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Entry: A Meditation for Guy Fawkes Day Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/a_meditation_for_guy_fawkes_day#8417 Post contents: @ Sid, "A tradition that has stood the proverbial test of time might be a good one to dialogue with." I do dialogue with it (that's what I'm doing now!) But a major portion of that "tradition that has stood the test of time", is the Eastern Orthodox Church who repudiated the Papacy almost 1,000 years ago - and when I lived in Russia for a few years, I was overwhelmed (not just emotionally, but in my logical mind too) by the authenticity of the Faith of the Russian Christians, AND by their rituals etc, all of which were evidently (and I have no reason to doubt the evidence) much closer to the Christianity of the Apostles than anything I've ever witnessed in any Roman Catholic Church, not to mention among the putative "believers" of the Roman Catholic Church. If you want to see the closest surviving approximation of the Church of the Apostles, go to Russia. The Church there has survived more intact than it has in the West, precisely because of its many centuries of striving to preserve orthodoxy against the depredations of Christendom's mortal enemies. But the Russian Christians (and I mean the REAL Christians of Russia, the elders who were born into the Faith and who carried it on through the "Communist" interlude) - the Russian Christians don't give a flying fiddler's F about the Pope. Yet they are more truly "Orthodox", in ALL meanings of that word, than almost 100 percent of Roman Catholics, including most of those mean-spirited geldings who call themselves Cardinals. (Eastern Orthodox Priests are expected to marry, like the Apostles did.) All that said, I reiterate: Pope Benedict is a great man and I think the late Pope John Paul is a Saint. But subordinating my conscience to the Roman Papacy is another matter entirely. Sent at: 2008 07 24