I know this thread is not ultimately about the quality of some list you found, but doesn't the fact that it is off by
several hundred years on many basic things as I already demonstrated make it at least
a little bit suspicious? And what of how it assumes that the Roman Catholic Church had power to invent and impose things on the rest of the Church, even when we're talking about churches that had their own heirarchies since the time of the apostles (e.g., the churches of Antioch, Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Armenia, Mesopotamia, and others which were founded by either one of the twelve or one of the seventy)? Isn't also a little weird? If the RCC supposedly invented all of these things and then imposed them on others, then why are some of them not found in most/any other churches? My Church does not command priests to be unmarried and celibate, and never has. Neither does the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Church of the East (Nestorians), or most Protestants.
It is odd to me that such a list intended to make the Roman Catholic Church out to be the corruptor of all Christianity includes things that only it (not the rest of Christianity) does or believes, like mandating priestly celibacy, and things that it really had no role in creating or shaping until it received them from elsewhere and adapted them to its own circumstances and cultures, like monasticism.
This article may help you, though it's not written from a Roman Catholic perspective (it is from the Antiochian Orthodox Church, an EO church). As stated there, it was the practice of the Church (as a whole, not just Rome in particular) to have married bishops (and in my own Church, even one of our Patriarchs was married, HH St. Demetrios -- we don't shy away from this fact), but it was
also the practice for all the churches in the East and the Orient (that is to say, most apostolic churches period) except possibly the Armenians (according to the article; I don't know anything about Armenian Church canons or practice myself) to draw from among the monastics when choosing candidates for the Episcopacy. As there have never been married monks, for obvious reasons (though plenty are widowed), this has in practice created a system in which those traditions which are strongly inclined to monasticism (the OO and EO, basically) are thereby effectively only elevating unmarried men to the rank of bishop. This has been formalized over the centuries, though it is not without criticism or a call to return to the practice of having married bishops in some cases (the article mentions Archbishop Iakovos of the Greek Orthodox Church calling for such a return; I am unaware of any such figures in my own church, but it's certainly possible given the historical precedent, if it weren't for the fact that tradition has developed otherwise since very early as well, so it is unlikely to change when it has already served us so well since about the fourth century).
As to why the Roman Catholic Church in particular does not allow such things when they don't have the preexisting practice of choosing their bishops from among monastics, I don't know. I can only assume that it is following the reasoning (also common in the East, as it is found in the Fathers) that the unmarried clergy (priest, bishop, archbishop) are assumed to be dedicating their lives/consecrating themselves completely to God.
Then He said to the disciple, "Behold, your mother!" (John 19:27)
There are Roman Catholic-specific excesses (from an Orthodox POV, of course) in this area that are just as unexplainable and indefensible to me as they would be to most other non-Catholics, but regarding what we hold in common (which is still quite a lot of the more basic stuff), it was in fact common and entirely uncontroversial to speak of her in exalted terms even before the councils mandated that it be believed that she is Theotokos (not just Christotokos, as the hated Nestorius and his followers claim). This is, in fact, part and parcel in the development of the Alexandrian tradition of Biblical hermeneutic (whether concerning St. Mary specifically or not) which developed since the days of the Catechetical School at Alexandria (the first of its kind in the entire world, and according to Coptic tradition, established by St. Mark himself while in Egypt; even the written records show deans going back to the middle of the second century or so), and it is from such readings that many of our hymns to her gain their shape and unique character. Were St. Mary not exalted and honored above all others as the pride of our race, then many of our connections as Christians to the Old Testament would be lost. It is not just "Mary is obedient", "Mary carried Jesus", and other surface-level understandings of what she did -- it is in the identification of her with the gates of Jerusalem (and Jerusalem itself), the tabernacle, the ark, and so forth that we can understand how our own fathers understood Christ to be prefigured in the Bible. Since so much of this thread is concerning how the Roman Catholic Church apparently opposes the Bible, I would think that this would be important. The NT Biblical canon of 27 books used by the entire Christian world without exception (even though some have more, as the Ethiopians do, none have less; historically, all have taken this list as their base) was first promulgated by HH St. Athanasius the Apostolic, the twentieth Pope of Alexandria, in his 39th festal letter written in 367 (it was later confirmed in the Latin Church in particular by the Synod of Carthage in 382). So the person you have literally to thank for our having the Bible as we do now would have read the Bible in this way, as it is the long-established tradition of his Church.
So it is extremely unwise and impoverished to disregard St. Mary in any way, and doubly so to do so by attempting to shield such concerns in fidelity to the Bible! Those who established our ways of understanding it and even established
what it is did no such thing. They all glorified St. Mary, as we are
all to do, and did not set that veneration up against the Bible which they canonized.
