All religions contain some element or elements of truth, a fact which I would not wish to deny, but:
(1) Is it reasonable for a Catholic to suppose that the Holy Spirit has revealed to other religions or to sects truths which have not being made available to, or have been repudiated by, the Catholic Church?
If so, the pretensions of the Catholic Church seem, to this humble and ignorant Left-footer, to be just pretensions.
If not, why read the scriptures of other religions or sects except with the purpose of converting their adherents. Or why read, quote, or endorse protestant theology?
(2) Can a Catholic learn anything of spiritual value, from other religions?
If so, what?
(3) Can a Catholic learn anything of value from the practitioners of other religions?
Well yes. There are good and wise people outside the Catholic Church.To give examples, from Muslims we can learn the worth of zeal, fasting, pilgrimage, and prayer, and from Jews, reverence, tradition, and scrupulousness (and more).
But the Catholic Church is as right as it is possible to be in matters of Faith.
Anything which differs or diverges is WRONG.
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I wonder whether Orthodox theological and spiritual writing is an exception to this? Byzantine theology was part of the common heritage of Christianity in the first millennium, but, as East and West became increasingly isolated from each other (long before the formal schism took place), Western theologians no longer had access to Greek texts (which they had in any case long been unable to read), with the result that Catholicism began to forget part of its own inheritance - theological, spiritual and liturgical. Orthodoxy, one might argue, preserved this authentically Catholic inheritance - and continues to preserve it in an aged in which so much of the Catholic world seems to have followed theological, spiritual and liturgical moidels which are liberal-Protestant in origin.
Lefty, as an Orthodox Christian, I regard Roman Catholicism as a heresy (several heresies, in fact). There are some things to be admired there, naturally, and a great multitude of very wonderful people (one of whom I happen to be married to); but the errors are very grave and extend into every aspect of Catholic life, theology, liturgy, spirituality, which now seem quite remote from anything recognisable as the Ancient Faith and the Apostolic Church.
Be that as it may, trading counter-assertions is quite useless, if we have nothing to show beyond our assertions and out theoetical constructs. It seems to me incontrovertibly obvious that Roman Catholicism is in a state of collapse. Even the conservative and Traddie blogosphere is for the most part a dark and unhappy region, characterised essentially by anger and cognitive dissonance. I see no evidence whatsoever of the abiding presence of the Holy and life-giving Spirit - rather, a multiplicity of increasingly tortuous attempts to construct an illusion of solidity, while pinning the blame for present disorders on one's scapegoat of choice.
I look at the Papacy and I think: is what one sees in the Roman Catholic Church consistent with this being true, or more in line with what one would expect of enthroning a humanly-constructed falsehood at the centre of everything, and I believe the question answers itself.
Speaking the truth, in love.
Thank you both and God bless!
Mark - Your last sentence goes straight to the heart of the matter.
Anagnostis - What heresies have you in mind, please? This question is not loaded!
The Roman Church has made several dogmatic departures that Orthodoxy regards as definitely heretical, and which Orthodox critics of Roman Catholicism have, over the centuries, postulated as the source of wider distortions and deformations in theology, spirituality, liturgy, ecclesiology, pastoral care. The most worked-over of these is of course the filioque, but that's not what I had most prominently in mind when I posted my earlier remarks. These purely theological divergences often seem impossibly abstruse to Roman Catholics, and discussion of them tends to get bogged down in circularities. I've come the conclusion (circularity alert) that you have to be Orthodox in order to understand why they matter so much.
No, what I really had in mind, having just re-read Fr Bulgakov's devastating essay on Vatican I, was the Papacy, concerning which I believe it's very much easier to discern tangible connections of cause and effect (assisted by the availability of a "control group"). It's my conviction that the final cause of "post-Conciliar collapse" is not to be sought in the Modernist conspiracy, nor the deliberations of 1962-'65, but chiefly in the dogmatic definitions of 1870 (thumpingly heretical from the Orthodox perspective): nemesis following upon hubris.
The essay, written in the 1920's, ends prophetically:
"In spite of its practical uselessness the Vatican dogma was an inevitable logical consequence of ecclesiastical legalism and a final symptom of the profound spiritual cleavage in Western Christianity after the Reformation. It is the last word of Protestantism within Catholicism—of the Reformation acting as counter-reformation.
The task of theoretically disproving the claims of papacy has been done; it is now life itself that must do the work. What is needed is a new experience, which Catholicism so far does not know. Papacy has gone through great upheavals and dogmatic doubts at the time of the Avignon captivity, in the XV century, and at the end of the XVIIIth. Is it guaranteed against them at our epoch of great upheavals? “Peter’s rock” seems unshakable, but the fortress of Tsarist cæsaropapism seemed so too, and yet it collapsed in the course of a few days..."
http://www.orthodoxchristianity.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=14:articles&id=39:the-vatican-dogma
Anagnostis - thank you for your thoughtful and thought-provoking answer.
Clearly I need to do some reading.
...and thank you for receiving these "hard sayings" with such generosity. As for reading, I think as good a place to start as any is 1 Kingdoms (1 Samuel) 8:4-20. "Then all the men of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah...&c."
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