I have to say that, as a traditional Catholic, I am agreement with Dr. Hahn with regard to his assessment of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Why would it surprise anyone that an orthodox Catholic would view the Eastern Orthodox as being in error?
By all means oppose Orthodoxy, but oppose reality, not some fantasy mental construct fashioned out of ignorance and bias.
I oppose what Eastern Orthodoxy has really become.
The repository of Truth. Oppose that as much as you want. It is preposterous that the Roman church, in trying to create facts to substantiate its inventions get texts from the Greeks, missinterpret them systematically and then say the Greeks didn't know what they were saying in first place.
The *whole* history of "infallible" dogmas is based on Roman interpretations of texts poetic in nature outside their proper context: the reading of the Catholic church in favor of a catapapic interpretation. Notice that this is not a calling of names, but a description.
Filioque: the whole Church (cata holos) understood and understands that the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone. That is a literal quote from Jesus' mouth. Everybody (cata holos) understood and understand that Jesus sends the Spirit to the world. Everybody (even the popes! - cata holos) agreed that the Creed should be kept that way and the wordly sending of the Spirit explained in catechism. In fact "together glorified with the Father and the Son" already accounts for the special relation of the Spirit with the two other Persons at the same time. There comes a Frank emperor and ignorantly (or ill-intended) says that the inovation had been "dropped" and impose it on the gullible West which, not only accepts it but is even unable to humbly correct the historical blooper;
Authority of the Primate: Only God is infallible and He teaches through whatever mean, wherever He wants (cata holic teaching). The primate defends the Orthodox Faith and the world praises him for it. Then people misinterpret that as if orthodoxy of faith came from his authority (catapapic teaching) instead through the whole (cata holic) from the one only Infallible.
Honor of the Virgin Mary: She is called Immaculate in very specific poetic texts in the very specific theology of the Catholic church. People who didn't know Greek translate it with different degrees of quality into Latin, and instead of humbly asking those who were teaching them the meaning of such lofty expressions, simply proudly try to guess and imagine. Then they come up with a heretical teaching, and once again, like with the claim that the Greeks had "dropped" the Filioque, they delludedly claim that their guess had always existed and that the whole community (cata holic church) that *taught* them the use of the title "dropped" that "first" meaning. Romans in face of the Greek Church are like children who invent invisible friends and then blame their parents for having stopped talking with these invisible friends.
Let's put the record straight:
There are only two peoples that we see in the Gospel that convert to Christianity: part of the Jews and Greeks. Romans are there but in NT we don't still have any significant number in conversions. Greeks are still Orthodox this day, their language is a direct descedent of the language of the Gospel and the Greeks enjoyed a continuity of education and culture that the West couldn't dream of. The worst days of Byzantine education would be examples of schooling to many societies even today. They *know* what they meant and they know what they mean. When confronted by Greek texts ask the Greeks what they mean. The whole "recovery" of texts and meanings is something for those who either lost or never had access to the original texts. The Greeks never lost them and had access from the very Apostolic times. Again, they *know* what those texts mean and the non-Greeks should just be humble, silent and learn.
Romans were once brilliant students of the Greek. In philosophy and in theology they reduced these activities to the application on the governance of society and the state, moving from a confederation of free cities/jurisdictions to the imperial monarchy of a dictator. As pagans they conquered their teachers militarily. As Christians, they tried to do the same spiritually and failed, thanks God.
Their city fell and their area of the world went through an age of decadence that led them to, adding insult to injury, crown a ex-federate barbarian king who imposed his own people broken theology on the papacy. The first popes resisted, but the later ones couldn't. That was the second and most terrible fall of Rome. Talk about cesaropapism. Charlesmagne managed not only to decide church matters but to change the entire theology of the Romans. Not even in the worst days of imperial interference in Byzantium an emperor managed to change the theology of the Church so deeply and for so long as Charlesmagne did with the Roman church both by the filioque and by allowing/making the pope to crown him. Everytime a Roman shouts cesaropapism sounds like a neurotic person who projects his/her own psychological pains onto the passerbies. Roman theology is the apix and most outstanding success of cesaropapism in history.
This is all to say this: cultivate your heresies as you may, but do not slander those who mercifully tried to educate you for your own failings in understanding.
If you mistrust the Holy Spirit so much as to look for "exclusive channels", popes, bibles instead of looking for the Spirit of Truth according to the whole (cata holic), that's your problem. If you want to further your cognitive dissonance by believing "according to ex cathedra statements of the Pope" and yet calling yourselves those who believe "according to the whole" than that's your psychologist problem. But do not put your blasphemies in the mouth of the Fathers, for they knew well the limit between dogma and theolegumen and spoke accordingly about each.
