I have, as most of you know, the profoundest respect for +BXVI. He is, I suspect, the nearest, or almost the nearest, I will come to seeing a true Father of The Church in my lifetime. On the other hand, I think he can be wrong and here I think his long association with Protestants and his understandable and laudable desire to stem the tide of secularism in the West has got the better of him. He knows better than what he is saying here:
“It is obvious that the old category of “heresy” is no longer of any value. Heresy, for Scripture and the early Church, includes the idea of a personal decision against the unity of the Church, and heresy’s characteristic is pertinacia, the obstinacy of him who persists in his own private way. This, however, cannot be regarded as an appropriate description of the spiritual situation of the Protestant Christian.”
He is wrong on his history, if he is including the East, and as for now, he is clearly wrong about at least American Protestantism if FR is any indication at all.
There are at least two matters here that get my attention. There is, so to speak, the, ahem, hobjective fact of hmissing the, ahem, hmark.
But, heck, you're a lawyer: do you think mens rea counts up there in the heavenly courts? If, say an Orthodox Presbyterian finds himself chafing at some of the strictures of his assembly and yet submits, I think there is the objective wrong of submitting to the wrong bunch, but the virtue of prizing the opinions of those who are his leaders and, in some sense, ecclesiastical betters above his own whim.
It's hard to evaluate for me, I think partially because it was the grace of longing to do IHS will which brought me INTO devout Episcopalianicity, and then OUT of it and into the Tiber. But here, wringing my clothes out on this side of the Tiber I discern strong, though sometimes -- usually -- subtle benefits to not only the Sacraments and sacramentals, but also to "little" things like praying or reading my Bible "with" the Church.
SO I evaluate my experience so as to conclude that it was not a total loss out there in PECUSA (now TEC) but that depriving myself of bona fide sacraments was indeed a great deprivation. But I did receive graces there.(I leave aside the matter of conscience that made it impossible for me to stay in PECUSA as not strictly relevant -- because ignoring that would have been a wholly different and very disastrous sin.)
I'm going to have to go to bed soon. I asked one of the guys to do an Inquisition on my main huge verbose post and he said he might be able to get to it next week. If his opinion is helpful I'll share it.
Also I'll post on my website a little paper I wrote at the request of the guys to some Episcopalians who were struggling on that side of the Tiber. It might shed some obscurity, uh, light, I mean light.