[monkfan]

It means a return wholly to the Traditional Faith of the Church, which includes an ecclesiology before there was any such thing as a Byzantine Empire or a Papacy.

And if wishes were fishes we'd all have a fry.

The See of Rome has run a long way from home. But in order for her to get back, she must first admit she's gotten lost. She'll have to renounce her innovations, up to and including the Papacy itself. That's about as likely as Protestants renouncing the Reformation.

[FactQuest]

I'm trying to figure out how an infallible Pope can apologize for something a previous Pope did, and still claim that Popes are infallible. Did they previous Pope err? If so, then all Popes are not infallible. Did he not err? If that is the case, then apologizing would be an error.

This is so confusing.

[dangus]

East and West have sinned against each other. West offers East a hand in reconcilliation, and East demands west concede that East is blameless, and that all her lies are truth.

For the record, Photios was no apostle. The power brokers in Byzantium wanted an excuse to teach people to reject the Bishops who had authority over them in Czeckoslavakia. So they invented false accusations against the bishops, claiming that their tolerance for the filioque was heresy: The Nicene council certainly had not stated that the Holy Spirit proceded from the Father, and only from the Father! Finding no apostle of the Catholic Church to disseminate their lies, they elevated a mere priest, Photios, to that of Patriarch!

Recognizing the invalidity of such an action, and also probably the motives, the Pope rejected the elevation. The East took the rejection as excommunication, and the religious conflict was born. It Photius' followers who were the ones preaching that Rome and those aligned with her were in apostasy. It would not be heresy to insist that the Filioque was unneccesary; what was heresy was teaching that the insertion of the Filioque amounted to invalid masses and that the acceptance of the Filioque demonstrated apostasy.

The Catholic Church was not wrong to disallow the elevation of Photius. It was not wrong to to allow missionaries into the Eastern Churches to promulgate its views. It was not wrong to prefer kings who advocated the truth over kings who advocated lies. And it did not order the war crimes which took place in Constantinople. But it did create an environment wherein armed forces came to falsely consider Eastern Orthodox Christians as enemies to the purposes of Christ, and heretics who deserved retribution, even though the Western Church did not formally proclaim such wicked things. As a result, many horrific abuses occurred in Constantinople, and most of the East fell into Muslim hands.

I propose as restitution for the West's errors, Rome once again recognize the urgent mission to rescue the souls of those in Muslim lands from the demonic horror that is Islam. When this is done, the Eastern Church will regain her see, and the cause for bitterness that the East bears against Rome will be in the past.

[Hermann the Cherusker]

professing a common faith of the “ One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. (Creed, 1st. Ecumenical Council, 325 A.D.)

Ummm ... no. Secodn Ecumenical Council.

The Latin-Greek split or schism before, during, and after the Fourth Crusade led to the theory that the Roman Catholic Church has one bishop ( the Pope ), and all the other bishops are in essence his local representatives.

Well, that isn't really the Catholic view, but lets not quibble over that. The same theory that is attempting to be propounded here (primacy of the Bishop of Rome) is found in kernel form in the letters of Pope St. Cornelius and St. Cyrpian of Carthage circa AD 250.

The alteration of the original Creed occurred some time in the sixth or seventh century in Spain probably by mistake, for the Spanish Church had few men of learning in those early centuries.

The men who added it to the Creed in Spain were among the most learned in all the West, who produced the mangificent creedal statements of the Councils of Toledo. They were following in the common teaching of the west what your Fr. Romanides has termed the "Western Orthodox filioque" to show that he felt it was not heretical) as asserted by Sts. Amrbose, Augustine, Leo, and others. The earliest citation in a Creed out of Toledo is from AD 447. The west, of course, did not even recognize Constantinople II as an ecumenical council until the ratification of Chalcedon in AD 451. Witness the lack of citation of the creed at Ephesus, which knew only of Nicea.

Ergo, pillaging, raping, killing, in the name of the Church and Pope.

The Pope had prior to this point excommunicated the Crusaders after they fell upon Zadar on the Dalmatian Coast. They were of course spurred on to Constatinople by the pretender to the East Roman throne, in whose pay they were operating.

These type of little mistakes make it difficult to trust larger assertions.

Following the tragic event of July 16,1054, when cardinal Humbert entered Hagia Sophia and immediately before the Divine Liturgy placed a bull of excommunication on the Altar, on behalf of the deceased pope Leo IX, things went from bad to worse when in 1071, the Normans conquered Bari (Italy), the last remaining Byzantine possession in Italy. By that time, the Byzantine Empire found itself unable to defend its land even closer than Italy. They were unable to cope with the double invasion that swept the empire – by the Patzinaks from across the Danube and by the Turks from the heart of Asia Minor. In 1071 they defeated and captured Emperor Romanos IV in the tragic battle of Manzikert. The loss of Bari and defeat at Manzikert in the same year indicated the condition of the Empire. In 1071 Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre also passed into Turkish hands for the 1st. time.

You would think someone might see the Hand of God in all this.

[dangus]

Umm... hey everybody... I just caught noticed this:

The author of this peice represents, and I quote, "the Ecumaniacal Patriarchate."

Maybe my Greek is a little rusty. OK, I don't know any Greek. But doesn't "ecumaniacal" mean something like "universally insane?" :)

I think "ecumenical" is the desired term. What little gremlin got his hands on this?

[nutmeg]

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