Looks like Jason and the Callers need to rethink their call to Protestants. Their pontiff just declared hostilities between Protestants and Roman Catholics to be sin:
Catholics and Evangelicals should not wait for theologians to reach agreement before praying and working together, Pope Francis recently told a group of Pentecostal Anglican bishops in Rome.
To continue to focus on differences between Christian denominations is “sinning against Christ’s will,” the pontiff said, because “our shared baptism is more important than our differences.”
In the light of Bryan Cross’ comment about the authority of the magisterium, I wonder if he needs to reformat his Call to Communion to conform to Francis’ understanding of Protestants:
The Church does not lose her authority when her claims don’t make sense to us, because otherwise there would no “seeking understanding” to “faith seeking understanding.” Rationalism would be true; the Church would have ‘authority’ only when we agree with what she teaches. Rather, when the Church, exercising her authentic teaching authority, teaches something that does not “make sense” to us, it is we who must trust and seek to grow in our understanding, not the Magisterium that in such cases must instead conform to our understanding.
Still, it sounds like Jerry Walls is making it easier for Methodists to break bread with the Bishop of Rome:
This Sunday (Nov. 2), on what is known as All Souls’ Day, Roman Catholics around the world will be praying for loved ones who have died and for all those who have passed from this life to the next. They will be joined by Jerry Walls.
“I got no problem praying for the dead,” Walls says without hesitation — which is unusual for a United Methodist who attends an Anglican church and teaches Christian philosophy at Houston Baptist University. . . .
Walls is a leading exponent of an effort to convince Protestants — and maybe a few Catholics — that purgatory is a teaching they can, and should, embrace. And he’s having a degree of success, even among some evangelicals, that hasn’t been seen in, well, centuries.
“I would often get negative reactions,” Walls said about his early efforts, starting more than a decade ago, to pitch purgatory to Protestants. “But when I started explaining it, it didn’t cause a lot of shock.”
Now if only Walls could be as generous about limited atonement.
Old Life 
“Our shared baptism?” Somebody at the Vatican needs to issue a clarification.
I’m not even going to ask what a Pentecostal Anglican bishop is.
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the ol’ Scripture acknowledgeth none. thing is what us OP’s keep running into. A confession’s a pesky thing, but helps prevent theological drift, yo (emoticon).
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Walls is an idiot.
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Bryan:
“Catholics (who come into the Church rightly, and not for the wrong reasons) choose to place themselves under Catholic authorities not based on their own agreement with those authorities, but rather, based on discovering the authority of that authority, by which the Catholic then determines [by reception from the Church] which doctrines are orthodox and which are heterodox”
Why is it that virtually any proposition put forth by Bryan involves repeating the same word at least four times?
I guess it’s about authority.
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Bryan:
“And if the response is that the present ‘authentic Magisterium’ contradicts (or could contradict) the Tradition, the answer is that the impossibility of such a contradiction is precisely part of the Tradition. Part of the doctrine of the Catholic faith is that we will never be put in a situation in which we have to choose between fidelity to the deposit of the faith on the one hand, and fidelity to the authentic Magisterium on the other hand. Any position or admonition presupposing that we may have to choose between these itself departs from Catholic doctrine. What we may have to oppose are individuals or groups (other than the Magisterium exercising its authentic teaching authority) who themselves oppose either the natural law or the Tradition of the Church.”
So the flesh & blood Pope and Bishops alive today may not, in retrospect, be a part of the ACTUAL Magisterium when Catholics look back 100 years from now.
That’s not helpful.
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What Bryan’s debate with Douthat (one-sided, Douthat is not part of it) boils down to is that the Caller conception of Catholicism is quite gnostic while Douthat’s is firmly rooted in time, space, and history. This is what makes the Callers so idiosyncratic (and “All In”).
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You also have to love Bryan’s belief that he has discovered a way to make decisions that no one else in the planet has. He “discovers” the church, he doesn’t first do the work and then find the church that fits what he thinks it should look like.
The sad thing is that he appears to really believe his own press.
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@Erik —
In all fairness to CtC that isn’t just Bryan. That’s precisely what groups like Catholics for Choice argue is the situation today. That because the actual flesh and blood Bishops are contradicting tradition and the deposit of faith they are obeying the Magisterium even while ignoring the actual flesh and blood Bishops on issues like abortion and contraception. Catholics do seem united on this doctrine that the “teachings of the church” and “what the church teaches” aren’t the same thing.
Ultimately there is no way to reconcile:
a) The fact that as a matter of historical fact the church contradicts itself all the time
b) The church cannot be wrong
c) Truth is unchanging
You can at best only pick any 2.
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I wonder if the “discovery” process looks anything like this:
“Hey everyone! Come see how good Rome looks!”
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