Very interesting. What was the origin of the jurisdiction (again, just curious)? I’m guessing it had something to do with Poland itself being behind the Iron Curtain. (All the Polish citizens I know personally are actually Eastern Orthodox.)
The PNCC was formed in 1897 after several years’ worth of conflict between German and Irish bishops and Polish, Lithuanian, Slovak, and other immigrant groups. Specifically, these immigrants believed they should own the parishes they sacrificed to build instead of handing the deed over to the bishop; they also wanted preaching and devotions in the vernacular of the parish. Fr. Francis Hodur organized several parishes of the different ethnic groups and was excommunicated by Rome in a papal bull (which he burned and threw into a creek). After a few years of existence, the parishes wanted to affiliate with a church, so they elected Hodur as their bishop and he was subsequently consecrated (1903) in Utrecht by the archbishop and the bishops of Harlemm and Deventer with the result that he and his faithful joined the Union of Utrecht. Interestingly, +Francis was a bit of a radical politically, supported Eugene Debs and was considered a labor leader. He was prone to some heresy, but the other bishops of the Church steered the faithful in the Catholic way while trying to maintain respect for Hodur as the founding bishop.
.. I was raised RC and remained so until I was about 27 years old, so I'm quite familiar with the rationale. When I read this statement in John 6:53, So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you, I saw a contradiction with all the other times when Jesus said that belief in Him (the Messiah, the Redeemer) was the crucial key to receiving eternal life. It also seems anomalous to suppose that God the Son would make a physical act or deed, such as eating and drinking, a necessary element of salvation, and yet God the Holy Spirit inspired Paul to write that we are not saved by any physical works (Eph. 2, Gal. 3). This bothered me for a long time, so eventually I read, reread, and meditated at length upon Jesus' words in John 6. I finally realized that the key to understanding what He said was to read the entire chapter as a unit to get the proper context. I found that the repeated theme, the main message which Jesus was conveying to the crowd, can be found in verses 29, 35, 40, 44, and 47. That message was: believe in Me. The problem Jesus had was that the people who were responding to him lacked faith and also lacked comprehension of the spiritual context of Jesus' metaphors. Those people kept focusing on the physical aspects and they missed the point entirely. No matter how many times Jesus came back around to His point that they needed to believe in Him, they kept talking about food. (Jesus even told them at the outset, Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled.) They really were a dense bunch! If you'd care to read it, here is a post I wrote some time ago in which I go through the entire conversation, piece by piece. See what you think. Personally, I don't think that Jesus was trying to teach them something relating to the future Eucharist (which He had not yet instituted), but was trying to teach them to place their faith in Him as their Messiah, the one who was foreshadowed and typified by the manna.
I wouldn't dream of it. I've asked you questions because until you recently joined the forum you could write what I knew about the PNCC on the reverse side of a postage stamp with plenty of room to spare. So, it's interesting to ask you questions about the PNCC. I don't expect you to be an expert PNCC theologian. Likewise, many of us Anglicans on here, while trying to give our best answers about our individual churches and the Anglican Communion as a whole, we are not necessarily expressing the current doctrine of any of those bodies.
Caveat: I respect your conscience and encourage you to pursue the truth in the best way you can. I also see this as us trading perspectives, not necessarily arguing. So, I read your post and I have a hard time jumping on with your reading. I think the opposite is true: Jesus was stuck on the physical implications and the people were scandalized because of that; they didn’t leave Jesus because they couldn’t stand his metaphors, they left him because they thought he was advocating cannibalism. This point was really driven home for me by Dr. Brant Pitre here: https://youtu.be/H5NoivSiyY8 I would also say that I have a different conception of faith than you. As we all know, “pistis” is a word that can mean some different things. I take it to mean something close to fidelity, faithfulness, loyalty, etc., which kinda changes the scope of the Christian life IMO. So, I have faith in Jesus when I pledge loyalty to him by living my baptism in following the commandments, taking the sacraments (remember: he told us to take and eat and drink), and living everyday in repentance, constantly attempting to turn toward God. Belief is an aspect of this, of course, but to make the primary components of Christian spirituality become essentially a mental exercise of trying to scrounge up enough belief sounds like a bad recipe. We have opposite stories: I grew up an evangelical and found the Catholic faith, so I have my own bias against a “faith alone” stance because it caused me to feel near-constant despair.
Yes, indeed. The current PNCC prime bishop +Anthony Mikovsky says that we are a well-kept secret, and he hopes a good one as well!
Now you have made me quite curious. If I'm not being nosy, could you explain how, or in what way, it caused you to feel despair? I agree that the view of "scrounging up" belief is an incorrect one, and some groups out there do take that view (I spent some time in one of them). True faith or belief in our Lord is not something we can manufacture. On the other hand, when we have faith we can (and we should, and we will) actively do things to strengthen it, such as going to church, receiving the Eucharist, reading the Bible, and communicating with God in prayer. What people strongly believe will strongly affect what they think, say, and do; this is a two-edged fact, for a person of little faith will tend to do little of those things, while a person of deeper belief will show deeper commitment to honoring God's will and seeking His wisdom. It seems to me that there are deep ditches of error on both sides of the correct path: one ditch involves making 'faith' into a substance one whips up like a recipe, and the other ditch involves making faith a matter of the doing, the deeds, the striving and performance of acts as a means to appease God's justice (which Christ already appeased fully on the cross).
It caused me to have near-constant despair because I was never sure if I was believing enough. I didn’t know it at the time, but I needed objective sacraments. In regard to your second paragraph: there’s not much there I would disagree with. I always take St. Paul’s line: faith which worketh by charity. Faith is a virtue given in baptism and, like any virtue, it can be exercised and strengthened; we believe that we strengthen faith by prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.