“Do you see some hope now with the motu proprio of last year?”
Of course I do, P. But you and I both know that the next pope could be a modernizing showboater. +BXVI has to reestablish liturgical, and I’d say theological, orthodoxy to the Roman Church. He’s an old man, P. He’ll need to establish a bulwark against another pope who is more concerned with presiding over liturgical circuses and making grand gestures than steering the Bark of Peter through a particularly stormy temporal sea. That’s why you’ve seen me pray that “God gives him the years”!
That never stopped any of the popes and local Latin Churches from changing something. The introduction of the filioque is a perfect example. But, the same thing happened with the Council of Trent. The pope placed a prohibition on any changes ever or any other Mass.
That lasted exactly 34 years before his successors "revised" the unchangeable Trindentine Mass, and then his successor revised it again 30 years later! Pope Pius XII made all sorts of changes for the Easter liturgy replacing the triple candle with a single large candle by fiat.
Pope John XXIII dropped the words "perfidious" in the Good Friday prayers for the Jews, and Pope Paul VI changed the Eucharistic fast from the midnight before communion to one hour before communion, in the same manner in 1963. Liturgical movement in the Latin Church was brewing since the early 1900's, etc.
Bottom line is: the Latin Church is in constant reform. It's constantly changing something. It is intimately tied to the wordily matters and it tends to change with them. Look at the Renaissance art!
They also change their doctrine, which they will deny. But Trent leaves no doubt that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church (meaning the Church that is in communion with the Pope of Rome). Post Vatican II teaching is the same except they expanded the definition of the Catholic Church to those properly baptized who for no fault of their own are not in communion with the Pope of Rome!
This, of course, includes the Orthodox who are "deficient" and the Protestants who are "gravely deficient." It takes a complete fool to not see that this is not the same doctrine taught 450 years ago.
Yet the Catechism of the Catholic Church says in
I am confused.
Catholic Encyclopedia New Advent from c. 1917 says "hell in the strict sense, or the place of punishment for the damned, be they demons or men"
Yet on July 28, 1999 Pope John Paul II says hell "is the state [not a physical place] of those who definitively reject the Father's mercy, even at the last moment of their life."
The Catholic Church also changed the doctrine of how we end up in hell from God punishing us to we conemndingoursleves by rejecting God.
So, in short, in addition to inappropriate "art" of nudity, the problem with any "guarantees" that could make the Orthodox more agreeable to reunion is lacking considering complete absence of changes in any doctrinal teaching in the East.
Given the track record, there can be no guarantee that nothing will change 30 years after the reunion. In fact, given the track record, we can be almost sure that there will be changes, and then we will begin another millennium of innovations until the next schism.
The Latin mentality is set on the "development of the deposit of faith which is antithetical to Eastern Orthodox mindset. Our think is divergent. That;s why any reunion, no matter how nice it would be, could never work.