Thursday, April 21, 2016

The Great Schism: When The Catholic And Eastern Orthodox Churches Split

Now it's time for a regular segment Words You'll Hear. That's where we try to understand stories in the news by parsing some of the words associated with them. Today's word is schism. We expect to hear that word this week as Pope Francis, head of the Roman Catholic Church, and Patriarch Bartholomew, head of the Eastern Orthodox Church, traveled to Greece to meet over the plight of refugees. But that meeting raises the question of why there's an Eastern and Western church to begin with. That divide is called the great schism. To help us understand this, we invited Monsignor Paul McPartlan to stop by our studios. He's a professor of systematic theology and ecumenism at the Catholic University of America...

Read the rest here.

This is really a rather unfortunate piece.

2 comments:

August said...

That would be the 'happy Catholic' take on it. You have to be somewhat unhappy, or at least trying to figure out what might have gone wrong to start entertaining different opinions.

Han said...

You know, Catholics desperately insisting that "Pope Francis is a gift" doesn't make it so. I am sure that a Jesuit Communist is the perfect person to convince the Russian Church (which, being honest, is the one that really matters - not Constantinople) that the Romans are not a bunch of heretics. Amirite?