I think I'm going to convert to Orthodoxy. I am Catholic right now but with so many scandals happening in the Church I just can't do it anymore. The Orthodox Church looks so much more spiritually healthy and it rests on sole apostolic tradition instead of Modernism. The Catholic Church has become an Anti-Christ Church, a shadow of it's former self. Orthodoxy is the true Church.
How should I go about contacting a priest? Any advice?
Have you prayed to the Lord and actually asked him if this is what he wants. Our Lord Jesus was slapped and beaten, he had his flesh ripped from him by whips, he had a crown of thorns beaten down on his head with a stick, we was forced to walk through the streets with the instrument of his own death on his back, he had to see his Mother weeping at the sight of him, he had nails hammered through his hands and feet, he was forced to hang for 3 hours gasping for air as he was mocked on the cross, he was given vinegar to drink because the people thought the "real" messiah would come, he was pierced in the side with a spear. What do the Orthodox want with you when something like this is enough to shake your faith? The Lord needs Saints for his Church not those who will leave at the slightest discomfort. I pray you think about this more.
reads like falseflag b8
I'm Catholic, but I was going to convert to Orthodoxy, so I do at least know how to begin. If you really want to do this, not even the Lord can stop your will. Simply google Orthodox churches in your city, and call/email the priest. That's it tbh. He told me that at first they would "get you into the life of the Church" and then Catechesis begins. That is all you need to do. Get the OSB, a prayer rope (you'll need it eventually) and begin studying things on Orthodox sites, intros to it. This is a good intro book, and it's free: oca.org
Find your closest parish and send an email or call the parish priest if you want to set up a simple meeting first. Perhaps he may inquire to see if it is really in your heart to jump ship, or if you are jumping the gun here. I am Orthodox and if you do join us, welcome home, brother.
I'm gonna suppose this is not a bait.
My advice is that you wait and study the core differences between catholicism and Orthodoxy. I suggest you look at BOTH sides of schism and what they have to tell about, that you look into Filioque (not just ortho memes about muh filioque bad, we good, but actually looking at both sides of the narrative - orthodox and cath), look into papacy (again not simple memes but rather looking into what it means) I suggest you get all the information and knowledge about the crucial matters. you need to make the grave decision of converting,,…aside from "church is now corrupt it is not convenient to be in this particular church". That's a very weak argument and honestly if someone uses it to convert you his other arguments are probably weak too.
Conversion is not something meme based. It's something you come to when you dig into theology. You state "scandals" as the foremost reason why you consider converting. That is wrong approach. You'll see corruptioneverywhere… in Orthodoxy too - LGBT friendly clergymen, etc.
My point is: There IS one true church out there. going by your feelings/impressions gained from memes and from current corruption may be very misleading. You state the current corruption as the reason why Ortho is the true Church. That's a bad reason buddy. During red terror Orthodox church was also subversed - would that make her a fraud all of sudden?
At the end of the day you should be able to tell why one church is wrong while the other is the True One and the arguments should be much better than "RCC is corrupt now, orthodoxy looks better" Those arguments should be made after looking at the matter from BOTH sides. not just RCC side, not just Orthodoxy.]
Regardless of an appearance of spiritual health, the Church is made of human, fallible people. Do not join us thinking we are ideal - you will just be disappointed once you meet terrible people and lazy clergymen, and what you will perceive as modernism, and you will then go for some Genuine Orthodox schismatic group. Join us because we are the true faith, not because you are uncomfortable with scandals in the Catholic hierarchy or because you feel resent for the Catholic Church. There are absolutely no reasons that these feelings would not also apply to the Orthodox Church.
Now, with that said… Look up Orthodox parishes near you. Go to one, attend the Sunday liturgy a few times, then tell the priest you would like to convert. Follow his instructions after that. But really, I strongly suggest you rather pray for your hierarchy with tears instead of running away at the first scandal. If you're interested in Orthodoxy, see the Divine Liturgy, talk to a priest to ask questions, and ask him for something to read to learn more about the Church.
Romanian catholic here. Orthodoxy in Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and the balcans in general is highly corrupt. Communism has left the othodox curch in ruins and it's current leaders are ex kgb agents. Many priests get involved in politics because they get paid. Sure, there are some great orthodox priests as well but not as many in the catholic church. Trust me, you'll want to be catholic after you see how the orthodox priests from eastern Europe do their thing.
The child abuse thing is also because of communism. (Watch the embeded video)
The catholic church is starting to clean up and to get rid of the pedophiles. Stay catholic.
Hey bro good luck. Find a local priest and ask for advice. Also would be a good idea to start reading scripture.
its*
Nice try rabbi
I can understand the sentiment, but would that really do any good? To be honest there seems to be so much corruption these days that I don't see where redeploying to somewhere else in the Trinitarian flow will do any good, you are just going to get shelled from the same enemy in a different position. Homo-pedos, mega "church" prosperity charlatans, bodies that are hardly dogmatic and in fact could be considered government controlled organizations with Christian iconography (Sweden comes immediately to mind)…take your pick of poison as there's many flavors even beyond what I have listed.
To be honest I am tired of people running from burning buildings. Try and put that devil's fire out first! And if someone tries to throw fuel into the conflagration, correct them and if that doesn't hold, whip them out. It may seem like I am targeting you and Rome on this, but I feel this way as a general matter of course and as such include everyone from Canterbury to Moscow as well, if you see smoke near you then you should source it and beat it out through any means. Otherwise you will flee from building to building, but will find no safety since there will be only the flames that you did not fight.
This also applies to Eastern Europe in general. It's very very hard to find a good priest, most are quite corrupted by money. Just look at the cars they all drive while the rest of the people can barely afford one. Many of them are also not very qualified due to the shortage of priests after the collapse of the USSR they were letting anyone in.
...
Orthodox liturgy puts to shame what passes off as Catholic novus ordo mass these days. No contest. And Catholic mass will get worse and worse as the church gets more progressive and inclusive
Christ, what a bad post.
Romanian Orthodox here.
Your doctrine has changed a lot, while Orthodox remained mostly unchanged.
It's extremely stupid how Catholics rationalize afterlife, invert doctrine like the filioque and exaggerate with Marianism, calling her co-savior or something like that.
Your pope is not infallible in the slightest and there are no sins harder than others. In heaven there can be no sin. You can't BUY forgiveness with money from your antichrist pope.
You've created a stupidly rationalized system out of everything.
It's not worth talking about the corruption in both of our churches. We can both agree there's massive amount of corruption among both clergies. And this is because we are people, FALLIBLE people. What matters is our faith, which needs to be according to scripture and apostolic tradition, not silly mental gymnastics which you call "theology"
don't
Or maybe it is your eyes that are corrupted? Since you wrote that the Bulgarian Church is corrupted and I know for a fact that she is not, I am inclined to think that you were wrong about the other Churches too.
This accusation is so absurd that I don't know how start refuting it. Some of the priests in Sofia (my city) live like sants. The salary a priest in my country is negligible ($200-300) so his main income comes in the form of donations from his flock. Do you think the flock is going to support corrupted priests? I don't know how much donations a priest gets, but whatever they are, they are well deserved.
No it hasn't.
Most things created by God have a nature that is, to some extent, comprehensible. Those things which are not fully understandable, such as the afterlife, resurrection, etc., are formally titled mysteries for obvious reasons.
The filioque wasn't an issue until the thirteenth century.
Mary being co-redemptrix is not Catholic doctrine.
Not usually, no, only under certain extremely strict circumstances.
1 John 5.
Obviously.
Obviously.
Total strawman.
That doesn't contradict anything I've said. I've said it's hard to find a good priests, you say SOME of them live like saints, where's the problem? Or are you gonna tell me know that all the priests in your country are saints?
I have seen weirder things…many times they have a lot of control over their parish…or do you think most priests do not try to get assigned to the best neighborhoods? And then when they are relocated to the countryside, they tell the parishioners to go to their new location.
Look, my main point is, there is also corruption in the Orthodox Church, and quite a lot of it. If the OP is thinking he will find a Church full of saints, he's in for a big disappointment.
Not at all, my friend. The Orthodox Church is full of living Saints and (hopefully repenting) sinners. Thank God, for I am a sinner living among saints!
vs
ok
I think I recognised two of the cars. 😀
Some time ago there was a scandal in the local media because various buzynessmen with shady reputation in different times had given cars and other gifts to the Church (hence to the bishops) and the Church had been accepting these gifts.
noice
Obvious d&c bait. Stop responding.
I thought the right hand was already cut.
Keep your political garbage out of Christ.
stay catholic
this is the right path
Scandals and evils have been happening since the times of the Apostles, with many previous ones - including the ones before Great Schism - equally bad or worse than the current one. Arian crisis, all the heresies and schisms rampant in early Church, the whole 11th century crisis (which was perhaps the single worst scandal the Church has ever had, worse than the current one), Western Schism, rise of Protestantism, so on, so on. Of course Satan will attack the Church Christ founded, and at times God may allow his attacks to be very severe, indeed, looking at history severe enough that it's pretty much impossible to imagine any other institution surviving what the Catholic Church has survived. Christ never promised that His Church will remain unattacked. He promised to save it from Satan prevailing over it.
He can be very close to victory, he can have almost all clergy corrupted, he can almost destroy the Church, as he did so many times in the last 2000 years, but in the end Satan will never succeed - God will always in the end top him, as he so far always did, no matter how deep a crisis the Church was going through.
Every single time Christ fulfilled His promise. Do you think this particular time it's going to be different? When Christ promised us to save His Church from Satan ultimately prevailing, do you think He wanted us to escape (and abandon it for some other church which looks, for a time being, healthier) every time Satan starts attacking - behaving like people who don't trust Jesus's promise and, lacking faith in God's providence, think that, even though Jesus promised otherwise, this particular time Satan will succeed?
God never breaks His promise. And if it looks like this time He is going to fail and not fulfill His promise, this is only because of lack of trust in His all-encompassing Providence in the one viewing.
So does Catholicism. Even though Catholics, even high-ranking ones, can turn out to believe Modernist (note here: modifying small-t traditions, e.g. the form of the liturgy, isn't modernism - this has been always happening, both in the West and the East; neither the elaborate Divine Liturgy nor Tridentine Mass was how liturgy was celebrated by the Apostles - "traditional" forms of liturgy are all highly developed and in their modern forms they appeared comparatively late) doctrines - there always were heretics in the Church.
Just become a calvinist. I'm Dutch Reformed but Presbyterianism is fine too
Gonna go see an Orthodox priest today, wish me luck. Finally done with this joke of a church.
The gates of hell have eaten it, the bad fruits are too much to handle. Our Lord warned us about trees bearing bad fruit. Gotta chop the tree down now. It's poisoned.
I dont consider calvinism Christianity, the church is younger than the religion and its precepts are absolutely idiotic, turning God into a puppet master who hands out damnation and salvation aimlessly, and man into mindless robots.
If Augustine was alive now or in the 1500s he would be kicked out of the catholic church. These ideas arent new.
I don't think you actually know what Calvinism is. Man has free will in calvinism, its just man is depraved and will only choose God through God's grace.
Is it truly worse than during all the horrible scandals before Schism though?
If you become Orthodox, you will have to accept that the pre-Schism Church was Orthodox, and so you will have to believe that the Church can and did experience such scandals. You will have therefore to believe that Orthodox Church can experience a similarly giant crisis at any moment, and still remain the true Church. The safety that attracts you comes from being born at the right time to see the Orthodox Church in a period of relative peace without bigger scandals, rather than from Orthodox Church being Divinely unable to fall into a crisis. It very much can and it, if you accept the pre-Schism Church as Orthodox, already has. The safety you look for in Orthodoxy is therefore purely illusory and can at any moment disappear.
But note that even in these pre-Schism scandals, Christ would always in the end win. Everything looked as if the Church was going to be destroyed by Satan, but in the end he was always defeated by Christ.
Trust God's promise above your intuition.
The fact that you consider the Catholic Church a tree that bears bad fruit shows that you lack perspective. You concentrate on the bad fruit, not seeing the overwhelming amount of good fruit.
Imagine you lived in times of, say, Arian heresy (read about it: it was absolutely apocalyptic in scale). You would see the Church in a very weak and broken state, full of evil people - would you be right in calling this Church a church that bears bad fruit? Or rather a church that, when you look at it in general, bears good fruit but is going through a crisis?
PROTIP: Stop thinking this way.
t. fellow Catholic
We all know calvinist free-will isn't authentic free-will, and the rest of TULIP is wrong. For a legalistic mind he really couldn't understand the spirit of the law nor God himself.
Just remember you will find the same things. The church you will join literally submitted to communism and its priests were KGB agents for 70 years.
Leaving instead of trying to change things is the easy thing to do. When the next crisis hits orthodoxy (and it will, because those countries are becoming westernized slowly) then you will become Protestant or whatever and say you want a 'personal relationship with God' or some crap.
heresy and stupidity. accusing St. Augustine of calvinism is like accusing Jesus Christ of mormonism
They were oppressed and murdered for half that time, thousands of priests and laity died for the church, their churches went from 28,000 to 500 at one point….then Stalin realized he couldn't destroy them, so he became more lenient. KGB are going to
infilitrate and try to control all religions, stop making up shit as if they just colluded without resistance and without martyrs, like the Vatican did with the Nazis.
—-
Priest says communists control Vietnam's Catholic Church
ecumenicalnews.com
I did the same OP. Going to attend church services next Sunday. God bless and good luck.
If the Orthodox Church experiences a similarly giant grisis, we simply have to see what the spiritual men say about this problem. They are our authority, not a pope or a patriarch. The Orthodox monks are not secret agents in organizations with dubious motives (as some Catholic orders are). If we have a crisis, we simply have to follow the respected among the monks and we will be ok.
Yes, in theory it is possible for the Church to experience a similar crisis and still remain the true Church. But it has been prophecied that a time will come when the Orthodox Church will be hit by a crisis and then the "official" Orthodox hierarchy will no longer be part of the true Church. When this happens the true Church will be considered a schismatic Church (just as now the Orthodox Church is considered schismatic by the Catholics).
In the Catholicism the pope is supposed to be the guardian of the true doctrine. Everyone who converts from Catholicism to Orthodoxy, must be prepared to assume the very same role as a guardian of the Orthodoxy.
Yesterday one user in another thread posted this channel:
youtube.com
Does the Catholic Church have something comparable?
I believe that if we ever had a pedogate like crisis, the laity together with the good hierarchs and priest would just purge the bad clergy away. Which makes me think, where is the backlash from the good Catholics to all that? I see everyone is unexplainably calm, even in this board.
I have pity on the true Catholics, especially when I see their struggle in this board. They are not calm. However, they don't know what to do, so they are waiting for a miracle to happen.
Since the Reformation, the Catholic hierarchy has been looking to the laity as to something to be kept a tight rein on. The Church is identified with the hierarchy and the laity is largely voiceless in Church matters. Everyone has to obey the one above him without much thinking. This system works well when the hierarchy is healthy, it, however, makes the Catholic Church vulnerable to forces who intentionally try to subvert it. If, for example, someone in CIA decides he doesn't like pope Benedict, then it is an easy matter to change him and this is bad.
8ch.net
If the same CIA guy does the same thing with the Patriarch in Constantinople, well this would be bad, but survivable just as we've survived patriarch Athenagoras.
The fact that you post here about your conversion - asking if you should talk to priest, explaining your issues with catholic church tells me you're not convinced about Orthodoxy being the one true faith.
I'll put it this way: If you thought this out theologically - not only through "muh corruption nowadays" and related-memes online, you would be pretty sure you want to convert. You would go to priest and ask him how to convert right away.
Instead you go here and ask what you should do - perhaps in hopes to have a discussion, perhaps in hopes that someone will persuade you to come back or just baiting. It's your conversion, your soul. If you're not sure you should wait and learn more.
Well if you're convinced about the conversion then the answer is obvious isn't it. Go there and talk about your desire to convert. Or call him.
It's pretty complicated isn't it. This post is either a bait or you're not convinced because you're not strong in your convictions, looking for an assurance. Let me tell you: You should think this through when you do that you either stay RC or you don't need any advice at all when contacting a priest.
Good luck user.
Insulting the catholic church isn't heresy.
You super brains here seem to think the whole gates of hell shall not prevail thing ought to be a source of comfort.
Speaking as a lowly plebe who looks to Apostolic succession and acknowledgement of the Real Presence in the Eucharist as preconditions for calling yourself God's Church, from where I sit I see two candidates for God's Church. And I see one church that survived everything Islam and Communism could hit it with and still bounces back. And I see my own church, which is placidly dissolving into a lukewarm glob of feel good go-along/get-along clap trap, with no visible outside oppressor and no will to set itself straight.
Satan won't prevail against God's church, fine. Yet here Satan seems to be prevailing. Is my church then something else?
Shame on anyone who lets the fact that a Church is being run by a cabal of satanic paedophiles make them wonder if they're following the right church. I'm a Catholic too, but looking at the clerical hierarchy and feeling that every single one of them has a strong chance of being the enemy to God and a facilitator or perpetrator of the most egregious crimes imaginable is enough to fill anyone with righteous anger. I honestly can't blame anybody who's thinking about leaving at this point, the whole institution couldn't possibly be any more discredited as a moral authority.
Disagreements about theology are one thing, the Bride of Christ being led by people who winnie the pooh children is entirely different.
Particularly in as much as these sinful fiends keep throwing us bones in terms urging/not urging sinners to remain in sin if it doesn't "bother their conscience" or whatever.
Screw dithering around about the filioque…. If I fall into sinful temptation and I talk to a man of God about it, I need to make certain it's not going to be some squish in the thrall of Luciferians who will slap me on the back and tell me God loves me anyways.
Seriously not trying to troll here but these are the issues that make me lose sleep fam.