Filum Romanum - A Thread for the Catholic Church

He's already got one under his belt: the USA-Cuba reconciliation.

I think miracles are normally things that happen after their death, so someone invokes their name or something and something miraculus happens, then after investigation the event is declared to be a miracle.

Precisely. And the process usually takes a few years and an extensive investigation. The wikipedia page has a good summary of the process.

edited 7th Sep '15 2:15:08 PM by Quag15

So my only chance for sanctity is to land me a necrophile

Father Aszur, go to confession! Necrophilia is a GRAVE sin.

I never said I would be the one digging up corpses. I am saying I am going to be the corpse.

Bury me in my sexiest clothing. Bury me like one of your french girls.

Upside down and with a potatoe on your left foot?

edited 7th Sep '15 3:54:20 PM by DrunkenNordmann

Why exactly do you know the procedure for burying younge French women?

edited 7th Sep '15 4:10:57 PM by Silasw

Conservative dissent within the Vatican starts boiling over. *holds up a "GO FRANCIS!" sign*

This is a case where the old yarn "A man is measured by his enemies" comes to mind. If Francis is pissing off the reactionary clergy this much with his message of forgiveness, tolerance, and administrative reform, then that's a sign he's on the right track and needs to keep doing what he's doing.

edited 8th Sep '15 3:49:04 AM by Ramidel

The American side of the Catholic Church is indeed quite conservative (not to mention the Polish side). And why is Raymond Burke familar to me?

In any case, I also don't like this meddling of political ideologies within the Church. It's best to keep the ultra-consertives and the ultra-liberals from taking over the debate.

edited 8th Sep '15 7:02:23 AM by Quag15

Yeah, but saying that something shouldn't be political is...downright naive. The Church has been political and politicized since well before there was a Church - even "which Gospels are canon?" was a political decision.

Seems like the Pope is now moving on to the divorce thing, huh.

Notice that I said political ideologies, not politics in and of itself. Of course there were politics long before political ideologies were codified (at least, as we know them today).

In other words, I don't like categorizable/labelled politics within the Church, since said categorizations and labels have become commonplace only during and after the French Revolution.

edited 8th Sep '15 8:03:19 AM by Quag15

No, Quag, those categories are much, much older than the French Rave.

Heads on glowsticks and shine-in-the-dark guillotines.

I can get behind that.

Hence why I said codified. I didn't argued the French Revolution was the Trope Maker of those things, only the Trope Codifier.

I don't really see it. What did the codification consist in?

I'm mostly going through its etimological use, its presence in the debates during the French Revolution, and on post-Napoleonic developments in the politics that echoed (and later refined) the early breakthrough made in the wake of the Revolution.

Here's something from the page on Conservatism, for an example:

We can take this to the Semantics thread, if you want.

edited 8th Sep '15 1:09:37 PM by Quag15

Semantics aside, the concepts in various forms have been around much longer (off the top of my head, the Roman Republic), and ideological questions have always played a part in what the Church was doing, even if the specific questions that are at issue are different in the modern world.

@ politics defined canon: doesn't that discredit the whole thing?

That's where faith comes in. Christian biblical scholars may study the issues and divisions within early Christianity and the political pressures put on the various Church councils, and still trust that the early Church Councils were guided by God (despite the politics) and got the Bible right - it's no different from asserting that the third Caliph whose name I forget kept everything pure and correct and didn't mangle anything (or receive any mangled copy) when he assembled the Qur'an into a single book. Christians just had a much longer and messier road from Jesus to Scripture. (Also, Catholics don't take the Bible to be literal truth, and so they're okay with the exact sequence of historical events being different even between the four Gospels that they did accept.)

Early Christianity was horribly, horribly splintered from the start, and only later coalesced into a single Church under pressure from an Empire that wanted a state religion. Ultimately, that meant that there were a huge number of Gospels about the life and teachings of Jesus, each with a different record of historical events and a different emphasis in the teaching, and now you have a council of bishops whom the Emperor has called together to sort all of this out and define what's canon and what's not. Each of these bishops has his own biases, the Christians who are over in the Persian Empire didn't get to send any representatives at all, and they all know that the guy whose men are guarding their deliberations doesn't want "all Christians should remain celibate" to be part of the final canon. But they managed to narrow it down to four separate records of the Good News with different details that they felt comfortable with binding together and calling a book.

@Ramidel: Fair point. Also, may I quote your post sometime in some future discussion?

And that process began at the First Council of Nicaea in AD/CE 325.