Mr Jack Trotter makes a significant admission about Roman Catholic beliefs regarding tradition and authority:
Third, Archbishop Roche, in his Preface to the Responsa, calls the decisions of the Second Vatican Council “irreversible,” but in fact nothing about the Vatican II Council is irreversible. Ecumenical councils come and go. Not every statement made in a council defines dogma infallibly, and their decisions are not on the level of ex cathedra statements having the imprimatur of papal infallibility. They can be examined criticially, altered, and sometimes reversed, just as the Vatican II fathers critiqued and altered many of the nondogmatic provisions of the Council of Trent (1545-1563).
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/the-guardians-of-sterility/
This reveals a major flaw in RC thinking: ‘Ecumenical councils come and go’; only the Pope can speak infallibly.
The reverse is true. The statements by the ecumenical councils are the highest authority for the Church, clarifying and confirming aspects of her Apostolic Tradition, and do not change or develop. The doctrine of papal supremacy brings with it insurmountable problems:
. . . The Orthodox Church believes that the Church exists where: 1) there is Apostolic Succession; 2) where the traditions and canons of the Church are preserved; 3) and where a right-believing Bishop in Apostolic Succession shepherds his people in good order according to these traditions and canons. While we may have a complex structure of Patriarchates, national Churches, and various autocephalous Church bodies, these basic elements define the Church. All other aspects of the Church are essentially administrative, and the Church's unity is ultimately preserved by everyone’s strict and unyielding commitment to Holy Tradition.
In the Roman Catholic Church, Apostolic Succession itself resides in the person of the Pope, who is Christ’s Vicar on earth. While modern Latin theologians have tried to restate or even reject it, and while the ecumenical pronouncements of the Latin Church have tried to downplay the significance of Papocentrism, it is the fundamental dogma of Roman Catholicism and a principle repeatedly defended by the present Pope. Even collegiality and shared primacy with the Eastern Patriarchates are subject to the magisterium of the Papacy.
Thus, when Roman Catholic traditionalists separate from Rome over issues of traditional practice, they obviously separate themselves from the very source of Roman Catholic authenticity. One can persuasively argue that since, unlike Orthodox, they do not attribute primacy to Holy Tradition, Roman Catholic traditionalists have no foundation on which to justify their schism from the Mother Church of Rome, especially when such separation is forbidden by the Pope himself, the very criterion of authenticity.
Orthodox traditionalists, on the other hand, are not only justified for separating from Churches or Bishops which violate the dictates of Holy Tradition, but are required by the Holy Canons to do so. Any Church (or Bishop) which preaches heresy places itself in danger; and those who see that danger, whether laymen or clergy, must separate from it. We see, then, the basic and fundamental difference between Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditionalists. Traditionalist groups in the Roman Catholic Church are obliged to violate the ultimate authority in their Church to be where they are. We Orthodox traditionalists, however, must heed the ultimate authority in the Church to be where we are. And herein lies one of the most important differences between the Latin and Orthodox Churches in general: the Latin Church’s appeal to the authority of the Roman See and the Orthodox Church’s dependence on the authority of the wholeness of ecclesiastical tradition, the very Body of the Church.
http://orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/rome_orth.aspx
Mr Noah Jefferson also shares some critical insights into the logical outworking of the papal claims in a highly recommended essay. Here is a little taste from it:
Fr. Sergius Bulgakov summarizes it thus:
Indeed, if the Vatican dogma is consistently thought out, the interruptions of papacy naturally brought about by the death of a pope must cause dogmatic perplexity: if a vicarius Christi can exist at all, how can he be mortal? How can the actual order of papacy be interrupted, as undoubtedly happens through death? A patriarchate may become vacant when a patriarch dies or is removed, but then patriarchy is not a special holy order, which papacy is supposed to be. Patriarchy is an ecclesiastical office with exalted rank and special jurisdiction attached to it, but as far as holy orders are concerned a patriarch is a bishop – and the order of episcopacy, like that of priesthood, is not interrupted by the death of its individual representatives, and will go on till the end of time. With papacy the case is different: a break is caused by the death of its representatives, since a pope exists only in the singular.[15]
The dogma of Vatican 1-2, taken to its logical conclusion, leads to an ecclesiology in which the Church is ultimately not grounded on apostolic succession, but rather on the office of one man, and this Church dies with the death of each Pope, leaving only a husk of an institution lacking its divine lifeforce, and rises again with the election of each new Pope. This is not in any way acceptable to the Orthodox Church, which has an ecclesiology grounded on apostolic succession, according to which no break in the Church’s existence can ever occur, as the death of a bishop or Patriarch (Patriarch just being a bishop with higher ecclesiastical office) does not interrupt the apostolic succession, for the power of priesthood subsists in the whole episcopate of the Church and has Christ as its source. If one were to argue that the death of the Pope somehow does not have these consequences because Christ continues to exist, then they deny that the Pope is necessary for the Church’s indefectibility, infallibility, power and universal authority and unity. To make this admission would however be to disagree with Vatican 2 which says, “this teaching (referring to the dogmas of Vatican 1) about the institution, the perpetuity, the meaning and reason for the sacred primacy of the Roman Pontiff and of his infallible magisterium, this Sacred Council again proposes to be firmly believed by all the faithful.”[16] But what was the reason given at Vatican 1 that the papacy was instituted for and why it had to perpetually exist? Precisely all these things one would have to deny the Pope is necessary for if they made the argument hypothetically given, and so by denying Roman Catholic dogma they anathematize themselves.
The Protestant spirit of rebellion had a source: in the Roman bishop’s rejection of Holy Tradition as the criterion for determining right belief and substituting for it his own opinion. Short of sincere repentance of that act, we are afraid that Mr Trotter and others will continue to see the RC communion fall further into confusion and decay as the days roll on, just as its child, Protestantism is experiencing.
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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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