Taking risks by rejecting the CC?

[Peter J]

Originally Posted by Gottle of Geer

## Not according to JP2 - he, not the OP, called them the "Church's other lung". That sort of idiocy is of the Vatican's making - no one else's, & certainly not the OP's.

From Redemptoris Mater 34:

• 34. Such a wealth of praise, built up by the different forms of the Church's great tradition, could help us to hasten the day when the Church can begin once more to breathe fully with her "two lungs," the East and the West. As I have often said, this is more than ever necessary today. It would be an effective aid in furthering the progress of the dialogue already taking place between the Catholic Church and the Churches and Ecclesial Communities of the West.86 It would also be the way for the pilgrim Church to sing and to live more perfectly her "Magnificat."

• http://www.vatican.va/edocs/ENG0224/__P7.HTM

Aidan Nichols OP speaks to the FiF Assembly 2002

The other lung

This, I might add, should be on the understanding that the Church of Peter and Paul does not wish the West to breathe without the East, without that 'other lung' in the metaphor of the Dominican ecclesiologist Yves Congar. 'The other lung' is a phrase which the present Holy Father has often repeated, and indeed turned into action, not least in promulgating the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church much of which, as has been said, reads as if written in Constantinople. With this other Anglicanism the ecumenical road is, by any reasonable assessment, shorter and more secure.

Hard decisions lie ahead of you. The Rome that sent Augustine, Hadrian and Theodore, an Italian, an African and a Greek, to England still shows, despite or because of cosmopolitanism, a motherly solicitude for you. But behind a Church-mother there stands, even more importantly, the Mother of the Church.

• http://www.trushare.com/91DEC02/DE02NICH.htm

I would say two things:

1. If you interpret JPII's words to mean that the Orthodox are one "lung" of the Church, than that's fine but you should be aware not all Catholics interpret them that way. For example, I very seriously doubt that such an interpretation would be supported by Fr. Ray Ryland, who is famous for his crusade against Eastern Orthodoxy.

2. If JPII meant that the Orthodox are one "lung" of the Church, why didn't he ever come right out and say "the Orthodox are one lung of the Church"?