Hello and welcome to focus the Catholic answers podcast for living

understanding and defending your

host and we always think I suppose we always have a prejudice that we're closer to the

Orthodox than we are to our other fellow Christians

certainly all having to do with the bishops and priests of

Orthodoxy, truly having holy orders, and the sacraments being valid, they're being the same number of sacraments, all of that suggests the ancient closeness of orthodoxy and Catholicism, but that closeness can sometimes breed difficulties that are maybe deeper

than the difficulties that exist between Catholics and other Christians.

And so Catholic Answers has a brand new book out from our guest today, Michael Lofton.

It's called Answering Orthodoxy. A Catholic response to attacks from the East.

Congratulations on the book, Michael. Hey, thank you so much, sigh. It's an honor. the kind of PhD thesis or something like that.

It's made for people to read and understand

what are the things that are actually points of friction, of difficulty between the Catholics and the Orthodox.

And so Michael's got 30 of them in here.

There are simple things like the Eucharist, excuse me, the Eastern churches in the first millennium never accepted

papal infallibility.

Okay, so that would be an objection and then Michael will give you a few pages on that one

actually quite a few pages that are written in a prose that you can understand

about what the Catholic response is to that so this is a Catholic response to attacks from the East. And we're

going to focus on one of them today, Michael. All right? Sounds good to me, yeah.

And that is that the Pope was merely a first among equals in the first millennium.

And before I get into the question with you, I feel like when we say in the first millennium,

what we're saying is in a period of time that almost nobody alive today

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