"Unfortunately, it has not yet become axiomatic to accept the Byzantine tradition as a consistent harbinger of the Latin tradition, one lagging centuries behind Byzantine theology of the Immaculate Conception."
"In negotiations with the Greeks in Constantinople, emperor John VIII [d. 1448] had to choose between two rival Councils for corporate reunion with the West. The Conciliarists at Basel wished to slight Pope Eugenius IV and receive the Greek contingent there. However, the Orthodox tradition was too conscious of the traditional presence of the Pope of Rome at an Ecumenical Council. As such, it was [sic!] beyond their ecclesiology to seriously consider convoking a Council that intentionally excluded the virtual presence of the Pope."
"[T]he early patristic tradition of the [Blessed Virgin Mary] harmoniously couple her appellation of 'prepurified' and 'immaculate' to such a degree that there is no known Father of the Church, Ecumenical Council, Liturgy or ecclesiastical author, who was at variance with the BVM's absolute holiness and perfection when considered under this quasi-title."
"C. S. Lewis asserts the feminine character of the Christian worshiper as consequent upon the transcendent masculinity of the God who is worshiped, a notion also echoed by H. U. von Balthasar, as in the last century by Matthias Scheeben. For Lewis, see That Hideous Strength (New York: Macmillan, 1965) 316: 'What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.' ... This quite common and quite unreflective reservation of the reality of masculinity to the Creator, over against a relatively feminized creation, implies a reversion to a cosmological dualism radically incompatible both with Catholic sacramental realism and with the doctrine of the Good Creation which underlies that realism."
"Only in [Eucharistic] worship do we enter into our free solidarity with the second Adam."
