Catholic - Orthodox Relations: Mutual Needs

“Among Orthodox believers we do not observe primarily a docile submission to the Church’s hierarchy, nor a tendency to make an assiduous study of the word of God. The distinctive characteristic of Orthodoxy is to be found in an ardent desire for an immediate contact with the heavenly world. Furthermore this is not a desire for an individual contact, but for a universal churchly contact, not something in the written language of theory and reflection, but something living, real, direct. Consequently the center and heart of Orthodox religious life is the worship of God in church. Orthodox Christians are not over-worried by the absence of preaching, nor, and this  is really regrettable, with contradictions between life and practice and the commandments of the Lord; but without the Church of God, without the Church’s worship, life becomes empty. Lack of concern for the Church, and its worship, its singing, is considered among the Orthodox as  a sure sign of lack of religious fervour, as the renunciation of Orthodoxy. In church the believer is aware of being surrounded by the inhabitants of heaven, a faith which the prayers of the liturgy themselves express. ‘When we are it the church of thy glory, we feel that we are in heaven.’”

“Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign. And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.  They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law.”

By the Letter to Diognetus, both Catholics and Orthodox are found wanting, the Orthodox by their nationalism, and Catholics because of their insufficient awarenes of being more really citizens of heaven than citizens of this world. Yet these limitations are built into our respective understandings of the Church which reflect our different histories.   The Orthodox have come to accept as normal its division into regional patriarchates, without a universal primate; and the Catholic Church came to see itself as a “perfect society” which is held together by the pope as source of all jurisdiction.   This latter emphasis on the Church as a perfect, supranational society  tended to supplant the idea of the Church as the body of Christ that embraces heaven and earth, and this affected our understanding of the spiritual life, of the sacraments, especially of the Eucharist. 
However, we have had Vatican II, and one of the groups most influential in the Council was the group that wanted to get an insight into modern problems by going back to th original sources; and, for instance, instead of interpreting church history from the point of view of 19th and 20th century Catholicism, they wanted to interpret 19th and 20th century from the point of view of the first thousand years.   Not only did they make an important contribution to the documents of Vatican II, two of them became popes!   If continuity into the future is important in the “hermeneutic of continuity” advocated by Pope Benedict, continuity with the  Church of the Fathers is also just as important.   This group had close ties with Orthodox theologians stationed in Paris.   They did not resolve the schism because the pre-suuppositions of each side were too far apart for that, but they did strengthen each other’s resolve.