Orthodox Or Heterodox?

 In response to the effort of American Catholic bishops to ban Biden from communion, a move which is not supported by the Pope:

Over the centuries the Catholic Church has always had its dissenters.  Many of them were loyal church members who just had a different spin on things. The Franciscans are a fine example. It’s not that they wanted to attack the authority of the Pope, it’s just that they communed with God more directly, which the papacy (not inaccurately) interpreted as a threat to its own authority.  Pope Honorius III brought the Franciscans under control (a bit, anyway) by recognizing them as an order of the church and thus putting them under his authority.

To this day they remain inclined toward mysticism and direct contact with God, a religious approach no longer highly regarded within the Roman Catholic Church, although profoundly important in the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Abelard was even worse from the Church point of view. He replaced Anselm as the great philosophic leader of Church thought. The problem was that in his position as a professor at the University of Paris he taught his students that they should study natural philosophy because by finding out the way the world actually worked in an objective, empirical manner; they would see how God had designed the world. He believed, and taught, that this would inevitably lead them to conclude that the Catholic Church was right about God. 

The Church wanted none of it. They wanted everyone to simply believe what they were told to believe.  After all, the true teachings of the church WERE the truth. They saw natural philosophy, an early form of science, as sometimes contradicting Church teachings (nailed it!), and in such a case, the church teachings were right and anything that disagreed with them was wrong. In fact, that was true in any and every case. Yet they couldn’t condemn him for it. First, he was very popular and famous throughout Christendom so a lot of attention would be drawn to muzzling him, generating controversy and debate which might weaken Church authority. Worse, all they could say against him was that he said that the actual objective, empirical world reflected God’s will (kind of obvious when you think about it) and if they said no it doesn’t, then they sounded like they were being very foolish. So they had to let him teach. That meant he remained a highly regarded member of the Catholic Church even though his doctrines were not in full alignment with Church orthodoxy.

No recent schisms have occurred. However, the Church does contain a wide variety of beliefs and opinions. Orthodox Catholics are orthodox. They toe the line, and it is a very straight line indeed.

Not all Catholics, however, are orthodox.

We might regard America’s bishops as the ultra orthodox within the Church  They want to go back a few centuries. They want to restore the monarchal authority of the Church.  The current Pope sees that as a way to simply speed up the process of the erosion of Church membership.

History seems to indicate that he is correct. The more fundamentalist and orthodox churches become, the more rapidly they bleed out membership. This has been displayed over the past half century in America. It’s long been the reality in Europe.

The ancient Christian desire for purity, once very attractive (and still attractive to some) is proving to be such a bad taste in contemporary spiritual mouths that it is driving many away.

Those in favor of purity argue, what use is a church if it doesn’t follow its own doctrine?  The more liberal argue, what use is a church if it has no members?

Whatever resolution is worked out for this particular moment in time, the struggle has gone on for as long as there have been Christians, long before there was a Catholic church, and it will continue for the foreseeable future.

It is interesting that polytheistic religions don’t generally have this problem. Different Greek cities were not only different nations but they often had their own mythological stories about a given set of gods. Was Helios the sun god? Or was it Apollo Helios? For that matter, wasn’t Osiris just Dionysus in a different form?  The answer is that it could be both, or neither, depending on where you lived.

This proved to be a very stable system for thousands of years, in various forms, during pre-monotheist history.  Tolerance is not an aspect of faith generally associated with monotheism.

It occurs to me that one could take a lighter look at all this and sing a song! The song could be, what do you do with the problem like Saint Anselm? I don’t think the answer would be turning him into a nanny for some adorable kids who sing catchy little songs.

On third thought, shouldn’t the song be, what do you do with a problem like Joe Biden? I don’t know. I think I’m overthinking this and it’s time to end this post. Also, I just heated up some pizza in the air fryer. And I’m hungry.