From Vatican I (1870)

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“I adjure you by God, most venerable fathers, how can we proclaim and publish and practice a constitution established in this manner? How can we defend it before the dissidents and present it to the Catholics? Let them [Orthodox] not accuse us of despising holy antiquity and let them not despise us as contradictors of the councils and canons. What will we say to those who give extreme respect to the councils, which took place in the east? How can Catholics persevere in the faith and how can the separated return when they see in this constitution the destruction of their autonomy and the loss of dignity and rights for their patriarchal sees? Unity consists in the fact that bishops are united in faith and love with their patriarch, the patriarchs among themselves and above all with the Roman patriarch. According to divine right, one of them, the Roman pontiff, is the prince of the others; according to canonical right there are five princes of the Church and successors of the Apostles. The Eastern Church attributes to the pope the highest and most complete power, but in a manner that the fullness of his power be in harmony with the rights of the patriarchal sees…The definition in canon 3, chapter 3, entirely destroys the foundations of the Greek Church and drags it to its ruin and to its complete dissolution. Our conscience refuses to accept this constitution because, for eighteen centuries, that is, from the origins of Christianity until today, this Church has been organized and ruled according to a law which is proper and conforms to nature, according to a special discipline, according to usages and ancient customs going back to the apostles; new definitions of this kind renew troubles, create difficulties and put obstacles which harm the salvation of souls.”

Melkite Catholic Patriarch Gregory II Yousef Sayour before the General Assembly of Vatican I concerning the declaration of papal infallibility. 1870. [1]

Now, 150 years later, that insistence for an unnatural papal authority over the natural canonical right codified soon after Pentecost, has come to turn on traditions even within the Latin Rite itself, where that unnatural right was defined. And in another example of how the arrogance of pride degrades, and degrades endlessly, that “authority” seems to take on morality itself.

[1] Steward of the Mysteries, Bishop Nicholas Samra, Sophia Press. West Roxbury, Massachusetts, 2010. pp 89-90.