Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!aplcen!haven!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: cvw@research.att.com Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Protestantism as Church Message-ID: Date: 13 Sep 89 08:22:02 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 29 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu I don't read talk.religion.misc, but I (an excommunicate Roman Catholic) would not "roundly condemn" your recently posted summary as an exaggeration of the Roman Catholic position. And I don't think you misunderstand what everyone is saying: there are serious divisions within the Roman Catholic communion on these issues. In fact, Joe Buehler's posting to which you added your note pretty much says that such divisions exist. I would agree with Joe that Roman Catholics today have not been not taught things they ought to know. For example, your summary mentioned the question of intercommunion. So long as one believes that Roman Catholicism is "just another denomination", the current discipline is indeed hard to accept. But once one understands that anyone who receives Roman Catholic communion implicitly affirms that the eucharist in Anglican and Reformed churches is invalid and not sacramental, it becomes hard to see why communicants of the latter churches would even want to engage in unapproved intercommunion. (This example is from one of Joseph Ratzinger's essays on ecumenism in his book *Church, Ecumenism, and Politics*.) As a minor point, I deplore the tendency to omit the "Roman" from "Roman Catholic." There are American Catholics, Anglo-Catholics, Old Catholics, and Orthodox Catholics, for example. The acceptance of their churches' validity by Rome and by each others' churches varies dramatically, but all of them are Catholic. Joseph Ratzinger has had the grace to say that it is "sadly necessary" to modify the noun "Catholic" by the adjective "Roman". His essays seem to use the full name a couple of times, then drop the "Roman," but only for brevity, not out of a presumption that the adjective is unnecessary. Chris Van Wyk