the faith handed down by God?
Thus far, I think that he has not done so.
This comforts me in my faith that he CAN'T.
That said, when I look at the Anglican Communion, I think it's a terrible tragedy that having everything right is not enough to constrain these headstrong men. It does not SURPRISE me, given that I buy the theology of the papacy, that this missing ingredient eventually caused...or allowed...the building to fall.
But it still distresses me.
Satan is on the loose, and the sheep are bleating and wandering in pain. The Holy Spirit needs to send a shepherd.
Now, of course, given that I buy Roman theology, I think that the only shepherd he is ever going to send is at Rome, and that it is pride that prevents the reunion.
But suppose I thought, as Anglicans do, that the Renaissance Popes actually DID commit heresy and actually DID break with the sacred traditions and thereby proved that God does NOT protect the See of Peter from doctrinal error on matters of faith and morals.
Where would I go?
In truth, I would probably go home, disgusted with the whole thing, and give up on Christianity as a false religion. If God held it together for 1500 years only to have it all fall apart in the 1500s, I am more inclined to think that it was illiteracy, tradition, luck, and the simple slowness of everything to change in those times that gave the Church such a good run, and not any intrinsic holy protection.
I cannot believe that God protected the One Church for 1500 years, and then suddenly let it shatter in 1540 into a thousand churches, many of which have themselves dimmed or extinguished.
A Russian theologian once told the Tsar something like "The first Rome fell to the Arian heresy. The second Rome fell to the Saracen. A Third Rome [Russia] stands. A Fourth there shall not be."
But I stop at the first.
If the Roman See, the See of Peter, really was permitted by God to fall to pieces, then I doubt that God has stood behind any other Church either.
Actually, if the First Rome was allowed to fall by God, then I doubt that Christ was God, since it was Christ who gave the power of the keys.
Of course, I don't think that the First Rome ever did fall into heresy, although not for want of trying by some horrible popes. I think they never changed the doctrine. They murdered men, but they did not murder the faith.
I think it was because they COULD not, because God didn't let them.
But perhaps I am very naive.
I do not know what the outcome for Anglican America will be, Deacon. It is my sincere hope that a way for Anglia and Rome to reconcile can be found, because I think that God really did make Rome the anchor, and without it, once the Devil starts to trouble the waters as badly as he has, once he takes captaincy of the ship, the rocks lie ahead and there is no captain who can command the crew and throw the mutineers overboard into the sea.
But who can say.
I do know that if I found Alladins Lamp of Three Wishes, my first wish would be to be transported to spend a day and two nights waiting in a tomb in Palestine all those years ago, to see if It really happened.
And yet... I think of what Kolokotronis has told me of the Orthodox, who also lack a central authority.
This makes me think that the weakness of the Anglican church as we have known it historically (I say this because I think that is coming to an end) has been the "Elizabethan Compromise" -- the forced melding of two rather different groups, the Evangelical and the Anglo-Catholic. We came to accept the fact that to be Anglican meant continual tension, that it meant to be in communion with those whom, well, you were in communion with them only because you have "always" shared this common label. And this has led to today's situation in the world-wide Anglican Communion, where the once unthinkable has become reality, and yet there is still an effort to preserve communion overall even though many jurisdictions have already declared themselves out of communion.
Historic Anglicanism doesn't have a quick-acting immune system.
But I am guessing this will come to an end and Anglicanism will divide and coalesce into three groups. The largest will be the Evangelical Anglicans; the REC and Network churches will be part of that group. Their self-authority will likely come to resemble that of the Orthodox.
Next will be the Anglo-Catholics, hopefully with a reunification of the various North American groups; it is possible this group will rejoin Rome as the TAC is even now attempting.
Finally there will be the apostates who will eventually just disappear.
I could be wrong, of course...
That Russian Primate was Nikon, who did for Russian Orthodoxy what William Laud did for Anglicanism: by trying to take a partly-state run church to complete independence, both ended up impeaching the church authority and leaving the bishops even more subservient (and in many cases willingly so) to the state. This was the problem that the Anglican Communion was going to have to face from the start and is why the ABC still can't enforce discipline. Whoever held the miter of Canterbury was still the dependent of the King/Queen, who was legally the head of the English Church. This was also true for the Russian Church.
As for potential Roman apostasy, the closest any Pope ever came was when Symmachus appeared to support dualistic modalism. It is quite possible he was under duress, but that makes him an inadequate Pope. The proclamation he signed was never enforced and Rome immediately returned to clear affirmation of Trinitarian Chalcedonian Christianity. That was back in Augustine's day.
That said, it is perhaps a little unfair to current Catholic prelates to say that prior ones did not lapse when there was every opportunity to do so. At the time, the very way ordinary philosophers and speculators thought was drenched in historic Catholic teleology and cosmology. This meant that every epistomologic road was, from wherever it started, going to end at the Tiber eventually. It was when people like Giordano Bruno started rethinking philosophy from first observed principles that the very foundation of Catholic thought came under attack (as it seemed at the time). Now that many are convinced that there is actually a secular explanation for reality, maintaining the Catholic doctrine becomes ever more difficult: the contrary reasoning has been thought out. Not only that: it is a sad unintended consequence, but if you have been granted an internally consistent explanation for reality, then one which exactly reverses this explanation will also be internally consistent. Both will be unfalsifiable from within their own frames of reference, given their premises. We believe based upon axioms God has revealed to us through His Son and by the grace of His Holy Spirit. They believe on the basis of the intent to reverse the orientation and to put Man as the standard for reference. All you need do is substitute our name for The Name and you don't even have to otherwise change the text to arrive at where they are.
Still, I have been there and have come back. The rationalistic, materialistic explanation for the kosmos does not hold up because it can point to no origin. It becomes even more an article of faith than the Catholic doctrine of creation it presumes to replace. It's also pretty tough to replace Something with nothing. But in this we see the perseverance of the saints and the preservation of His Body by His grace-filled action in the Holy Spirit: God maintains His people even in what look to them to be the worst of times.
Now, what I can't do more than pray for is the continued validity or even existence of protestant Episcopalianism. This is a set of doctrines which has, contrary to Our Lord's explicit injunction, embraced the world, the flesh and the devil as if they thought they could tame these beasts and incorporate them, thus nullifying them. That is hard to distinguish from lunacy, but what can be said is that it reveals that humans can tend to hubris in any condition or Age. This one just happens to be a particularly pride-filled and reckless generation, making the effect all the more glaring.
In Christ,
Deacon Paul+