By this.
Let me explain.
For those of you who read this blog who are still unaware, I am Byzantine Catholic. Essentially, I am one of the Orthodox Christians who reunited with Rome a few centuries back. We rejoined with two caveats: that we be allowed to stay true to our theology and liturgy (which is different than the Roman Mass), and that we be allowed to keep our married priests.
Oh, wait, what? The Catholic Church allows married men to be ordained?
They sure as hell allowed for it then.
The Orthodox Church has considered married parish priests essential to its ministry since the beginning of the universal Church 2000 years ago. At one point the West had married clergy as well, but that shifted around the 8th century for reasons that the East has never approved of. Not ever. Rome's response has always been one of naive tolerance. "We are Rome, so therefore everything we do is better", has been their attitude for almost as long as Rome has existed. Anyone who is an Eastern Catholic is acutely aware of the prejudice, and takes it about as silently as one is able to.
Well, I've had enough of that. Rome has, once again, overstepped its bounds in its naive idea that it is superior to all others, an idea that is unfounded on any amount of serious reading of history and common sense. I've had enough of the spiritual descendants of Bishop Ireland, that scumbag of arrogance (may he rest in peace, it's a lot better than he ever gave us!) making power plays over us.
My message to my fellow Roman Catholics who agree with the scumbag of arrogance is:
Our origins have little to nothing to do with you, and I am not impressed by your insistence that you are better. Become educated so I can actually take you seriously.
For the rest of my Latin brethren who try to defend the Cardinal's decision: get the hell out of my way. Rome has no right to do what it did, and the fact that B16 did not announce this personally is of little consequence, as his man "over" us (as if they can be!) did. What the Cardinal did is as close to an act of Rome as there's going to be, short of the Pope himself speaking (which B16 probably won't, he hasn't defended us from this idiot before, and there's indication to the opposite).
So, to be clear, I am done pulling punches with people who seem to think that "us Byzantines" are backwards. We are older and, quite frankly, our theology developed while you were still getting destroyed in Rome by the weekly barbarian raids. Everything that you have that you're so proud of came from us, from your Mass to your Rosary to your celibate priests. A little more than an idiotic "well put up with you" is required, seeing as the East is the source of your basic theology. To get respect you must give respect, and I've lost my patience, short as it was to begin with.
(And to those of you who are my friends and who are offended by my referring to the Cardinal as an idiot, please go back to one of the man's earlier statements that clerical celibacy was an apostolic tradition. The fact that that man can even consider such a statement shows a profound ignorance present in all idiots that I've met, hence the term. I am not attacking the office, he is a bishop after all. But the man? If there's anyone who has earned wrath, it is him. And I will not stay silent anymore. Will my temper eventually calm down? Of course. But do not think it will change my opinion of Rome, for it is a reaction against what Rome thinks of itself. My opinion will change when Rome wises up, and not a moment before.)
Um... what about those of us who agree you shouldn't be bossed around like that? Are we allowed to put in that it's not like the theology or practice of the Church in Rome was irrelevant because the city wasn't up to keeping barbarians out? Or that just because the Mass was said in Greek before it was said in Latin doesn't mean we didn't get it straight from the apostles in Judea just like the rest of Christianity? Not to say that the point isn't valid that all this stuff is as ancient in the East as in the West, just that being unfair to one side isn't solved by trying to turn the tables and be unfair to the other. We have to recognise that Christianity has legitimately been carried on in the East and the West, despite the handful of crucial disputes between the two.
ReplyDeleteAnd as a Roman Catholic... I live with crap like this all over. The Church in the West says the Eastern Churches are supposed to govern themselves, then turns around and tries to step in on their government? Know what, it sounds just like when she said everyone should learn chant, then turned around and let the new form of the Mass be pioneered by leaders who threw out chant, Latin and anything else that had anything to do with tradition (or Tradition). You guys aren't getting shafted -- well, okay, you are, but it's nothing specially directed at you guys -- it's just been a universal shaft-fest back and forth over here more or less since Martin Luther got nature and grace all separated from each other and threw authority of the visible Church out the window. Maybe longer than that; I just happen to have a vague idea how to trace it from now back to then, but not how to trace it farther back. Unless, of course, you want to chalk it up to human nature being weak (whether that's a matter of its being deeply damaged by original sin or a matter of it just plain not being all that great without grace fixing it up; I tend to think the latter, because Baptism gets rid of original sin and yet we still screw up and screw ourselves and everybody else we can), in which case I think we can all blame this one great-great-grandfather of ours who ate some gorram fruit (metaphorical or literal or both) that he was told not to.
When I attribute the whole deal to Martin Luther, by the way, I'm not so much saying that the Roman Church has been influenced by heretics as that she's been influenced a bit much by opposition to heretics; for example, temporary rules or even mere popular custom wind up doing things like taking chant out of the Mass precisely so the people are as unlike the priest as possible (since Protestantism denied that the priesthood was anything sacramentally over and above what belongs to all Baptised Christians and we wanted to avoid Protestantism), and then when the Popes finally say that was an overreaction some fools seized on it to try to make the Church Protestant, thereby ensuring that there would be people to this day who, instead of listening to the Popes say to get chant back, insist that the people should remain silent because they think the idea that the people participate in the Mass is Protestant.
And you know what? That means we're going to need the Saints to fix problems like this. Because the authority of the Church can safeguard the Truth, but the only way people are going to follow it is by opposing untruth without becoming defined by their opposition -- and to oppose evil without becoming defined by that opposition requires that we be focused on Good even in our opposing evil, which is an essentially Saintly quality. Only Saints can focus on Truth enough to defeat untruth without becoming unjust and untruthful in their attempt to defeat it.
You know what though, you do have every right to be angry. And... I'm sorry. Really. None of this should be this way.
ReplyDelete(Not like it altogether stops Christ from working through His Church [in the East and the West] -- but on the other hand that doesn't mean we can turn a blind eye to sin, or even to simple mistakes if those mistakes put undue burden on others.)
To the first post: I say thanks for signing up. Honestly, your comments are... awe-inspiring, sir. You often upstage Andy and I on our blogs, and I am very happy that this is so.
ReplyDeleteIt falls back on the fact that some Latins just cannot seem to understand that they're incomplete, and always will be til the East comes back. But, like any civilized human being, we don't want to be treated as pets. Not too much to ask for, right?
Don't ask that of Bishop Ireland and his followers.
Thanks, and glad I can help... although honestly, I wish I could consistently make my points without going Dr. Horrible on complex sentence and paragraph structure and parenthetical statements. (*points to bag of glop* "The molecules tend to...shift...")
Delete(Word verification, ironically, is "ptoppea soul".)
On point (since you seem to like these rambles), the really terrible thing is that Bishop Ireland's heirs don't seem to even realize the legacy they're living. Anyone I know who knows that name associates it with "Americanism or, more descriptively, beating up on German, Italian, Spanish and Byzantine Catholics till they retreat to isolated ethnic parishes or return to the schism from whence they came." I've yet to run into anyone who knows about this and thinks it was for the best; but apparently when Americanism was condemned next to nobody was listening (guess that's a trend that goes back a long, long way), so not a few people go on following it without even knowing who Bishop Ireland was or that "the Americanist heresy" doesn't refer to the belief that motorcycles are awesome because they're a thing of the country I love best.
DeleteI definitely think some folks are just insecure when it comes to dealing with their fellow Christians and even fellow Catholics, and consequently don't know how to deal with legit differences any more than with heresy or even how to give the benefit of the doubt to the good faith of people who take (or seem at first glance to take -- sometimes when you dig deeper into the distinctions you find more complexity) the wrong stance on something that's a matter of essentials in the Faith. It's like we know there's pressure on us from within and without to doubt the Faith in little things as well as great things, but many people respond to this simply by developing a defensive attitude, and then when you combine this with how much easier it is to disagree with someone who isn't from intellectually unknown waters naturally people start practicing beating up on each other ad infinitum in the name of defending what they all really agree on or would if they had enough intellectual skill to parse in distinctions and categorize the weighing of prudential questions as such. (And in blogland, this is amplified by the interpretation of the blogger's informative mission as "Weigh in on everything that other people are already talking about! Your two cents matter! Even if they're the same as twenty other people's two cents!") Obviously sometimes we do have to have fraternal correction (say, the folks who got Rome's attention on the Legion of Christ following a manipulative methodology passed down in ridiculous detail from a sexual predator, however honest and faithful the average priest in that movement may be), but there's no sense of fraternal trust to lay the groundwork for, well, the fraternal part of fraternal correction. Some people have criticized the "bunker mentality" of groups that have been at risk of schism (e.g. the SSPX), but the truth is bunker mentality is possibly the main weak spot of most otherwise faithful Catholics in the modern world (heck, even the rather faithless Catholics-in-name-only don't seem to know how to deal with disagreement except by saying it's all opinion).
If we're going to have legit disagreements, first we gotta get our legit agreements down straight so we have someplace to start dealing with disagreements in the light of something other than mutual hatred -- perhaps, say, the light of Christ's love? I mean, there's only one reason any of this matters, right? Souls. We all (and I mean we all, myself included) gotta work on seeing souls not as some kind of brownie points we have to score by forcing 'em to either join our team or admit they're against us, but as the image and likeness of God that should be brought to the Truth not so much to crush whatever's wrong in them (though that should happen, it isn't the main point -- the final end, as the Thomists would say) as for the sake of their awesomeness.
And now that I’m done with that ramble, I need to go deal with my literal kitchen sink, which ironically has a most certainly schismatically heretical and unholy clog between where the dishwasher joins the drain and where the right half of the sink joins it. ;^)
DeleteTell us what you really think . . .
ReplyDeleteAnd, then, pray.