Dropping the Filioque?

[00:00:00] Foreign. [00:00:15] Is Pope Leo considering dropping the filioque from the Creed in order to advance unity with the Eastern Orthodox? [00:00:23] If he does this, is this a step forward or step back? That's what I want to talk about today on Crisis Point. Hello, I'm Eric Simmons, your host editor chief of Crisis magazine. [00:00:31] Before we get started, smash that like button. Subscribe to the channel, let other people know about what we're doing here. [00:00:39] I don't like you hitting the notifications bell, even though the little icon, where is it? There it is up there in the corner, right there. See how it says like, you know, hit the. Hit the bell. [00:00:49] Don't hit the bell. You don't need your phone or your computer or anybody telling you what to do, but subscribe to channel so that you can see what we're doing here. [00:00:58] Also, you can follow us on social media. Ismag. Go to our website crisismagazine.com and put in your email address and we'll send you our articles each morning, usually around 9am Eastern time, usually two articles a day. Okay, so there's a little bit of a talk right now that Pope Leo might be considering the possibility of dropping the filioque from the Creed. [00:01:23] Now, some people, probably not if you're listening to this, but some people might be like, wait a minute, what's the filioque? What are you talking about? We're going to talk, we're going to bring that all up here. So even if you don't know what the filioque is, why it's important, why the Pope might want to be dropping it, you'll get it all here today. So don't fret. [00:01:41] Now, what the context of this is simply that in this year is the, what is it, 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which happened in 325, called by the Emperor Constantine, and it was to combat the heresy of Arianism. [00:02:02] And at the Council of Nicaea in 325, the council fathers came up with what's known as the Nicene Creed. Now, Nicene Creed at this time, first of all, is written in Greek. It ended with the line, I believe in the Holy Spirit. [00:02:15] And there was nothing else after that. The purpose of the Creed was to combat, like I said, Arianism, to state that Jesus Christ was truly God and truly man, that he was not just an exalted creation, he was not some kind of middle way between God, the divine and human, which is what Arius basically was saying. A common saying among the Arians was there was once a Time he was not meaning, he came into being. He was created by God at some point. [00:02:47] And of course, the Orthodox faith is that Jesus Christ is now and forever God, God from God, true God from true God, light from light, all that one being with the Father. [00:02:59] And so this is the 17th hundredth anniversary. And so Pope Leo, who's going to be meeting, I believe, soon. Yeah, I think he's going to Turkey to meet, you know, meet with the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. But he wrote an apostolic letter called In Unitate Fide. [00:03:17] And in it he's Talking about the 17th anniversary council of Nicaea, the importance of the Nicene Creed and also its ecumenical meaning today, which is where there's some suggestion that perhaps he doesn't. He wants to drop the filioque for ecumenical reasons. So let me just explain real quick the Council of Nicaea and the Creed to make sure we understand what we're talking about here. In 325, there was a nice Council of Nicaea which had the Nicene Creed, which, like I said, ended with, and I believe in the Holy Spirit. In 381, there was another council, council Constantinople, in which were added sections to the Creed about the Holy Spirit. [00:04:02] And the part about the Holy Spirit included a number of things, but essentially what it was doing was it was. It was making sure it was clear that the Holy Spirit is also God. You know, Nicene Creed, just, I believe in the Holy Spirit didn't say anything about him. [00:04:17] And so this added that the Holy Spirit also got. It also said that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, period, and from the Father and the Son. He's worked with the Father and Son. He's worship and glorified. So it says he proceeds from the father. That was 3A1. In 451, the Council Chalcedon laid down that this is the Creed of the Church, the Nicene Constantinople Creed, which is its more formal name because it includes both aspects from Nicaea and Constantinople councils. And it could not be changed. That this is the unbinding, you know, the, the unending faith of the. Of the Church and it cannot be changed. [00:04:55] So that is what we're talking about with the Council of Nicaea. And then. [00:05:00] But then what happened was. Here I want to get a little bit of history. We'll go back to Pope Leo's letter here in a minute and what he says about the potential of the filioque and talk about that in a second. [00:05:12] Let me just write down a note here real quick. [00:05:15] Oh, my device is. That's technology for you, okay? Exciting podcast when. When the. When the podcast host decides to take notes in the middle of it. [00:05:30] So this was the Creed of the Church, the nice and constant 451 accepted by both east and West. And it just said the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and nothing else. It, you know, it said about the procession. However, then in Spain in the 6th century, there was a movement of Arianism kind of came back. Arianism died out in the east in probably by about the, by the end 4th century, early 5th century. [00:06:02] But it still, it kind of came back in the west with the barbarians, with the barbarian hordes in the north. And in the west, they that were coming in, they were Aryans. And so Catholics of that time had to basically make sure it was clear what the Church believes. We're not Aryans, we're Orthodox, and here's what we believe. [00:06:20] So in Spain, they added the clause Filioque, which means and the Son to the line, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. [00:06:31] And they did that because they wanted to make it very clear that Christ was. That Jesus Christ was God, he was equal to the Father. And that they felt was a way that they could do that. [00:06:43] And so that's. That happened. In Greece, it was officially asserting, decreed at the fir at the third Council of Toledo to combat Arianism. But this was just in Spain. [00:06:53] But it spread a bit in the west. Not like wildfire, but over time it started to spread. In fact, Charlemagne, who of course was crowned Holy Roman emperor in 800 AD, he was a big proponent of the Filioque being included in Creed, because at this point in Rome, the Filioque was not included in the Creed. Also, it's important to note that the Creed was not said at every single Mass or every single Sunday Mass at that point. It was mostly said at baptisms and other events like that. [00:07:24] It was not said in the daily liturgy, which was more the practice in the east and became the practice with Charlemagne, but not in Rome. [00:07:34] So Charlemagne, he basically convened the council and he aggressively promoted the use of the Filioque. This is around 809 AD, and he petitioned Pope Leo III, Pope Leo III, to make it universal so that the whole Church would include the filioque in the recitation of the Creed at Mass. [00:07:55] But Pope Leo III rejected this idea. [00:07:59] He refused to request. He agreed with the theology that the Spirit proceeds from the, from the Father and the Son. But he did not believe you should add something should be added to the Creed that even he, as the Pope, shouldn't be adding this to the Creed. [00:08:14] And in fact, he engraved the Creed in Latin and in Greek on two silver shields and displayed it outside of St. Peter's Basilica without the filioque. That's still there. [00:08:27] So in rome in the 9th century, the Filioque was not being said with the Creed at this time. But in most of the west at this point, by the 9th, 10th century, the creed was. Did include the filioque. I remember seeing a. [00:08:43] Somebody recited the Creed in Old English from like the Anglo Saxon times. This would be the 8th century, around then. And it did include the Creed. I mean, I'm sorry, it did include the filioque. So right there we see that there was a. [00:08:59] You know, the filioque was very prominent in the west, but it was not set in Rome. [00:09:03] And the Pope did not say, the whole Church needs to say it. And the east, it was not at all part of it. I mean, because obviously it was added to the Latin edition of the Creed. In the east. They're saying it in, in Greek. And they don't have this problem with Arianism anymore. They have their own problems, but not with Arianism. So they don't feel a need to add it. They're like, no, we don't add anything to the creed. [00:09:24] Then in 1014, King Henry II arrived in Rome for his coronation. [00:09:31] And he was surprised that the Creed wasn't being said during Mass. And so he basically asked that the. [00:09:38] That the Pope at the time. Let me look it up, Benedict the eighth, that he would recite the Creed as coronation and include the filioque. And Pope Benedict III the 8th did do that. And so the Creed was recited in Rome with the filioque. This is around 1014. So this is beginning of the 11th century. [00:09:59] It becomes the standard practice in the west, in Rome as well. So every Western when, when the Creed is reside in Latin, it includes the filioque. However, in the east, when the Creed is reside in Greek, it does not include the filial qua. [00:10:14] This had been a growing division between east and west as early, you know, Photius talked about it in the 9th, was that 9th century, I think it was. [00:10:24] And it was debates about the Filioque. Like many people in the east were saying, no, filioque actually is heretical. [00:10:31] I mean, the arguments were this. Number one, the biggest argument was you simply can't add something to the Creed. An ecumenical council is needed in order to add to a creed created by an ecumenical council. That was the number one argument, that nobody has authority, not even the Pope. The east was saying has the authority to add anything to the Creed. Secondly, there was some concern that. [00:10:55] And I won't get into all the details here, I reckon there's a few books you can read about this. Eric Ybarra has a great book about the Filioque. I recommend that one probably be. Be your number one resource. I think it's just called the Filioque by Eric Ybarro. [00:11:08] Y B A, R, R A. [00:11:10] And he spells his first name wrong. E R, I C, K. The right. Good Eric. Spell Eric, of course. But anyway, so read that for a whole history. But the. The idea in the east was that this was somehow potentially heretical because it made the Father and Son like one in its procession, in the Procession of the Spirit. And so it made. The distinction between Father and Son gets lost because there needs to be a distinction between the three. [00:11:39] It is a stereotype. But in general, in the west, they always emphasize the unity of the Trinity more and eco is emphasize the distinction between the three persons. Both are true, of course, and they need to be balanced. But that's part of the debate here. So by the time of the official split in 10:54, which of course isn't exactly when everything, you know, split, but it was like. It's a good. It's a good marking point. [00:12:04] The filioque was a major cause of division between east and West. Obviously the. The papacy was the biggest one, but the filioque was right up there with it. That was the biggest doctrinal issue between east and West. [00:12:18] And so what happened though is let's kind of advance to today. So today in the west, obviously, we say the Creed was the Filioque. Eastern Orthodox say the Creed without, the Filioque without. And the Son. And they. And many of them consider it heretical. Not all this is something you'll get Orthodox guy who'll be like, oh, it's heretical. We believe it's heretical. Some of them do, some of them don't. They believe. There are ways you could probably believe. And the Son without it being heretical. Well, an interesting point of all this is the Eastern Catholics, these are the. In general, these are the churches that were Orthodox. [00:12:53] So they split from Rome at one point, but then they came back to Rome. And so parts of them came back to Rome became the Eastern Catholic churches. So we're talking about like the Melkites, we're talking about the Byzantine Catholics, the Ruthenians, the, you know, different ones like that. [00:13:12] And these are Eastern Catholic churches. And what's interesting about them Is, in general, they do not say the filioque with the Creed. When they recite the Creed, even if it's English, whatever, they do not include the filoque. Some do, but most don't. [00:13:27] And if you go to Eastern Catholic Church today, which is in full communion, remember this, it's in 100% full communion with Rome. [00:13:35] They are not required to say the filioque in the Creed. [00:13:39] And so they're kind of that bridge between, as always, from east and west, where they don't say the Creed. But Eastern Catholics do not consider the filioque heretical. At least they shouldn't, because they're part of the Catholic Church, so they shouldn't. So that. That's kind of where we are. So the question then becomes, should it be removed? And the reason this came up is because of something that Pope Leo wrote in this apostolic letter. [00:14:05] He says, this is paragraph 12, I think, in order to carry out this ministry credibly, we must walk together to reach unity and reconciliation among all Christians. The Nicene Creed can be the basis and reference point for this journey. [00:14:19] It offers us a model of true unity and legitimate diversity. [00:14:23] Unity in the Trinity, Trinity in unity. Because unity without multiplicity is tyranny, multiplicity without unity is fragmentation. [00:14:31] The Trinitarian dynamic is not a dualistic and exclusive either or, but rather a decisive bond. Both and the Holy Spirit is the bond of unity, whom we worship together with the Father and the Son. [00:14:45] We must therefore leave behind theological controversies that have lost the raison d' etre in order to develop a common understanding and even more, a common prayer to the Holy Spirit so that he may gather us all together in one faith. One love note. In this paragraph, he goes on as well. Let me see, is there anything about the next one? I'll get to that one in a second note, though. Here he doesn't actually say, let's remove the filioque. He doesn't even mention the filioque here. The only time the filioque is mentioned in this letter is in a footnote when he. When he quotes the Creed, saying proceeds from the Father, he footnotes it to explain the filioque briefly. [00:15:24] But it's obvious that's what he's talking about, because he's talking about the Holy Spirit and he's talking about common prayer of the Holy Spirit basically having the same common, you know, ways that we acknowledge the Holy Spirit. And he talks about this. Theological controversies. [00:15:39] Basically, they've lost their reason for being and have and develop in order to develop a common Understanding. So everybody interpreted this, and I think he meant this to mean let's drop the filioque that we, you know, we don't need to say it anymore. [00:15:55] So I don't. So this has been the common understanding of this, and it's done for ecumenical reasons. In fact, he goes on to say, Pope Leo, that is, this is not implying ecumenism that attempts to return to the state prior to the divisions, that is before the split between east and West. Nor is there mutual recognition of the current status quo, of the diversity of churches in ecclesial communities. Rather is an ecumenism that looks to the future, that seeks reconciliation through dialogue as we share our gifts and spiritual heritage. [00:16:27] And so basically what it's trying, what Pope Leo seems to be saying, or at least suggesting, is let's look at maybe reciting Nicene Creed, which is a basis for unity in general between east and west and even with Protestants, many Protestant communities, let's actually recite it together the same. And in fact, there have been popes since Pope John Paul II who have recited the Creed without the filioque. I know Pope John Paul II did it. I'm pretty confident Francis did it. I don't know if Benedict did. I think he did. I'm not sure if Leo's done it yet. [00:16:59] But the idea is, why don't we just drop this drop de filioque? And I think that's an interesting question. [00:17:06] It raises number question about humanism in general. Now, humanism, I will say, has always been an area just for me. In fact, I've written two books related to ecumenism. I wrote this textbook, you know, 12 years ago, something like that, Ecumenism, Interreligious Dialogue. And that was obviously on the topic of ecumenism. And I was more pro ecumenism back then. But then I wrote a book called Deadly Indifference. And this talks about the dangers of ecumenism, the dangers of putting ecumenism above all things. So I have a real interest in this. And I think, though it might not be what people. People might expect, my views on like the filioque controversy and whether or not we should include it. [00:17:45] About three years ago, I posted a poll on, on X. And maybe it was called Twitter back then. I can't remember now. Let me put it up here for you. It says, if the only thing that prevented the reunion of the Catholic and Orthodox churches was that Catholics had to remove the filioque from the Creed while accepting its basic orthodoxy, would you accept dropping it? [00:18:05] And this was meant to be a Thought experiment. In other words, if it really was true that we live in a world where the only thing that kept us from unity with the Orthodox was we had to stop saying the filioque in the creed. We didn't have to say it was Herod, we just had to stop saying the creed. Would you accept dropping it? [00:18:23] I actually thought this was a layup. I thought this was a softball that almost everybody would say yes. However, out of 1500 votes back then, I should put this poll up again. [00:18:33] Like I said, this was done in November of 2022. So this is three years ago. I wonder what it'd be now. [00:18:39] 65% basically said no, we still keep it, that they should, we should not drop it even that's the only way. Now a number of people are like, well, obviously that's not going to happen. They're going to want more concessions. [00:18:50] I get all that. This was not meant to be real life. This is meant to be a thought experiment. If that really was the only thing, you didn't have to reject the filioques hereco, you just had to not say it on Sunday mornings. [00:19:02] Would you accept that if that's what got the Catholic Orthodox Churches together? And I was shocked because only 35% said yes. I think that's an obvious yes, in my opinion. I think it should be obvious that if that literally was the only thing. [00:19:18] And so, you know, why, why do I think that? And I realized though, the more I read the comments of that one and I've read other ones, I realized there's a real deep resentment of anything that even smells of ecumenism or smells of selling out or compromising the faith. And I get that. There was an article about this apostolic letter yesterday at LifeSite News where it talked about Poplio downplaying the filioque. And I made the mistake of looking at the comments and it was just unbelievable how first of all uninformed most people are, but how much it was just a knee jerk reaction of oh yeah, here the Vatican is again selling out the faith. Here the Vatican is again, here the Pope is again, you know, compromising the faith and giving into the schismatics and the heretics and blah, blah, blah, and how if you don't accept the filioque, you're a heretic and blah, blah. And it just was, it just showed a lot of ignorance, to be honest. [00:20:13] Now, I'm not saying you have to be. You had to vote yes on that poll. I gave. What I am saying though, let's understand what it is we're saying here, I mean, honestly, I think that I get first, I get that lots of people have a knee jerk reaction against humanism. Remember, I'm literally the guy who wrote a book against ecumenism. [00:20:35] Deadly Indifference. How the Church Lost Remission, How We Can Reclaim it is basically based on the idea that religious indifference has grown by leaps and mounds within the Catholic Church and lava has been caused by the ecumenical and interreligious dialogue movements. [00:20:50] So don't like act like I'm Mr. Ecumenism. [00:20:53] So I do understand why people have a knee jerk reaction to anything that kind of reeks of compromising the faith because that's what's happened. In fact, if you look at this letter, I didn't put it up. I don't have it here to put up on the screen. [00:21:07] But it's just interesting that when we're talking about the, the, the, the 1700 year anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, why do we have to talk about ecumenism? Why is that always got to be what's brought up? I mean anytime a pope or high, you know, Vatican official goes anywhere, ecumenism always becomes part of the theme. It's almost like ecumenism has become the actual religion, not Catholicism, but ecumenism. I mean, Leo writes, he says the Council of Nicaea is relevant today because of its great ecumenical value. Well, actually, I would say it's relevant today for a lot of reasons. Ecumenical value being, you know, kind of low on the list. [00:21:48] Indeed, the achievement of unity among all Christians was one of the main objectives of the last council, the Second Vatican Council, exactly 30 years ago. St. John Paul II further promoted this conciliar message in his encyclical Unum Sin. In this way, together with the great anniversary of the first Council of Nicaea, we also celebrate the anniversary of the first ecumenical encyclical. [00:22:13] It can be considered a manifesto that brought up to date the same ecumenical foundations laid down by the Council of Nicaea. There were no ecumenical foundations laid down by the Council of Nicaea. If you understand the term ecumenical as we understand it today. Now of course it's an ecumenical council. There's two different uses of this term. I want to be clear about that. Ecumenical just means universal when we're talking about an ecumenical council. So when we say the Council of Nicaea was an ecumenical council, it means it was universal and it applied to the whole church. There are 21 ecumenical councils. [00:22:43] But the word in the context of ecumenism, what ecumenical means is basically trying to find ways to bring Christians into unity. If you note at the first Council of Nicaea, it wasn't trying to bring Arians and Orthodox together in some weird ecumenical way. It was actually rejecting the Arians and saying, you're, you're false, you're false Christians. You need to repent and come back into the Orthodox Church. That's what it was saying. [00:23:13] Because if you think about the Arians are kind of like the Protestants of today in that they had, you know, they had some Christian understanding, but it was like they had some heretical beliefs. [00:23:24] In fact, the Arians had valid sacraments. [00:23:28] And yet what did the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea do? It said, no, we're not going to compromise with you. We're not trying to bring together with you. We're telling you you're wrong. You need to come back to the Church. So the idea that like the first Council of Nicaea was ecumenical in the modern sense of that term of ecumenism, the ecumenical movement is just nonsense. But of course that's what's brought up because it's like the letter continues, thanks be to God, the ecumenical movement has achieved much in the last 60 years. Has it? [00:23:59] Has it? [00:24:02] What exactly concrete has the ecumenical movement achieved? I mean, I'm asking that with all honesty. Like, I'm not trying to even be like sarcastic and stuff. Like, I just really would want to know what has it actually achieved? What concrete thing have people. [00:24:16] I mean, I would say probably the ordinary is the one thing I could list. The ordinary in which Pope Benedict set up a way for Anglicans to enter into the Catholic Church and maintain some of their traditions. [00:24:29] You could, you could say that that's a concrete objective achieved by the ecumenical movement. But other than that, I can't think of anything else. It is true that full, visible unity with the Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches and with the ecclesial communities born of the Reformation has not yet been reached. [00:24:45] I mean, and there's. Are we any closer to it being reached today than it were 60 years ago? [00:24:50] But then he goes on. I mean, basically the he, it's very typical modern church is ecumenism becomes like the religion. So I totally get, I totally get why Catholics would have a knee jerk reaction. Like the commenters at that LifeSite News article, which were a lot, were mostly ignorant. [00:25:13] I understand why they have a knee jerk reaction. Anything that reeks of the Vatican compromising again or being too ecumenical and kind of accepting false, false beliefs. [00:25:24] I also think that, you know, there's some legitimate reasons why legitimate issues with this, you know, with this letter of how he talks about the ecumenical movement. In fact, there's a great article over at Pelican plus by Murray Rundes and I'll link to it in the show notes that you can read. He gives him some decent criticisms on this. But I just want to say that I do think defilioque is a somewhat unique situation. [00:25:51] I, of course, would not want the Catholic Church. Do not believe the Catholic Church can change our teaching on, for example, the papacy. If we're going to have union with the Orthodox, they have to accept the papacy, at least on some level, as the, you know, the first C. [00:26:14] But the filioque, remember, was not included in the original Creed. It was not included in the Creed recited at Rome by the popes until the 11th century. [00:26:27] In other words, a thousand years after the time of Christ and 700 years after the Creed was originally written, popes did not include the filioque. [00:26:40] So the idea that somehow not including the filioque today is some, like, I saw somebody call it, I think somebody in the comments on X the crisis when we posted this video was like, basically, that would be heretical. Heretical. How can it be heretical when literally popes did not include it for 700 years? And to this day we don't require the Eastern Catholic Churches to recite it. This is a pre Vatican II thing too. This is not like some new ecumenical movement thing that we don't require. We didn't require before Vatican II either. [00:27:14] And so personally, I think that not including the filioque in the Creed is not something that should keep the churches apart, that to keep Catholic and Orthodox churches from union. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think we're going to have a union between the Orthodox churches and the Catholic Church anytime in my lifetime, anytime soon. I mean, the Orthodox churches themselves are obviously in schism with each other at times. You know, they're, they're in various spats. They have some theological issues like, you know, their acceptance of contraception in many of their communities, the. The acceptance of divorce and remarriage. [00:27:47] You know, obviously their views on the papacy. [00:27:49] And so I'm not saying we only have the filioque to go. But I am saying, though, as a thought experiment, I totally think it would be fine if the Catholic Church should say, okay, we're not going to include the filioque in the Creed as an actual ecumenical gesture. Now, we cannot reject it as heretical because the filial Oak way is not heretical. Obviously, if The Catholic Church has been reciting it for a thousand years in the Creed. [00:28:16] We could never say it's heretical. So I'm not saying we'd say it's heretical. We just simply say we'll go back to the practice that we had before the 11th century in which we don't recite it in the Creed universally. [00:28:30] This really is something where I kind of break. I know, with a lot more traditional Catholics and it might seem like I'm being soft on ecumenism, but here's the way I look at it. [00:28:41] The ecumenical movement as it's currently set up in the Church is worthless when it comes to any or any groups other than the Orthodox. It's worthless. And really that's only the Protestants because interreligious dialogue is our dialogue with non Christian religions. Ecumenical movement is our dialogue with Christian religions. So, I. E. Protestants and Orthodox. [00:29:04] It's worthless with the Protestants. Do you know why? Because you cannot have a corporate reunion with any of the Protestant sects, sects like for example, the Methodists or the Presbyterians or the Baptists, because they don't have. They don't have the sacraments. They don't have a hierarchy. They have no way. You could actually. All you can do is basically bring them home individually. Maybe a whole, maybe one whole church might come in, but that's not really a reunion. That's just simply them converting to Catholicism. So ecumenical movement, when it comes to, like Protestantism, is really just a dead project in my mind. That being said, I do think it's worthwhile with the Orthodox to actually have conversations, to actually work with the Orthodox to see are there ways that we can draw closer. Why? Because the actual goal of reunion is possible because they have valid sacraments, a valid hierarchy that could come back into communion with Rome, which has already happened in the past with the Eastern Catholic Churches. Now I know the modern ecumenical movement, they want. They're embarrassed by the Eastern Catholic Churches and how they came, but that's just silly on their part because those were true faithful Catholics, Christians who decided to join into communion with the Roman Church in spite of humongous obstacles, humongous persecution by the Orthodox against them for become, and in fact not even being very welcomed by many of the Latin Catholics when they did become Catholic and came into union with Rome. [00:30:37] So the Eastern Catholics can still be a model, in my opinion, for ecumenism in the end. And in that, in the. In with the Eastern Catholics, they were not required to recite the Creed, the. The filioque in The Creed. So I think that's a model for us of, you know, pre Vatican II humanism, whatever you want to call it. [00:30:57] So I, I still think that we should, you know, I think the Catholic Church should be willing to say, okay, we won't include the filial qua in the Creed when we recite it. Obviously an ideal situation would be where the Orthodox churches come into reunion with the Catholic Church and they don't have to recite the Creed, the filoqua, but we, we can recite the filioquate kind are with the Eastern Catholics. But I'm just saying, if that was a barrier, I do think Catholics should desire reunion with the East. I don't. I think we underestimate what a big deal that would be if there were large sections of the Orthodox churches that came back into communion with Rome, what a huge witness that would be in the world and how much that would affect basically Christendom in the whole world and how many people would be drawn closer to Christ because of that. So I do think we should be willing to say, okay, there are some things we are willing to do give on, not on doctrine, but on certain practices if that is something that would bring us closer into union with Rome. So, okay, I know that's kind of a controversial view among the more traditional leaning Catholics out there, but I really just think that it's kind of funny. I think this has something to do with my own history. [00:32:07] You know, I attend the traditional at Mass. I consider myself really a traditional Catholic, but I came to the traditional language Latin Mass through Eastern Catholicism. I've never been an Eastern Catholic, but I was, you know, converted pros from Protestantism to Catholicism. I started going to some Eastern Catholic liturgies frequently. Like, you know, number of times, maybe a few times a year, something like that. And I really love that. And that's what then introduced me to deeper liturgy and appreciation of the traditional Latin Mass. So maybe that's because of my history, why I'm more open to things like, okay, we could drop saying the filioque. So, okay, let me just post up some. Thank you for the live chat. Those who participate. Let me show up a few of the comments made. Tom Palm 64 says, thank you for clarifying some of this for me. I'm glad I know Philly Oakway. I actually didn't expect to get very many people watching this podcast live at least, or maybe at all, because it's like Philly Okway, snooze alert for some people. Like, oh, what do we care about. I do think it's an important issue. I think it can be very controversial. But like I'm happy to help people understand at least the history of it. Even if you don't agree with my my view at the end that we should, we should be willing to drop it if necessary. I do think it's important to know the history behind it. Female Casey Ross fan says who published your book Deadly Indifference? I might want to buy it. It is published by Sophia Insupress. Actually it's Crisis Publications but you can buy it Sophia Institute, Sophie what's their website? Sophieinstitutepress.com Something like that. I just look Deadly Indifference or Sam Eric Salmons on on the Sophia website and you can buy it there directly I on my website, my personal website, ericsson.com I'm actually out of stock but I realized today I have one copy. So I mean you could email me for that one copy if you want to. Female Casey Royals fan so I highly recommend the book of course. Course. August TV123 says Facebook has been putting Eastern Orthodox news articles on my feed. And if you think Catholic trads are mean and charitable, they pale in comparison. Compares to the ortho treads in the comment section. Honestly, they're both terrible. Oh, the ortho bros are the worst. I mean they're so bad. But some of the trad guys are the worst too. So I, I definitely know I'm not picking on Catholics being ignorant and stuff and, and being mean and mean spirited. I mean trads can do that. We, we have the reputation and some of it's justified, some of it's not justified. The study of the content is probably the worst. But the Eastern Orthodox, some of those ortho bros, yeah, they're terrible. They, I mean but they don't actually represent, you know, Orthodoxy any more than like Catholic individual in the comments represents Catholicism. So that's important to remember. So. But it is true, they can be pretty nasty. So. [00:34:49] Okay, I'm going to wrap it up there. I'm actually impressed my voice lasted this long. I've been fighting a cold for the past week or so. My voice has been kind of, my throat's been a little bit sore. I had two other interviews earlier today that lasted for a couple hours total. I actually was worried I wouldn't have a voice for this. So thank you Lord. My voice did last throughout this. Maybe some of you think I wish his voice had given out halfway through. But anyway, like my mic gave out briefly. So anyway, until next time, everybody God love you, Sam.