Quote:
Originally posted by SecretMethod70
OK, having read Lebell's post, I can say I agree with 99% of everything he said (that 1% is essentially nitpicking on words so I won't even bother)
Just cause this is one thing I'm picky about, there was the Egyptian Coptic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Catholic Church, not Roman Catholic specifically. Roman Catholic is a particular rite of the Catholic Church and, while it is the most widespread and common, it is not the only one.
The best way to sum up what I mean by different rites is this: all Catholic rites are to believe the same things as far as interpretation of scripture, etc, but as far as the organization is concerned things may differ. Take, for example, the organization choice in the Roman Catholic Rite that priests cannot marry. This is not a matter of faith for Catholics but, rather, something that the Roman Catholic Rite chooses as a way to run itself. The Byzantine Rite or the Latin Rite however allow their priests to marry. All in all, I believe there are 13 or so Catholic Rites. They all work under the Pope and College of Cardinals.
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I think I'm going to nitpick here myself. To the best of my knowledge, the Roman Catholic church has only two rites: the latin rite and the eastern rite. The eastern rite arose when the Ukrainian churches joined the Catholic church rather than the Russian Orthodox church. The Eastern Orthodox church is an entirely seperate organization, which split off from the Roman Catholic church somewhere around 1000 AD, consisting of, among others, the Greek Orthodox, the Russian Orthodox, and the Armenian Orthodox. As a whole, it is much more loosely organized than the R.C. church. I don't know a whole lot about the Copts, but I don't believe they're part of either of these organizations, and if they are, I would suspect it would be the Eastern Orthodox.
As far as the teachings on marriage go, I don't know what the Orthodox church teaches, but I believe that priests in the Eastern Rite are allowed to be married, but not to marry. That is, if they are already married, they can still become priests, but once they've become a priest, they're not allowed to marry. Priests in the Latin Rite, of course, cannot be married at all.