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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+