IMHO: For An Orthodox or Catholic Xtian who knew his religion to apostasize is a calamity and mortal sin. His soul is in very grave peril.
I do not understand the phenomenon I'm about to relate, but I think it's undeniable:
My Orthodox Acquaintance (hereinafter MOA) is what you might call OINO - no not a wino, "Orthodox in name only." He sees nothing wrong with worshiping at the Episcopal Church and receiving the sacraments there. He knows, but it seems only in an academic - with a slight tinge of ethnic pride - way some of his religious background. MOA and his wife do not say "grace" over meals or prayers at home, they don't talk about the Faith. They both are good, conscientious folks, she's Episcopalian, who have no idea that God loves them enough to die for them. I once inflicted upon them one of my Xtian panegyrics and they both said it was "beautiful", but I could just tell that they thought it was kind of like Spiritual Disneyland -- beautiful, entertaining, provocative of nice longings and feelings, but not REAL, not THE REALEST of ALL. They didn't get that if it was beautiful it was so not because I write beautifully, but because I write clumsily about the most beautiful thing, about beauty itself
Now I would say they are currently negligently sinful (and I'd guess that the vice of despair lies beneath this.) They are not really seeking grace, not reading the Bible nor the Fathers, not deliberately following the advice in the parable of the unjust judge and nagging God.
I lay at least some of the blame for this at the feet of their pastors.
In the days of my "radio show" I made a point to end every show with "God loves you," and to structure the entire 30 minutes of yatta yatta toward making that declaration clear and developing what it means in our lives. I preached at a prominent Church near here and a number of people said that was the first time in a long time that anybody had either told a joke in the pulpit or told them that God loved them and yearned for them to love Him.
Before the Pope came down on lay preachers during Mass (and I think he was right to do so) one of my very favorite pastors, a holy and loving man, even if he is pretty much a pinko, sort of meditatively observed that Catholic homiletics tended to assume that people were "saved" while Protestant homiletics (by which, he explained, he meant mine) took the rhetorical stance that the preacher had good news to impart, news which hadn't yet been heard.
My personal "spirituality" (gag, retch, bleah) is centered on the notion that contemplation of the FACT of God's love and action coming out of that contemplation is where it's at. Part of my Dominican call is not the intellectual side of it but the evangelical.
Even in the Sheriff's office, where most of the full-timers thought I was a klutz (at least until I got into some fights) and thought the idea of a lay chaplain was stupid and just one of the Sheriff's crazy notions -- even there they responded with startled amazement when I told them, usually individually, that God loved them, right then, just as they were, and that nothing they could do could ever make Him love them more. And consequently they listened at least respectfully when I advised them that an appropriate response to that was to start praying and to go to Church and to think about their faith.
Looks like a digression -- it isn't.
The person who is susceptible, I think, this is all in my head, to sheep-stealing is the person who has not, whoever's fault it is, expected to have a personal relationship with IHS or to meet him personally, or to find him in the Most Holy Sacrament. Now being in that case may involve mortal sins, as I said above. But when someone is so empty in his personal life with Christ I don't think it's a mortal sin when he, in response to effective evangelical preaching by some of the other groups is finally brought to offer his heart to Christ.
This is NOT, I don't think, countenancing apostasy. It is patient parsing. The commitment to Christ is good, and it MAy amend all. The stepping away from the means of grace and the plene esse of ecclesia is a disaster.
But in disasters we must keep our heads. We must affirm the "coming to Jesus" and rejoice in it, while we also deplore the separation from the fullness of the Church.
It's not for nothing that Our Lord had to do with fishermen. If you throw the net wrong, the fish spook. Timing matters. And what we lay people need to do is to be ready to explain to these people how what they are talking about has been taught about in their own churches not only for millennia but for them in their time. We need to accept that it was often taught very badly or negligently. And we need to trust that even though today such and such a person is not with us before the Sacrament, God is at work with Him and He may help him understand that IHS is not the property of the other groups but is and has always been beckoning from the altar.
Pope Adrian VI in 1523 said
We freely acknowledge that God has allowed this chastisement to come upon His Church because of the sins of men and especially because of the sins of priests and prelates ... We know well that for many years much that must be regard with horror had come to pass in this Holy See: abuses in spiritual matter, transgressions against the Commandments; indeed, that everything has been perverted.I'm not minimizing (I think) the sadness and general terribleness of people leaving the Church for another group. But while we can't stop sheep-stealing, we can see that the sheep let themselves be stolen for a reason which ought to set or at least influence our agenda. We need a new commitment to evangelization, not only for the unbaptized or members of the other groups, but for those in the pew every Sunday.
Oh, and I take solace from the stories told be the Coming Home Network of people who leave the Catholic Church as a result of some religious experience but then return. So I'm not going to panic and I'm not going to condemn the good in their newfound relationship with Christ. But I will work and pray to get them back. And I don't think that's going to be accomplished if I start the conversation with, "You know, you're committing a mortal sin here ...."
I assure you that it IS FRIENDLY fire! :)
“IMHO: For An Orthodox or Catholic Xtian who knew his religion to apostasize is a calamity and mortal sin. His soul is in very grave peril.”
I love it when you guys go all Latin on us with the “mortal sin” as opposed to “venial sin” stuff!
“My Orthodox Acquaintance (hereinafter MOA) is what you might call OINO - no not a wino, “Orthodox in name only.” He sees nothing wrong with worshiping at the Episcopal Church and receiving the sacraments there. He knows, but it seems only in an academic - with a slight tinge of ethnic pride - way some of his religious background.”
He's not at all unusual, at least here in America. For many decades there was a belief among the Orthodox here that the Episcopal Church was merely English Orthodoxy and that there was a de facto if not a de jure (though there very nearly was in the ist decade of the 20th century)communion between the Piskies and Orthodoxy. Orthodox believed and were even told by some priests that if there was no Orthodox Church nearby, they could go to the local Episcopal Church and intercommune etc. After about 1910, no bishop said that but priests did into the 1960s at least. Episcopals from bishops on down encouraged this. Virtually all of the Orthodox who did this, and I had some family members who did, honestly thought it was OK. It still goes on. We recently received a family back into the Church after a couple of decades in the Episcopal Church. They were received by Confession, recitation of the Creed and then Communion.
Your OINO friend's priests bear a heavy burden having failed this man but he too is guilty of a grave sin. In Orthodoxy, sin can be voluntary or involuntary. Your friend's is at least involuntary. The reason is because sin is a missing of the mark, Christ. There's no requirement that the miss be intentional. One assumes, I suppose, that an intentional miss is less worthy of divine mercy than unintentional, but who knows these things? Maybe it makes no difference to God. You are of course correct that going to your OINO friend and calling him an apostate will accomplish nothing. But that, MD, is not the issue. The issue is rejoicing over communion, knowing or unknowing, with heresy because it appears to be better than nothing. I submit that since we don't know the extent of God's mercy or whither the Spirit goes, outside The Church but we do know the result of communion with heresy, your position can never be acceptable for members of The Church. It stands to reason then that The Church should always oppose the efforts of ecclesial groups to gain adherents in lands where The Faith of The Church is The Faith of the nation, as in Poland or Ireland or Italy or Greece or Serbia or Russia. I do believe that any group has the right to serve its own people wherever they are so long as its teachings and practices are not contrary to the good order of society.
Amen, MD. :) I would infinitely rather have my next door neighbor and friend become a Roman Catholic or Orthodox than be lost forever. It's not even an issue. This is just common sense to me.