Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches compared

[rug]

last updated:
25/11/2016

One summer’s afternoon in 1054, after testy exchanges with the Patriarch of Constantinople, the Pope’s representative, Cardinal Humbert, entered the city’s main place of worship, Hagia Sophia, placed a document on the altar, and then left quickly. The document was a Bull of Excommunication, expelling the recipients from the church and thereby denying them a route to heaven. This dramatic gesture is widely taken to mark the beginning of the ‘Great Schism’, the moment when the previously ‘undivided’ Church was split and Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism were born.

History, of course, is more complicated than this. At the end of the first millennium, the unity of the Church was already broken. Five hundred years earlier, complex disputes about the nature of Christ had led to a rupture between the Catholic/Orthodox and Eastern ‘Oriental’ Churches following the Council of Chalcedon in 451.

And even the moment seen as the start of the schism was infact just the latest step in what was a growing gap between east and west.

The Bull of Excommunication was the not so much the cause, but rather the symptom, of the difficulties which had been gradually unfolding over time.

http://www.euronews.com/2016/11/25/catholic-and-orthodox-christian-churches-compared

[47of74]

1. I remember reading one time...

...if Islam had not taken over the Middle East it would have been the western and eastern branches of Christianity squaring off against each other instead.

Even the very references to a "Christian Middle East" conceal an ugly animosity. Without Islam, the peoples of the Middle East would have remained as they were at the birth of Islam — mostly adherents of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. But it’s easy to forget that one of history’s most enduring, virulent, and bitter religious controversies was that between the Catholic Church in Rome and Eastern Orthodox Christianity in Constantinople — a rancor that persists still today. Eastern Orthodox Christians never forgot or forgave the sacking of Christian Constantinople by Western Crusaders in 1204. Nearly 800 years later, in 1999, Pope John Paul II sought to take a few small steps to heal the breach in the first visit of a Catholic pope to the Orthodox world in a thousand years. It was a start, but friction between East and West in a Christian Middle East would have remained much as it is today. Take Greece, for example: The Orthodox cause has been a powerful driver behind nationalism and anti-Western feeling there, and anti-Western passions in Greek politics as little as a decade ago echoed the same suspicions and virulent views of the West that we hear from many Islamist leaders today.

The culture of the Orthodox Church differs sharply from the Western post-Enlightenment ethos, which emphasizes secularism, capitalism, and the primacy of the individual. It still maintains residual fears about the West that parallel in many ways current Muslim insecurities: fears of Western missionary proselytism, a tendency to perceive religion as a key vehicle for the protection and preservation of their own communities and culture, and a suspicion of the "corrupted" and imperial character of the West. Indeed, in an Orthodox Christian Middle East, Moscow would enjoy special influence, even today, as the last major center of Eastern Orthodoxy. The Orthodox world would have remained a key geopolitical arena of East-West rivalry in the Cold War. Samuel Huntington, after all, included the Orthodox Christian world among several civilizations embroiled in a cultural clash with the West.

[rug]

2. Good article.

"Let’s start with ethnicity."

[47of74]

3. Yeah, unlike what that chest thumping Orange One and his followers say...

...it's not the religion that's the problem. It's the extremists of every religion that cause all this crap. Take away the religion and all the hatreds would still be there, they'd just find something else to latch on to and use as an excuse for their hatred.

[Kolesar]

4. There were no hatreds in Ireland until the Protestants...

...decided that they had to stomp any Catholic ascension to the English throne by invading and dividing the country. The Protestants objected to Papism and the changes it made to Biblical Christianity and replaced it with something that is as arbitrary and contrived as Catholicism.

[rug]

5. You're off by 200 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutes_of_Kilkenny

[Kolesar]

6. Sorry, don't follow ... eom

[rug]

7. The hatreds go back to the English invasions hundreds of years earlier.

Long before Henry and the English version of the Reformation, which was more a matter of political power and ecclesiology than theology.

[Kolesar]

8. The scale is quite different.

If you are Netflixing, look for the documentary called "Armistice". It broadly addresses the contemporary impact of actions 100 years ago. Good use of a dark winter evening.