Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsIt's all been said before and to no avail
Reviewed in the United States on September 27, 2022
What follows are the opinions of an ex-Catholic agnostic atheist whose sympathies lie primarily with the Orthodox Church.
In the conclusion of his book, Robert Spencer, a relatively recent convert from the Catholic to the Orthodox Church, states that many of the points he makes in it were made in the 19th century by Eastern patriarchs in an Ecumenical Letter written in response to Pope Pius IX's invitation to the Orthodox Church to return to the Catholic fold. In sum, the patriarchs stated that Catholicism’s innovative teachings, i.e., those it proclaimed after the two churches fell out with each other in 1054, are "impious," "soul-destroying," and "condemned." Neither the pope nor the Eastern Patriarchs, Spencer remarks, "had any doubt where the other one stood, or why."
What, has that certainty somehow vanished since that exchange? Don't both churches today understand exactly where each other stands? How would ongoing discussion after 10 long centuries not be beating a dead horse? Is it any wonder, as RS points out, that the issue of papal power, the worst of Catholicism’s pretensions in Orthodox eyes, does not preoccupy the contemporary Orthodox Church; that Orthodox responses to Catholic claims regarding the papacy are hard to find? Isn’t that because the Orthodox have had it to here repeating the same arguments against it?
Regardless, Spencer insists that more discussion is needed on the part of church leaders: "[U]ltimate reconciliation between Orthodoxy and Catholicism will not be possible without some consideration of what has separated them in the first place, and that will inevitably involve each side making a full and honest statement for the case of its position [. . .] [U]nless it is fully acknowledged and understood by both sides" what divides them, there can be no real unity.
Some consideration of what has separated them in the first place? Seriously? Like there haven’t been all kinds of it for eons and to no avail? It’s only too clear that neither church has any intention of relinquishing its claims, their cushy ecumenical exchanges notwithstanding.
Spencer points out that Pope Paul VI (d. 1978) stated that "undoubtedly” the papacy is "the greatest obstacle on the path of ecumenism," which prompts the question: Does RS mean to suggest that that statement signaled the Catholic Church's coming round to a future admission of the falsity of the papal office? That will never happen. He goes on to quote Pope John Paul II as saying that what is needed is “a way of exercising the [papal] primacy which, while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission, is nonetheless open to a new situation.” The author remarks that for that to happen would require “examining what is really essential to the papal mission, and what isn’t.”
But it's precisely what is ESSENTIAL to the primacy, infallibility and universal jurisdiction, that the Orthodox Church expects the Catholic Church to renounce. Does Spencer imagine that John Paul II would have ever maintained that those two elements are inessential? The idea is ludicrous on its face.
Spencer avers that if only the pope would “return to the situation of the first millennium” (when both churches were united), then he would retain his preeminent status as the first bishop among equals “without exercising pretensions to infallibility that popes clearly do not have [. . .] and universal jurisdiction [. . .].” But if anything is expendable in the doctrine of the papacy, it’s the pope’s status as “first among equals.”
If the Catholic Church were ever to renounce what it claims is the solemnly defined doctrine of papal power, that would entail the renunciation of much, much more. The 14 councils that Catholicism teaches are ecumenical but which Orthodoxy rejects as spurious would have to be renounced as well, at least insofar as their teachings and decrees are at variance with Orthodoxy, and they would surely be numerous. The Catholic Church would have to resurrect its liturgy of a 1000 years ago, while allowing for reasonable adaptation, which would be nonetheless repellent to the great majority of Catholics, both clerical and lay, as well as to its theologians. A slew of much-loved Catholic devotions would have to be abandoned, such as that of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, etc. Papally-approved Marian apparitions, such as Lourdes and Fatima, along with those of Catholic saints, would have to be quashed as counterfeit—indeed, satanic. And the veneration of those saints (whose canonizations the church claims are infallible) would have to be done away with as well.
There isn’t the least likelihood that any of that will ever happen. If it did, millions of Catholics worldwide would certainly apostatize. They would regard themselves and their descendants down the ages as having been duped beyond forgiveness. And the scoffing of unbelievers would deafen the world.