As a Byzantine Catholic I find myself highly concerned with Catholic-Orthodox relations, which only makes sense. I am an Orthodox in communion with Rome, it would be good to know when I get to rejoin my Orthodox brethren! And the only way to get this to happen is to hit people at the ground level and help them understand from where the West and East come from, in as charitable a way as humanly possible. With that in mind, I recently joined an ecumenical Facebook group to see what people were discussing and its...
Discouraging is an understatement. The arguments are about who's right and who's wrong, which is exactly the wrong way to go about it. You wouldn't do that in a friendship, would you? You wouldn't go and tell someone that the entire way they've come to live is wrong if they're your friend, right? You would try and understand why they think so differently, and how it might benefit them, before you open your mouth. If you lay blame in a marriage often enough it's going to just destroy the relationship. These are basic human principles that we can all agree to?
SO WHY THE HELL DOES IT SEEM TO BE THE EXCEPTION FOR A GROUP THAT CLAIMS TO BE ECUMENICAL?
Trust me, I'd understand a little more friction in a Hindu-Christian ecumenical group. Those two groups really don't have all that much to discuss without coming to blows. But the holy, apostolic, and catholic Church? We are ONE body! ONE! But instead we let the cancer of our preconceptions and past experiences get in the way of what we're supposed to be doing, which is healing the greatest cause of scandal we have! We have an incredible amount of work to do, and not a lot of time to do it in, and we sit around bickering about whose theology goes which way when I can guarantee that most of the people making these comments have done no serious amounts of studying?
Well, if you want change, be that frickin' change. From here on out I resolve to know East and West like the back of my hand. I want everyone reading this post who has a book or a source they think is relevant to either East or West to post it up on here or on the Facebook link. Doctrinal explanation, mysticism, apologetics, doesn't matter. Someone has to read the information and get it out there for people to read, and it may as well be me!
"We have an incredible amount of work to do, and not a lot of time to do it in, and we sit around bickering about whose theology goes which way when I can guarantee that most of the people making these comments have done no serious amounts of studying?"
ReplyDeleteYup. It's pretty rare for a human, even an intelligent one, to develop an automatic filter to avoid investing in or against an opinion they don't have both a clear understanding of and a truly solid basis for affirming. I think I have a moderately decent filter of that sort, and it only developed in the past couple years, mostly keeps me from wasting everyone's time (though possibly at the expense of not saying things that should be said and would be marginally helpful because I'm not sure I can say them right), and is only even remotely healthy because it developed as a side-effect of more important personal spiritual growth.
I'm inclined to think the approach to ecumenism taken by the average Catholic is intemperately influenced by certain factors, to wit:
1) In recent history there's been a movement that's used alleged "ecumenical relationships" as a stick with which to beat the Tradition of the Church, and people who actually believe the Church was given authority naturally (and mostly rightly) want to fight back against that by defending the prayer and doctrine of the Church.
2) In somewhat less recent history, a few particularly neurotic preachers by the names of Luther and Calvin decided to teach everyone the sophistry to tear down the Church with sloppy but dogged reasoning. Rightly or wrongly there is a perceived need to defend the questions of Protestants with, well, answers. Rightly or wrongly this carries over into other engagements.
3) Some of the factors in the older disagreements in the Church have had theological elements where St. [insert big Latin name here] argued with the Patriarch [insert big Greek name here]. Even though most of these arguments were at a level of Theology that most Catholics with bachelor's degrees in Theology are barely equipped to begin to learn about, an assumption is made (mostly wrongly, despite its object being less near-sighted than the previous two points, especially the first one) that these disagreements need to be hashed out to get at the TRVTH just like allegedly one has to have answers to Protestant questions directed at the Church.
Basically, all three involve valid instincts -- defending the Church against wishwashiness, defending the Church against attacks by intellectual doubt, and examining the roots of longer-standing rifts -- but what's problematic is all three are hopelessly mixed up, and so people end up assuming that the Orthodox are split off because of the sort of intellectual doubt and/or anti-authoritarian attacks that have come more recently, and so respond as though they had to prove the Orthodox wrong rather than understand what both our sides of the Church were thinking then, what they're thinking now, and see if we can reconcile our differences without beating each other over the head about it.
(To be continued...)
Of course, my hypotheses here are based mostly on seeing Catholics argue with... other Catholics. People say that radtrads have a bunker mentality, which is often true, but what not many people realize is that pretty much the entire Catholic apologetics subculture (and possibly larger portions of faithful Catholic culture), with exception of a handful of people who are just trying to find out the Truth and pass on what they've found, is almost as bunker-mentalled as radtrads, just less obviously. See, we're all taught at some point that we need to be ready to defend true Catholicism; and we've all noticed that there are people who claim to be Catholic or speak for Catholicism who either don't know what they're talking about or else are deliberately sowing falsehood and confusion; and yet, the average fellow doesn't want to be that annoying guy who comes into work every morning and asks whoever happens to run into him at the office to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, so a lot of people gravitate instead toward arguing with people who should at least know and care what they're saying and then trying to weed out impurities in the character of beliefs of their fellow Catholics. Again, it mixes up the problem of needing to defend the Faith, the problem of there being wolves in sheeps' clothing, and the problem of people who are actually non-Catholic or heretical being harder to argue with than the people we don't actually need to argue with about anything important, and so the tendency is for Catholics to enter into extensive debates denouncing each other for... things that don't come remotely close to amounting to heresy.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, I wouldn't be all that surprised if most of the actual Catholic/Orthodox disagreements turned out to be institutional outgrowths of that sort of behavior, rather than true splits in Theology, let alone Tradition.
I doubt I'd know much about Theology, Tradition or anything else that you don't already know or couldn't get from better sources than me just from reading Fr. Z's blog. I would be very interested in your take sometime on some things that've come together for me about the spiritual life that make sense of all the seemingly different things that've been said and done on the matter in the West -- I'm curious whether the point of unity among theologians and mystics and whatnot on this side might also be a point of unity between seemingly different traditions. But these insights themselves I haven't figured out how to explain well yet, and would probably just ramble even longer than ever before in a comment and leave you with misconceptions of what I meant. I'll work on that and if I have a concise explanation I'll get back to you.
(As a somewhat amusing if irreverent afterthought -- or a fore-thought that got preempted by quoting the post -- I saw the title of this post and thought, "Welcome back to another webisode of Byzantine Catholics Don't Take That S---...")
Reading my own comments to make sure I didn't miss anything (because the preview box is way too small, yo): "...some things that've come together for me about the spiritual life that make sense of all the seemingly different things that've been said and done on the matter in the West..." "the matter" in that sentence is the spiritual life: all the seemingly different things that have been said and done on/with the spiritual life.
DeleteYa I had to go to a talk for my Race and Ethnicity Thursday night class on Immigration and the speaker was someone who speaks about Catholic Social teaching in the Kansas Archdiocese. Anyway, I really shocked that this person who is close to the archbishop and says he is close with the Church said that some people on immigration, "think backwards, like the Byzantines." And I thought it was a fluke, gave him the benefit of the doubt until, he said it again to reiterate that Byzantine people don't think correctly. What?! If I wasn't going to meet Bryan after class that night, I would have had a long talk with him, who lost my interest for the rest of his talk. I mean, I'm pretty sure bishops, at least in the US have this thinking and since they are bishops no one is telling them they are wrong. So many westerners are against any thinking from the east, and I think that is a sad state for the church to be in when our catechism says that we can not exist with out them, the "right lung of the Church".
ReplyDelete