Orthodox Church"; he formally absolves him from schism and heresy after having made him say that he desires union with the "holy, Catholic, Orthodox, Eastern Church." The Confessions of Mogilas and Kritopulos say the same thing less directly.[1] D. Bernadakes wrote the Catechism used in their schools throughout Turkey and Greece. In it he explains the four notes of the Church, that she is one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic, and establishes that these are the notes of the Orthodox Church only. The child is made to exclude explicitly the Roman and Protestant Churches.[2] And this is the conviction of all the Orthodox. Palmer's Visit to the Russian Church is full of conversations in which the author elaborately expounded his new Branch theory to bishops, archimandrites, priests, to the Procurator of the Holy Synod, even to noble ladies. And all, without exception, answer that they have never heard of it before, and that it is absolutely opposed to the teaching of their Church. Long ago St. Metrophanes of Voronege († 1703, canonized 1832), one of the famous Russian Saints, had left as a legacy to his people a last address in which he says: "As without faith it is impossible to please God, so also without the Holy Eastern Church and her divinely-delivered doctrine it is impossible to be saved."[3] So the Archimandrite of the laura at Moscow: "Our Church is in truth the whole Orthodox Catholic Church, and she calls herself so distinctly."[4] The Archpriest Koutnevich, "High Almoner of the Army and Fleet," says: "We are unbending concerning the Eastern Church, which we believe to be altogether right, while all others have fallen away." He goes on to say that "Rome and the Latin Church has all Christianity, only deformed by one or two heresies."[5] The Procurator of the Holy Synod, Count Pratasov, "seemed to be staggered at the idea of one visible Catholic Church being made up of three communions, differing in doctrine and rites, and two of them at
- ↑ Mogilas makes union with the (Orthodox) See of Jerusalem, "mother and mistress of all Churches," the condition (i. qu. 84). Kritopulos says there are four Patriarchs of the universal Church — they are, of course, the four Orthodox ones (chap. xxiii.; see also chap. vii.).
- ↑ Quoted in Kattenbusch: Orient. Kirche, in the Realenz. xiv. p. 456.
- ↑ Palmer's Visit, p. 95.
- ↑ Ibid. p. 196.
- ↑ Ibid. p. 268.
