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The Schism of 1054 begs to differ.
Well, the old school way in which both sides of the east-west schism saw each other was very much, "we are the Church, those schismatics are Not!The!Church."
Things have gotten more relaxed, especially on the Catholic side, but the formal view of Catholicism is "Catholicism is the True Church and the Orthodox should be in communion with us" and the formal view of Orthodoxy, which is much more muddled, is fairly close in most circles to "The Pope is a heretic and a schismatic who altered the creed that Must Not Be Altered and we are the True Church which holds to the true doctrine of the ecumenical councils."
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Fair point. And notably the Eastern church is the only one that the Catholics (at least now) consider a real, proper church on a near-peer level. But I don't think it's representative and certainly SSPX isn't on that level.
The mainstream estimate for the SSPX’s numbers is between a half a million and a million(arguments that this is an overestimate are far more plausible than underestimate arguments). This is bigger than several of the eastern churches considered near-peer by Rome, notably the Church of the East.
Really? Mea culpa, I thought it was maybe 10,000 at the absolute max.
Wiki lists 600,000, and that seems to be a reasonable middle of the road estimate. It’s possible that this is a large overcount, but not by a factor of 60- thé arguments that they’re far smaller than that tend to cluster around 100-200 thousand, not 10k. They have individual Sunday congregations getting quite close to that number.
Well, thanks. It's interesting to learn.
They had 15,000 people at econe- and their members tend to be the poorer traditionalists, so the portion of population which can travel to Switzerland is rather lower than the FSSP’s- which points to a fairly large organization, so I don’t agree with a low count, but the lowest number anyone cites while sober is 100k.
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On a near-peer level, that's true, because they're both Chalcedonian. But there are more than one eastern churches.
The "real, proper church" thing (I assume you're referring to the "Church" vs "ecclesial community" split) has to do with the sacramental priesthood and episcopacy rather than doctrine specifically, and generally most of the Eastern churches are considered to be on the same side of that line. Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, the Church of the East, despite their Christological differences, all have a general sense that priests are performing a liturgical sacrifice of the Eucharist to God, which is the requirement Catholicism sets for being a "Church-Church."
Anglicanism is in an interesting category because there are priests and bishops, and the Eastern Churches are relatively warm to them on that basis, but the longstanding view of Catholicism is that Anglican orders are null and void because the Church of England, especially in the 15-1800s, relativized its understanding of what the priesthood was to more of a ministry in the Protestant sense than a sacrificial office, while the Eucharistic sacrifice was described as a "sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving" (added to the first BCP communion rite by Cranmer). Both of these I know are described by modern Anglicans (except Anglo-Catholics, who've always jumped through hoops to try and make Anglican theology more Catholic than it ever was) as explicit steps of separation from Catholic theology and alignment with the continental reformation.
There's an alternate universe perhaps where Edward's minority didn't give Cranmer an in to push his agenda, or Elizabeth had a desire to impose more of her own liturgical conservatism and insisted on maintaining sacrificial priesthood as a pillar of the English establishment, and in that universe the Church of England would probably be called a "Church" by Catholic doctrine. Henry VIII was extremely Catholic in theology, and if his six articles had survived the test of time, the world may well be quite different.
Historians who study the history of Anglican sacramental theology agree fairly strongly that the CoE genuinely developed a different understanding of these elements, and so I think Apostolicae curae was a solid interpretation, even if the subsequent "we're not going to call protestant churches "churches" thing just annoyed people.
The main reason SSPX isn't on the same level is they don't want to be -- they want the "we are doing things without the Pope because the Pope is doing heretical things" without the "we are the True Church" baggage, which is obviously rather unstable. Technically speaking, the SSPX also doesn't have "lay members" or even "parishes" -- they have chapels and "people who come to mass here."
If they were to start appointing metropolitan bishops and naming a patriarch, both their self-understanding and the way in which mainstream Catholic doctrine sees them would change dramatically. The Old Catholic Churches are considered to be "Churches," though the woman-bishop thing is a problem. I should also note that the Polish National Catholic Church in the US, formed because of some ethnic tensions between Polish Catholics who felt excluded by other Catholic ethnicities -- the cardinals' desire to elect the Polish Wojtyła as Pope to connect with Polish Catholics didn't come from nowhere -- is considered a Church as well, and they also have a problem with the Old Catholics' woman thing.
That's the one without the wife in a box, yes?
I'm kind of sorry for Cranmer, and kind of not, so I can't resist laughing at him. I think he was honest in his beliefs, but man was he ever a doormat for Henry. Granted, it was 'bow or have your head chopped off' but the speed at which he went 'whatever the king says' is amazing. See his letter about Anne Boleyn where he's 'I'm astonished to hear this story but if the king says it, then okay, it must be so!' and he trots off to the Tower to dissolve the marriage that a just few years back he had worked so hard to legitimate, never mind that he owed his rise to the influence of the Boleyns:
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