Anglican and Catholic reunion if the Roman Church schisms?

I don't mind a serious hard-ribbed discussion and clear statements, unlike my friend @Liturgyworks. It's easy to be offended for him and myself and other people who are not in the favored group, as the RC apologetic has always maintained, but I don't care about being offended when there is truth involved, so thanks for stating the traditional RCC perspective.

Here is my thing though, with regard to the crisis you guys are currently finding yourselves in. I understand that you've got prophecies about a dark time in the future. But if this indeed does come to pass: "evil will be taught as good and good as evil and the Papacy will fall", then I do not see how we may say that the Roman Church has not defected from the faith. If the Papacy will fail, and IF it's true that "on Peter I will build my church" (an interpretation Anglicans reject), then if Peter fails, the Church fails, and the entire infallible nature of Rome disappears.

This means that not only it would cease to have been infallible then, but that it never had the character of infallibility; and so Trent, Vatican I, even the Lateran councils, the promulgation of transubstantiation, in short the entire last 1000 years which gave Rome its modern identity, may be wrong, according to your own concession (not according to my Anglican apologetic). If the Papacy fails, then Rome does not have the character of infallibility, by Rome's own internal logic.

So even if this dark time was truly predicted in RCC prophecies, I don't see how at least one essential facet of the Roman church can survive here. And if Rome never had the character of infallibility, then it was no more, and no less, than another kind of Anglicanism. A particular church, with its own history of liturgy, tradition, and theology.

 

Who said I minded this? If my statements seem obfuscated, it is only owing to my preference for ornate and delicate prose; many of them pack rather a wallop within their delicate, but not fragile, Baroque, if not Roccoco, syntactic construction.

By the way, in merely going after transubstantiation, you are failing to attack the entire Thomistic-Aristotelian system, which I would argue is a superfluous and unneccessary distortion which enshrines doctrinal deviation. To the extent the Summa Theologica can be shown to have drifted from the Ékdosis akribès tēs Orthodóxou Písteōs of St. John of Damascus, Latin-Frankish doctrine can be asserted to have departed from the firm doctrinal Orthodoxy of the Byzantine-Roman Orthodox Catholic Church and by extension, since their doctrines are compatible with those established in the aforesaid Ekdosis, the Oriental churches and the Assyrian church (except to the extent that St. John mistakenly conflated the former with the Monophysite-Tritheists of which John Philoponus of Alexandria, always regarded a heretic by the Copts, was a member, and to the extent that the latter during St. John’s lifetime contained an excessive number of Apoktastasis-enthusiasts, but this was of course a transitory problem, as one will not now find an Assyrian presbyter extolling the virtues of the eschatological premise contained in the famed and infamed Book of the Bee.

What is more, we can assert the Catholicity of the Ekdosis and the heterodoxy of the Summa by their respective compatibility and incompatibility with the writings of our mutual friend St. Epiphanius of Salamis, for the former quotes St. Epiphanius verbatim, using the epitomes he wrote describing each heresy in the Panarion, for all such ancient heresies, and writing new heresiological matter only for novel heresies like Monothelitism, Islam, and Iconoclasm, which had arisen between the death of the great bishop of Salamis and his own age, and is also consistant with the Regula Fidei contained in St. Epiphanius.

Aquinas on the other hand rather aspires to bore us senseless through endless regurgitation of Aristotle, referred to as “The Philosopher”, as if all of a sudden the work of Socrates, Plato, Xenophon, Pythagoras, Euclid, Zeno, Diogenes, as well as lesser known but still rather critically important chaps such as Epicritus, was now valueless, interpreted through the heretical Islamic lense of Averroes, who Aquinas dares refer to as “the Commentator”, as if the opinions of various Christian scholars such as St. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, the Cappadocians, et cetera, was now to be dismissed, and the opinions of a Muslim preferred over those of other more recent Christians or even the great Jewish philosopher and Aristotelist Maimonides, and also, most especially, the thoughts of the monks of the Syriac Monastery in Egypt, Mar Sabas in Palestine, from which St. John Damascus hailed, or Mar Mattai in Mesopotamia, the other chief center of translation from which Aristotle and other Greek philosophers were made available to Islamic scholarship by Syriac Orthodox monastics.

We can make the same assertions about the Institutes of Calvin and reject them on the same ground. Both Aquinas and Calvin set out to write out an entirely novel, Aristotelian system of theology to supplant the Patristic philosophical system, which used a carefully pasteurized form of Plato synthesized with droplets of other pan-Hellenic philosophers, their tangents of a pagan theological or perverse sexual nature being ignored, excised and circumscribed, and their genuine intellectual accomplishments elsewhere utilized. And to the extent each of these two works is differentiated from the writings of the Sabaite doctor, it exposes the errors that crept into the Roman church and the Calvinist overreaction to them. In like manner, the direct applicability of the Damascene corpus to the lives of pious Anglican fathers indicates that therein represents something of a non-singular, but still highly useful, touchstone, for Anglican-Patristic dialectic, which was critical in moulding the Orthodox character of the Church of England in its historic splendour, which was such that even the pages of the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia, which at times seem to drip with conceit and thinly veiled contempt for non-Latin Christianity, masked at times with impressive patronistic hubris, with regards to Anglicanism, come across as envious (something also noticeable in their treatment of Russian church music, which the authors seem pained to concede is superior even to Gregorian chant).

Now how is that for an ornate wallop-packing rhetorical punch ensconced in the stylistic splendour one would typically associate with a mid 18th century harpsichord concerto (of the sort where one is rather likely to encounter the most agreeable presence of Stephen Cleobury conducting)?