NICHOLAS: You are an Old Calendarist traditionalist and you think the Papists have a leg to stand on, even in "the early Church"?
INCOGNITO:Yes. As did Saint Ignatius, etc.
NICHOLAS: The citation by Saint Ignatios commonly my used by Papist apologists is a fraud. You have got to come to grips with the amount of forgeries spun my Rome. It's staggering. Ask yourself: if they needed forgeries, how can their claims be true?
INCOGNITO: There is no doubt the early Church believed Rome presided over the universal Church. Saint Ignatius even used that term -- "presides." [if my memory is correct].
NICHOLAS: The Church granted Rome certain rights, which She never viewed as Divinely established, for then She would never have birthed Saints who said that Rome has fallen away from the Church. If Rome can have fallen away, (and she HAS), then her precedence cannot ever have meant what Papists say it meant. Rome's early precedence (and remember: most Christians of the time never heard a word from her their entire lives, so we are not really discussing something that has much to do with REAL LIFE: most of this is academic paper work) originates in the fact that Rome was where Saints Peter and Paul were martyred, and she was the capital of the Empire: THAT and that alone was the source of her authority in "the early Church." If Rome were ever anything more than that, then all Orthodox Christians would be duty-bound to accept all Rome's subsequent innovations, which the Eastern Patriarchs and the Saints resisted every time they got wind of what was being promulgated in Rome, what she was making of her Church-granted precedence IN HONOR. All Orthodox Saints resisted Rome's bogus claim---that is, that her precedence came from what Christ gave to Saint Peter--- because this claim is not Apostolic, it is a deformation of conciliarity. Read the 1848 and 1895 encyclicals of the Eastern Patriarchs. In fact, the 1895 encyclical states bluntly that if Rome can demonstrate that before the ninth century she read the Creed with the filioque, baptized by pouring or sprinkling ,used unleavened bread for the Eucharist, taught purgatory and indulgences, the immaculate conception of the Virgin, and papal infallibility, "then we will have no more to say." For some strange reason you seem to pine for the days when Rome presided (as if this would deliver you from your present confusion), but those days are GONE, and the Church survives, proving that Rome's precedence was never ESSENTIAL to the structure of the Church: it was a temporary historically-conditioned precedence granted by the Church, and now denned by the Church, since it grew into a tyranny that insisted on placing itself ABOVE the Church, making itself her Judge. If the "early" Papacy was willed by Christ God as an indestructible sign of His Church, then the gates of hell have prevailed against His Church, for Rome fell long ago. Of course, NOTHING has prevailed against Christ's Church and we have the Orthodox confessors to praise God for this fact.
We do not look to ad hoc institutions, no matter how venerable, to preserve the Church: NOTHING is higher than the Church. There was no Patriarchate in Russia until the late 1500s: and yet the church lived Her life in Russia, from 988 on. She did not become legitimate merely by accepting the Patriarchy. And when Tsar Peter the Not-So Great abolished the Patriarchate, the Church in Russia did not die: neither did the Orthodox Church die when Rome fell away.
Nicholas Candela
