Long, honest, and skeptical comments on my limbo between Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity. Skepticism, generalizations, and sweeping claims abound!
"Mainstream Catholic apologists are known to strawman the ever-living shite out of Orthodoxy’s positions" AND the harder they double down on easily refuted attacks on Orthodoxy the more it gives the impression that the Catholic Church has no legitimate defenses for itself. Which I dearly hope isn't true not only for my own sake but because it feels degrading for the Catholic church, even if wrong on certain positions, to be so easily undone.
This is a great point. I imagine it's too easy to polemically abandon the Catholic Church to the wind if one becomes Orthodox. I can see this online with Orthos who certainly aren't charitable.
For a lot of Catholics like me, there's not much that feels more abandoning than your own church pushing you toward Orthodoxy; and we say, "well, there's a crisis, the crisis doesn't invalidate the faith, and its just the hierarchy that's corrupt and brainless." Then people who represent your church and study the Faith don't have ways to respond to Orthodoxy, so they panic and strawman to keep you in.
Truthfully, I feel like the last four years have been marked by people telling me ten-thousand reasons *not* to leave Catholicism, and not a many reasons to stay. I've spoken to fellow Catholics people about my discernment of Orthodoxy, and sometimes I just get a "Yeah... don't blame you," as opposed to le epic EXTRA ECCLESIAM NULLA SALUS. This feeling is helping me to understand just how bad things really are. Worse yet, so much of what's wild about the Catholic Church right now is because of the papacy. I can't help but ask, but what did we think was going to happen by putting absolute giga-epic authority in one man?
And lastly, perhaps the love I feel from Orthodoxy is because its family and experience of authority is spread out instead of top down, which means the spiritual integrity of the flocks are far less subject to one wild patriarchate. I hope this makes sense, but it's like of like how one corrupt dad can invite terror and demonic nonsense on his whole family.
"Mainstream Catholic apologists are known to strawman the ever-living shite out of Orthodoxy’s positions" AND the harder they double down on easily refuted attacks on Orthodoxy the more it gives the impression that the Catholic Church has no legitimate defenses for itself. Which I dearly hope isn't true not only for my own sake but because it feels degrading for the Catholic church, even if wrong on certain positions, to be so easily undone.
This is a great point. I imagine it's too easy to polemically abandon the Catholic Church to the wind if one becomes Orthodox. I can see this online with Orthos who certainly aren't charitable.
For a lot of Catholics like me, there's not much that feels more abandoning than your own church pushing you toward Orthodoxy; and we say, "well, there's a crisis, the crisis doesn't invalidate the faith, and its just the hierarchy that's corrupt and brainless." Then people who represent your church and study the Faith don't have ways to respond to Orthodoxy, so they panic and strawman to keep you in.
Truthfully, I feel like the last four years have been marked by people telling me ten-thousand reasons *not* to leave Catholicism, and not a many reasons to stay. I've spoken to fellow Catholics people about my discernment of Orthodoxy, and sometimes I just get a "Yeah... don't blame you," as opposed to le epic EXTRA ECCLESIAM NULLA SALUS. This feeling is helping me to understand just how bad things really are. Worse yet, so much of what's wild about the Catholic Church right now is because of the papacy. I can't help but ask, but what did we think was going to happen by putting absolute giga-epic authority in one man?
And lastly, perhaps the love I feel from Orthodoxy is because its family and experience of authority is spread out instead of top down, which means the spiritual integrity of the flocks are far less subject to one wild patriarchate. I hope this makes sense, but it's like of like how one corrupt dad can invite terror and demonic nonsense on his whole family.