You say your St. Dionysius named the Bishop of Alexandria the pope?
No. The Dionysius in question who first applied the term "Pope" to the bishop of Alexandria was HH St. Dionysius of Rome, who served as bishop of Rome from 259 to 268, and applied that term of endearment to HH Pope Heraclas posthumously in his letter to one Philemon (HH St. Heraclas having passed on in 246). That's the point of pointing out that the appellation was first given from the bishop of Rome to the bishop of Alexandria, rather than the other way around as you would expect it to be if you followed the modern RCC ecclesiology.
Well, Popes do not and have not named their successor.
What? That's not what we're talking about. The Bishop of Rome would not have named a successor for Alexandria in the first place, whether or not either of them were called 'Pope'.
With respect, I think you're too stuck with a set of ahistorical claims to uphold to fully comprehend what is being shown in the example of HH St. Heraclas.
Yes, what
you just claimed is not true. It also has nothing to do with what I actually posted.
But if Dionysius was the Pope from 259-268, his predecessor was Sixtus II, his successor was Felix I. And Sixtus II was preceded by 23 men before him.
Who preceded and succeeded HH St. Dionysius of Rome has nothing to do with anything.
To your last statement, same back at you.
"Same back at me", what? Same back at me, "Rome's claims of exclusivity are a later development, and hence not accepted by any other apostolic church."
Uh...yeah. I already wrote that, and I do agree with it, so...same to me. I should remember that...about Rome...
But it was Christ who started our ecclesiology.
It's strange that it took at least 5-6 centuries to begin to manifest, and arguably another 5 after that before it would grow into something analogous to what is found today (with Universal Jurisdiction, Papal Supremacy, Petrine Exclusivism), etc. I guess Christ must've had it on some sort of timer, then.
So then, either somebody's wrong
Indeed.
or the Call of Christ is Catholic, and our response is Latin Rite Catholic, or Orthodox or whatever. But only one has the entire Truth.There always has been. If there has never been, then there's no need to worship God or Christi in any way.
Pardon? Did you seriously just write that if there's no universal jurisdiction, there's no need to worship God or Christ in any way?
Please tell me that you mean something other than what that appears to mean, because a bare reading of it is downright blasphemous.
What on earth do you think the Orthodox, High Church Protestants, Assyrian Church people, and the many, many generic kinds of Christians who have no particular ecclesiology are doing in gathering every Sunday, then? Meeting together to play checkers and tell knock-knock jokes?
No, Christ's Church is universal. Catholic. And I'm not talking about the political side.
I don't think this was anything that anyone claimed directly (at least I didn't), but now that you've written it, I find it hard to stomach the notion that the idea of universal jurisdiction (and related ideas like Petrine exclusivism -- the idea that the Pope of Rome
alone is St. Peter's successor) is not political.
Tell me: if it's not political, then why don't the Coptic Catholics get to call their bishop "Pope" (HG Bishop Ibrahim Sidrak, I think is his name)? 'Pope' is, as has already been established, an honorific that is traditionally applied to the Bishop of Alexandria, as it was for centuries before Rome ever attempted to apply it to their own bishop in any kind of exclusive sense. (With exclusive quasi-theological ecclesiological claims, to boot.)
So either the big, established-by-God, Vicar-of-Christ Pope of Rome is scared of the political consequences of annoying 8-12 million Copts (who mostly wouldn't care, because they don't know anything about Rome, and they obviously couldn't do anything about it anyway), or it somehow runs afoul of
Rome's own ecclesiology...and we can't have this tiny batch of Egyptian Rome-affiliated Catholics thinking that their Pope is
actually the Pope, now can we?
Lots of people do things that are more secular.
I don't know what you mean.
And those in the Church are supposed to care less about the secular and more about the religious.
This would be a lot less open to obvious criticism if your Bishop didn't have his own sovereign city-state, but yeah. I agree with this in principle.
That Rome and Alexandria are separate is a human thing. Christ asked that His Church be one as He and the Father were one.
You've completely missed the point of invoking Leo I's letter to HH St. Dioscorus: This was in
445, before either Ephesus II (449) or Chalcedon (451).
Rome and Alexandria were still one at the time. But they weren't "one in all things", as Leo puts it, meaning that Alexandria did not follow some uniquely Roman practices that Leo wanted us to. It really was an attempt to assert Rome's supposed authority over Alexandria (albeit more politely than Rome would in the future; the tone of the letter is more "You should do this so that we'll have the same practices", not "You should do this because to not do so is heretical"), and seeing as we did not adopt the practices requested in the letter, we can safely conclude that it failed. So much for universal jurisdiction -- again, several years before the "human thing" that would actually separate Rome and Alexandria.
Sure. I've said my peace.
