Rod Drehrer on Roman Catholic Apostasy

 

Rod Drehrer writes:

Rod Drehrer writes: I suspect we Orthodox will see more Catholic faces in our parishes, given that the Church of Rome teaches that our priestly orders are valid, as, therefore, are our sacraments. But it is very hard for me to imagine Catholics like the ones I met in Poland ever leaving the Catholic faith. As one of them told me, Catholicism is so tightly woven into her identity, and her idea of how the world is, that she literally cannot imagine not being Catholic. She is not a Latin mass Catholic, so she's not feeling that particular pain. But when the Pope makes all these changes, it surely leaves the faithful confused at best, and undermines trust in the Church's authority.

I have some friends who are faithful to the Latin mass, and they are among the most devoted and prayerful Christians I know. They are in agony right now. And for what? Why is the Pope doing this to them? It's cruel and pointless, seems to me. As far as I know, none of them are planning to leave the Catholic Church; they're planning to wait out this papacy, and hope for better times. I wish them luck, but I would also tell Catholic friends who want to see unity between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches that the kinds of things Francis is doing makes that all but impossible. If there's one thing that Orthodox Christians cannot abide, it's monkeying around with the liturgy.

Back in the early 1990s, when I got serious about becoming Catholic, one big thing that made me consider that the Catholic Church was what it claimed to be was its doctrinal stability. I looked at Rome compared to the Protestant churches (Orthodoxy never entered my mind), and believed that the papacy was a strong guarantee against the kind of instability that was ordinary within Protestantism. Once I became a Catholic, I soon realized that the stability I expected to find within Catholicism existed more on paper than in reality, in parish life (or rather, it varied from parish to parish), but certainly the Pope was as good as gold on that front. John Paul II was the pontiff then, and like many conservative converts, I became pretty much a papolator. It was unimaginable to me then that a Pope like Francis would be possible. I knew that there were bad popes in the Church's past (think of the Renaissance popes), but I took comfort in the belief that for all their personal corruption, they never messed with doctrine or liturgy. The most important thing any pope can do is be the guardian of the tradition. By that measure, Francis has done tremendous damage to the papacy, certainly in the hearts and minds of the kinds of Catholics who are most faithful to the papacy and to the Church's teaching authority.

Like I said, I can't figure this out. Twenty years ago, I asked a Catholic priest friend how on earth so many bishops could have turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse by priests. My friend said, "Because they don't believe in God."

Wait, I said, really?

Yes, he replied, really. No bishop who really believes in God would have done what they did. It is incomprehensible. They believe in the Church, maybe, and in themselves and their privileges ... but not God.