A La Carte (7/11)

Re. the Catholic thing - Do you have a link to the actual document? All I’ve seen are the news reports (uh, not that I don’t trust them to perfectly interpret religious communications . . .)

I’ve heard fairly pluralistic views from the Catholic church with respect to other religions, so I am a bit surprised that they would pick a fight with Protestants.

If this comment is accurate then it is actually kind of funny: “Other Christian denominations, it argues, cannot be called Churches in the proper sense because they cannot trace their bishops back to Christ’s original apostles.”

Even if tracing back to the original Apostles was a requirement, we could still make that claim. We were part of the “real” church and then some corrupt leaders started making up their own religion. We broke off from them ~500 years ago, but we can still trace back to the Apostles.

Why does this surprise anyone?

Because some Protestants have their heads in the sand.

Here is a link to one of the official documents:

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20070629_responsa-quaestiones_en.html

Maybe this will work, Carrie.

Guys, this is kind of a non-issue. (Neil, you’re absolutely right; I haven’t seen a mainstream news report yet that reflected it accurately.) All the pope said was that the Catholic Church doesn’t use the word “churches” to describe Protestant communities, because they neither have nor claim to have apostolic succession. There is only one Church, and although Protestants are part of it through Christian baptism, their separate congregations are not separate Churches unto themselves. Rather, they’re members of the Church that are out of communion with the main stem.

(I usually put it in a way that will really get your collective goat: you’re all actually Catholics in rebellion against authority. But Papa Ratzi is a lot more diplomatic than I am, and there’s a lot more to it than you can sum up in a sentence.)

The Orthodox do have valid apostolic succession, which is why the Catholic Church refers to them as “sister churches.” In fact, had the schism in 1084 not happened, he would be the patriarch of Rome alongside the four other patriarchs: Antioch, Byzantium, Alexandria and Jerusalem. I believe that the Orthodox recognize him in that capacity even today; the issue is over leadership among the patriarchs.

None of this is anything new; it’s just reiterating what Vatican II declared. Note also that the pope didn’t say anything about who is and isn’t a Christian; he was just clarifying what the word “Church” means in Catholic teaching.