Chatolic vids on youtube.

[OzzyKP]

Re: Catholic vids on youtube.

Originally posted by Heraclitus
After being freaked out by Muslim vids on youtube, I'm starting to look at the vids of other religions.

Overall most of youtube is filled with anti-Catholic BS, the above are one of the few vids made by Catholics. And for the most part they don't seem scary. Some of the evangelical Christians stuff is similar but some other Protestant vids seem, well, rather intellectually bankrupt. Also most Orthodox vids appear to be mixed up with one or the other kind of eastern European nationalism.

Why?

Cause Catholics are saner than everyone else.

[Elok]

WRT the Orthodox question, I can't say for certain since my current PC/net setup can't play videos. However, what I can tell you is that the OCC is structured very differently from the RCC. The Ecumenical Patriarch, usually acknowledged as the head of our church, doesn't have power anything like the Pope's. His authority over the church is comparable to the American Vice President's over the Senate (sorry, I can't think of a European parallel). If we ever have another ecumenical council (it's been well over a thousand years since the last one we recognize), he'll only get to call the meetings to order and recognize speakers and what-have-you. Oh, and he wears the biggest hat during services, that's about it.

The upshot of this is that the buck tends to stop at the national level. The Patriarchs of various national churches play much the same role in their churches as the Ecumenical Patriarch plays in the church as a whole, but synods are called yearly for decisions to be made on the national-church level, as opposed to the centuries that pass between WHOLE church decisions. Plus each church keeps its own customs, usually tied into its national identity, which strengthens the local association.

The good thing about this scheme is that, being fairly democratic, it weeds out the worst of the corruption. The obvious downside is that it leaves the Church vulnerable to hijacking by civil authorities, as is apparently the case in Russia today and, I'm told, was the case in Russia under the Czars and the Byzantine Empire as well. Not a historian, can't say for sure. People remain nominally dedicated to the universal Church but, to themselves, think of Orthodoxy merely as an integral part of being ___ (Pick one: Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Georgian, etc.). It's a real problem.

Plus Eastern Europe is full of congenitally proud and unfortunately backwards states which happen to be largely Orthodox, or were until the Commie purges anyway. Their FINE ORTHODOX HERITAGE helps them forget about the third of their populations that's drunk, illiterate and unemployed.

[Heresson]

...and living next to Russia