De « Cui Pertinebit » à « frjohnmorris » 2 days ago
<catholic world report/item/2884/Roman_Rights_and_Wrongs.aspx?refresh?=1#comment-12205788210>Remarquable analyse détaillée et démontage des objections byzantines et russes.
I'm an ex-atheist,turned Southern Baptist, turned Orthodox monk, now entering into communion with Rome.
I'm entering into communion with Rome because I realized that, the more I looked into things, the more it became clear that Rome was in the right on every issue. I will admit that Orthodoxy gives every appearance of being the "Apostolic" Church, mostly on account of the preservation of *formal* antiquity. But the Church is One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic, not "Scattered, Mystical, Overlapping and Ancient."
Rome has been on the front lines against the Apostasy for five centuries. I would have a hard time believing that She was the Church myself, given Her liturgical crisis and widespread, interior dissent, were it not for the fact that several marvelous and incontrovertible apparitions of the Theotokos over the past three centuries predicted that precisely such a thing was coming. I view the uniformity of Orthodox exterior forms as a product more of her ent-renched, reactionary nature at present (and her long domination by Islam and Atheism), and less as a function of any authentic spiritual life... a view confirmed by my experience at many parishes, where the icons and chant may be nice, but the people are just as lackadaisical and theologically confused as any Catholic. I view the fact that Catholicism has officially perdured in Apostolic doctrine, despite the crisis of liturgical and theological dissent, as a proof of two things: first, the fact that She is fighting the apostasy single-handedly; second, that God defends her... because any other Church, and especially the Orthodox, would long ago have collapsed under the weight of such a crisis.
____Orthodoxy is a confused jumble, and many of the "distinctive" elements of Orthodoxy are recent innovations that are based on the reactionary attempt to "purge Latin influence," effectively undermining even the Eastern Patristic Tradition. I found myself getting continually impatient, with the way Orthodox would always set up straw-men of the Catholic doctrines, and reject those... for example, your own description of Original Sin as "inherited guilt," for Adam's personal transgression, when the Council of Trent and the exposition of it by Catholicism's great doctors, like St. Robert Bellarmine, all make it clear that this is not the Catholic teaching at all. There is a long list of such things - for example, Catholics wring their hands over "created grace," but then when you read Aquinas, you realize that "created grace" is simply his short-hand for referring to God's uncreated grace when it is inhering in a created being. I have long been interested in the Western Rite, and so my ability to read Latin and to sympathize with the Latin Fathers, often armed me against the shallow polemics directed against such things by Eastern Ortho-dox who have never even spent so much as a week immersed in the full cycle of divine services. How irritating it is, to read Orthodox Christians writing books against the "heterodox" piety of the Stabat Mater, when anybody who has been in just one full week's cycle of services, cannot help but encounter the Stavrotheotokia of the exact same spirit!
___I began to realize that, throughout history, whenever an Easterner took the time to study Latin and read the Latin Fathers, they came around to see that Rome does not teach anything different, though Rome sometimes does teach more clearly. Take Original Sin: did you know that St. Maximos the Confessor teaches that Adam's fall introduced a principle of "irrational pleasure" as a predator upon human nature, and that God set suffering against this as a way of humbling man and bringing him to repentance? And that he taught that every act of sexual inter-course is so imbued with this irrational pleasure, that it predicates each new man's existence upon this principle, subjecting him to the natural AND unnatural effects of the first transgression (i.e., Original Sin)? And that the whole reason why Christ's economy of salvation is effective, is because Christ received a birth free from this predication upon the principle of irrational pleasure and so, rather than owing the debt of suffering on account of sin, His passion was voluntary and was directed against the system of sin? By joining us to Him in baptism, we also receive a Virgin Birth free from predication upon irrational pleasure and the due suffering, and, imitating Christ, suffer voluntarily with Him and die to ourselves, so transforming our own suffering and death into His death Passion and death, which has the Resurrection unto eternal life as its reward? This is part of why the Church has always regarded celibacy as the normative ideal of the New Covenant: we have received a Virgin Birth like Christ's, and should persevere in the logic of this new manner of life, rather than in the old... for, in the Kingdom of Heaven - of which we have already received the foretaste in the Mysteries - they are neither married nor given in marriage. le reste à lire sur le site indiqué ci-dessus
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