Filum Romanum - A Thread for the Catholic Church

Define present. Where? Because, while Latin Rite Catholics are subject to automatic excommunication, Eastern Rite Catholics are generally only excommunicated by decree if they are found to be guilty of doing such.

Good statement, but it will fall on deaf ears or will be met with responses that will involve whataboutism.

To add to what Ach said:

Also, I posted something about this a while ago:

In other words, excommunication will (hopefully) become less of a bureaucratic thing (that is to say, dependant on the bishop of a respective diocese), and the lifting of said excommunications will happen with greater ease and speed (and greater forgiveness, which is what Pope Francis is trying to achieve).

@Cassidy: I'll PM you later about all those topical questions you've made.

edited 26th Mar '16 8:49:26 AM by Quag15

If I were to justify why abortion incurs excommunication and murder doesn't, it'd be because a woman procuring an abortion is presumed to be acting in accordance with a belief that abortion is morally justified - in other words, she's participating in heresy. Nobody seriously believes that murder is not a sin, and those who did believe it would be considered insane, not heretical. Excommunication is (ordinarily) for heresy and schism, not for sin.

Of course, the real reason is as Ach said: the Church is attempting to prescribe a moral position that doesn't have the consensus agreement of the flock, rather than describing the beliefs of the body of the Church (which is how infallible declarations are supposed to be used). Because of this, the Church has been taking a brute-force approach to the issue in an attempt to make people think correctly.

edited 27th Mar '16 10:44:56 AM by Ramidel

No Pope has made an ex cathedra statement on abortion, so I'm not sure where you're getting infallibility from. The Catechism is not infallible, although it is authoritative.

The Church has every right to define its own doctrine and try and influence the behaviour and beliefs of its flock - that's fairly integral to the whole religion thing. I'm not sure where you get this idea that the Church's Magisterium is a democracy.

- Catechism of the Catholic Church, 100

edited 27th Mar '16 2:05:55 PM by Achaemenid

Ach is right. Out of the official 2 statements made ex cathedra (some theologians and analysts count 7 statements), none were made on the matter of abortion.

Additionally, excommunication isn't a kind of judicial punishment or primarily an indication of wrongdoing. The severity of the sin doesn't correlate with the likelihood of getting excommunicated. "Why can you get excommunicated for X, and not for the much more sinful Y?" is a fundamentally wrongheaded question.

so about the beatification of Mother Teresa. Apparently a lot of the money donated to her charities went to the Vatican Bank?

@Ach: Huh? I didn't either say or imply that the Church was or should be a democracy.

I was under the impression that abortion had been ex cathedra'd. It hadn't, mea culpa - anyway, I was under the impression that ex cathedra statements only counted as such if they held the agreement of the whole church already.

Aside from that, I said what I said: abortion is being labeled as an automatic excommunication and a harder excommunication than normal to get out of because the Church is trying to prescribe morality in a way that doesn't line up with the actual beliefs of their flock. While the Church certainly has the authority to "authentically" decide these things, they have a very limited number of options for actually getting their flock to go along - and as I said, they've chosen to use a brute force approach.

From where I'm sitting, the Jubilee looks like an attempt to turn down the heat. Francis isn't going to change the Church's position on abortion (and he wouldn't even if he could), but by the same token he would rather reconcile people to the Church - and it seems like, even on the issue of abortion, he'd rather have the dissenters back in the fold than outside when all is said and done.

A purely silly question.

What happens when you stampede cattle through the Vatican?

Well, assuming that nobody died or seriously injured, that is.

Just another day in Rome.

Mecha-Pope Julius II rises from his tomb and wrecks your shit with his swordfighting skills.

There's not the space for a stampede, the only place you could get a herd is Saint Peter's Square, otherwise you have to go past doors or though the secure vehicle entrance.

So if you did someone manage it? A lot of questions and a very serious investigation about her you manage to get all the cows past the Swiss Guard.

edited 9th May '16 9:51:06 AM by Silasw

These days, you could probably do it. Few of those lads will have herded cows before. Once upon a time, though... they'd've known every trick, ever.

Now, onto a more serious question.

What's the Catholic Church's view on separation of church and state?

Huh. Well, that's a pretty big one.

Well, ever since the Vatican stopped being an actual political power some time ago and was reduced to just the city of barely a thousand permanent residents, the Vatican doesn't seem to mind church and state being separate.

And of course, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and render unto God what is God's" is quoted all the time in favor of separation of church and state, and I think the Church is running with that for now, if they haven't been running with that to begin with. Besides, being both church and state is bothersome.

And then this is what I found when I Googled "Catholicism separation of church and state":

http://www.uscatholic.org/church/scripture-and-theology/2011/10/whats-catholic-view-church-and-state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relations_between_the_Catholic_Church_and_the_state

Hope I gave something resembling an answer to your question, dRoy.

edited 9th May '16 7:02:04 PM by Insano

You did, and thank you.

Well, that is... quite a big question. Let's see if I can give a good, conprehensive answer

The notions of 'state', 'religion' and 'separation of state and religion' (or 'church', if you want me to just limit my answer to the institutional church) are rooted in notions of political and philosophical thought that began to be formed after the time where Jesus walked on this Earth as well as later than the times where the Biblical texts were written and compiled. I'm saying this because it's best not to apply overly presentist views to the line 'Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's'.

That being said, there's been numerous intepretations of this line (as well as that of so many other lines in the Four Gospels). One can infer from various ancient commentaries on Matthew, Mark and Luke's synoptic Gospels that said early interpreters do not treat that line as a launch pad for any political theory, but rather in an individual and devotional way to believers, in terms of their obligations to the Roman state and their obligations to God.

This allowed writers like Origen or Justin Martyr to emphasise that Christians can or are to submit and obey the state, even while their higher obligation is to honour and worship God. On this note, there is also a similar idea in St. Augustine's The City of God, where his thesis depicts the history of the world as an universal warfare between God and the Devil. This metaphysical war is not limited by time but only by geography on Earth. In this war, God moves^note by divine intervention/ Providence those governments, political /ideological movements and military forces aligned (or aligned the most) with the Catholic Church (the City of God) in order to oppose by all means—including military—those governments, political/ideological movements and military forces aligned (or aligned the most) with the Devil (the City of Devil). This concept is part of the official doctrine of the Catholic Church, and it is still used today, as one can gather from Gaudium et spes.

Through a very complex interplay of ecclesiastical and secular structures in the post-Western Roman Empire era^note the Eastern Roman Empire post-Constantine, and especially post-Theodosius, puts the union between the emperor and the religion back together in a new way - namely, in the notion of the Emperor as heading up a new Christian world, rather than the pagan Roman notion of Emperor as having divine qualities, so, their path took a slightly different route, we arrived at a social and political organization in Europe that was heavily influenced by the Church, but which also had specific separations in terms of some laws and jurisprudence. Power politics also played a role in this, as one can gather from the difficult relation between the Pope and the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, for example.

While in the Rennaissance, the first ideas of humanism and proto-modern secularism were laid out, it was in the Enlightenment period that these ideas began to take a cohesive and clearer shape. These ideas, naturally, influenced the American and French Revolutions, as well as other revolutions that would happen down the line (e.g. see the conflict between the Church and Soviet Communism). I'm not gonna focus on the American case (and, for that matter, in the Protestant nations in Europe), as I'm not well versed in the matters of American history (and of Protestant nations and their national churches in Europe).

The conflict stemmed from the French Revolution between clerical and anti-clerical forces (which caused loads of deaths - e.g. the noyades of Nantes, the campaign that happened in the Vendée). Basically, since the various monarchies in Europe had an aspect of relationship towards God and the divine (which is where the slightly misinterpreted term 'divine authority' comes from), a relationship which was mediated by the Pope and various ecclesiastical forces, based on hierarchies (fairly complex ones, to boot). The clash between this idea and the new Enlightenment idea that the monarch did not had any sort of 'special blessing of powers' by God (for lack of a better expression right now) ultimately shaped the anti-clericalism that began to spread throughout Europe. Later, Napoleon pretty much wiped out any power the Papal States had. Pope Pius VI, who had also condemned the French Revolution, died as a prisoner.

As the rise of the Republics and democracies in Europe began to take shape (and even before that), the Church tried (really hard, but ultimately unsuccessfully) to condemn and stop various movements that appeared throughout history (and which still exist nowadays): freemasons, Republicanism and others... including the separation of state and church.

Pope Gregory XVI, for starters, opposed democratic and modernising reforms in the Papal States. The next Pope, Pius IX (who opened the First Vatican Council and defined papal infallibility), lost Rome on 20 September, 1870, against the troops of general Raffaele Cardona (after incursions and attempts by people such as Garibaldi). After this, he excommunicated all participants and authors of this occupation. The Italian government, in order to placate the vast majority of its population (since most Italians are Catholic, after all), tried to propose the Law of the Guarantees, which assured that the Vatican, the Lateran and Castel Gandolfo would get an extra-territorial status. Pius IX refused this law and shut himself in the Vatican (starting the 'prisoner in the Vatican' period), since he maintained his opposition to the seizure of the States of the Church and the proclamation of Rome as the capital of Italy. This generated the so-called 'Roman Question', which was settled with the Lateran Treaty of 1929. However, it still remains controversial to this day, due to the one-sided absolute solution proposed by the Italian government (from the Church's perspective). This treaty, in any case, established the foundation of the modern microstate that is the Vatican City ('d a little bit), thereby ensuing some continuity with St. Augustine's thesis.

There is more that I will say (namely about the post-Lateran Treaty period up until the current days), but for now I think this is enough, don't you think? Besides, I have to go to sleep, since it's almost 4 AM.

edited 9th May '16 7:53:46 PM by Quag15

Indeed, and thank you for the long, comprehensive, but interesting post.

I admit, I forgot that it's such a big topic.

You might want to motor over to Extra History. They're covering the very early schisms... Which means touching where the bleed between Church and State basically started in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Hint: it's Constantine. Not Walpole, this time. Honest.

edited 9th May '16 10:15:57 PM by Euodiachloris

Interesting. I'll check out, though after their crusades series and their shameless fanboying over Justinian I'm a bit fearful of how they'll approach the subject. Extra History seems to lean on a very Renaissance view of the medieval era as Medieval Morons and everything Roman as the best thing in the history of ever.

An extra point to consider is that the separation of Church and State was entrenched with the 30 years war, after that ended and state sovreignty was codified the Catholic Church had kinda lost. There were Protastent states and there was nothing it could do about it, the Catholic Church was permanently separated from the state in thouse countries.

So the Church has had a long time to come to terms with not being able to dictate state policy.

Not to mention the fail that was their research (as well as their dishonest intentions) into Suleiman the Magnificent.

They are trying to distil volumes of occasionally complex, contested and contradictory history into quick segments with, at most, eight episodes in total — usually six.

It's impossible to do that and find narrative hooks to hang everything from without bias and distortion. On top of that, none of them are actually historians who specialise in the areas they touch. I winced along with the Zulu Empire one (the pronunciations; ouch, my ears!), but didn't take it too badly — they did better than most.

When it comes to introducing people to things they've not met before, they do a fine enough job to get them interested. Which is all they're out to do.

I had a good time with their talk on the Zulu, the South Sea Bubble and the London medical crisis, simplified and at times incorrect, but broadly solid. My problem was with their series on Justinian and the one about the Crusades, because it is in those they really let their biases fly high. Justinian is portrayed as The Messiah and the entirety of the Crusades is portrayed as a result of medieval stupidity.

Just the First crusade, and isn't it?

As for Justinian, I dunno, he's more like a crazy motherfucker hiring more crazy motherfuckers to help him chase after a dream he'd have been better off without. The messianic bits are mostly at the start, when he makes his big reforms.