The Elephant In The Room When Orthodox And Catholics Discuss Unity
The Elephant in the Room
Orthodox participants felt it important to emphasise that the use of the terms “the Church”, “the universal Church”, “the indivisible Church” and “the Body of Christ” in this document and in similar documents produced by the Joint Commission in no way undermines the self-understanding of the Orthodox Church as the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, of which the Nicene Creed speaks. From the Catholic point of view, the same self-awareness applies: the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church “subsists in the Catholic Church” (Lumen Gentium, 8); this does not exclude acknowledgement that elements of the true Church are present outside the Catholic communion.
The grace of the Trinity is the starting point for understanding the nature of the Church, and especially for her unity in multiplicity, as the Holy Spirit shares one life and one being. The three distinct and unique Persons are one in life and in nature. Similarly, the Church exhibits a parallel multiplicity of persons in unity of life and being. The difference between God and the Church is that, in the former, multiplicity in unity is the truth, whereas in the latter, this is only a participation in the truth. In patristic language the former is ousia, while the latter is metousia. The unity of the three divine Persons in life and being is, therefore, the prototype of the unity of the Church’s persons in life and in being. As Christ Himself says in His prayer for the Church: “even as Thou O Father are in me and me in Thee, so they may be one, that the world may believe that Thou has sent me.” The mark of unity is collegiality and love, and not subordination. Orthodox Triadology, based on the grace of the Trinity, supplies the basic ontological categories for Orthodox ecclesiology. The Church is an eikon of the Holy Trinity, a participation in the grace of God.
The Church of Christ
How does the Church participate in God’s mystery and grace? How is metousia Theou (“participation in the essence of God”) achieved? How does the Church become an eikon of the Holy Trinity? The answer, in its simplest form, is contained in the phrase “in and through Christ.” Christ has established the bond between the image of the Triune God, and that which is made after the image, namely, the Church, mankind. In Christ we have both the eikon and the kat eikon (“that which is according to the image”). Hence, we must say that the Church is the Church of the Triune God as the Church of Christ. The link between the Holy Trinity and Christology, that is, between theology and economy, demands a similar link in ecclesiology. The Church is in the image of the Triune God, and participates in the grace of the Trinity inasmuch as She is in Christ and partakes of His grace. The unity of persons in life and being cannot be achieved apart from this economy of Christ, and we here encounter what the New Testament calls the “Body of Christ.”Christ is the Head of the Church and She is His Body. It is from this Christological angle that we better understand the multiplicity in unity which exists in the Church. This angle of the Body of Christ is normally connected with the divine Eucharist, because it is in the Eucharist that the Body is revealed and realized. In the divine Eucharist we have the whole Christ, the Head, and the Body, the Church. But the Eucharist is celebrated in many places and among many different groups of people. Does this then mean that there are many bodies of Christ? This is not the case because there is one Head, and one eucharistic Body (His very body which He took up in the Incarnation) into which all the groups of people in the different places are incorporated. It is the Lord Himself who is manifested in many places, as He gives His one Body to all, so that in partaking of it they may all become one with Him and with one another. “In that there is one bread, the many are one Body, for we all partake of the one bread.” The many places and the many groups of people where the eucharistic Body of Christ is revealed do not constitute an obstacle to its unity. Indeed, to partake of this Body in one place is to be united with Him who is not bound by place and, therefore, to be mystically (or “mysterially,” or “sacramentally”) united with all. This is how St. Athanasius explains the prayer of our Lord that the apostles may be one. “… because I am Thy Word, and I am also in them because of the Body, and because of Thee the salvation of men is perfected in Me, therefore I ask that they may also become one, according to the Body that is Me and according to its perfection, that they, too, may become perfect having oneness with it, and having become one in it; that, as if all were carried by me, all may be one body and one spirit and may grow up into a perfect man.” And St. Athanasius concludes: “For we all, partaking of the same, become one Body, having the one Lord in ourselves.” What is given in one specific place is something which also transcends it, because of its particular perfection, that is, its being Christ’s risen body. The different eucharistic localities, with the eucharistic president (the bishop), the clergy, and the participants (the people) constitute or reveal the whole Church. It is a local church, and yet she reveals the catholic mystery of one Church. The one Church of Christ is equally and fully in all these localities because of the one, perfect Eucharist, the one Lord, and the one Body.
The new Catholic “Sister Churches” ecclesiology describes not only how the Catholic Church views the Orthodox Churches. It also represents a startling revolution in how the Catholic Church views itself: we are no longer the only kid on the block, the whole Church of Christ, but one Sister Church among others. Previously, the Catholic Church saw itself as the original one and only true Church of Christ from which all other Christians had separated for one reason or another in the course of history, and Catholics held, simplistically, that the solution to divided Christendom consisted in all other Christians returning to Rome’s maternal bosom.Vatican II, with an assist from those Council Fathers with a less naïve Disney-World view of their own Church’s past, managed to put aside this historically ludicrous, self-centered, self-congratulatory perception of reality. In doing so they had a strong assist from the Council Fathers of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church whose concrete experience of the realities of the Christian East made them spokesmen and defenders of that reality.
In the divine Eucharist we have the whole Christ, the Head, and the Body, the Church. But the Eucharist is celebrated in many places and among many different groups of people. Does this then mean that there are many bodies of Christ? This is not the case because there is one Head and one eucharistic Body (His very body which He took up in the Incarnation) into which all the groups of people in the different places are incorporated. It is the Lord Himself who is manifested in many places, as He gives His one Body to all, so that in partaking of it they may all become one with Him and with one another. “In that there is one bread, the many are one Body, for we all partake of the one bread.” The many places and the many groups of people where the eucharistic Body of Christ is revealed do not constitute an obstacle to its unity. Indeed, to partake of this Body in one place is to be united with Him who is not bound by place and, therefore, to be mystically (or “mysterially,” or “sacramentally”) united with all.
“Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humanity by country, language, or custom. For nowhere do they live in cities of their own, nor do they speak some unusual dialect, nor do they practice an eccentric lifestyle….While they live in both Greek and barbarian cities, as each one’s lot was cast, and follow the local customs in dress and food and other aspects of life, at the same time they demonstrate the remarkable and admittedly unusual character of their own citizenship. They live in their own countries, but only as aliens; they participate in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign country is their fatherland, and every fatherland is foreign.”
“A synodal church is a listening church, aware that listening is more than hearing. It is a reciprocal listening in which each one has something to learn.”
“walking together — laity, pastors, the bishop of Rome — is an easy concept to express in words but is not so easy to put into practice.”
“We must continue on this path,” Francis told them. “The world in which we live and which we are called to love and serve, even with its contradictions, requires from the church the strengthening of synergies in all areas of its mission.”
“The Orthodox church, faithful to the unanimous apostolic tradition and her sacramental experience, is the authentic continuation of the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church as confessed in the Creed and confirmed by the teaching of the Church Fathers,” the Orthodox representatives said in a final message.
“The Orthodox church expresses her unity and catholicity in council — conciliarity pervades her organization, the way decisions are taken and determines her path,” the message continued.“The church does not involve herself in politics — her voice remains distinct, but also prophetic, as a beneficial intervention for the sake of man. Human rights today are at the center of politics as a response to social and political crises and upheavals, and seek to protect the citizen from the arbitrary power of the state. Our church adds to this the obligations and responsibilities of citizens and the need for constant self-criticism.”
“We have met, we have embraced as brothers, we have prayed together and shared the gifts, hopes and concerns of the Church of Christ,”
“We have felt as one her beating heart, and we believe and experience that the Church is one,” he said.
a) that Christ founded His Church as a visible and perfect society;
b) that He intended it to be absolutely universal and imposed upon all men a solemn obligation actually to belong to it, unless inculpable ignorance should excuse them;
c) that He wished this Church to be one, with a visible corporate unity of faith, government, and worship; and that
d) in order to secure this threefold unity, He bestowed on the Apostles and their legitimate successors in the hierarchy — and on them exclusively — the plenitude of teaching, governing, and liturgical powers with which He wished this Church to be endowed.
It is the Gospel as seen and interpreted by lawyers, all about laws, powers, rights, and obligations. True enough, but, because it is all about law, it cannot get to the very heart of the Gospel about a love which is away above anything that can be codified in any law, whether we are talking about God’s love for us or about our answering love for him. This legal approach, therefore, leaves us with so many unanswered questions that it is better to choose another approach.
We have seen the feeble attempts to explain our salvation in terms the cultural attitudes and man-made feudal laws of the Middle Ages, and we have put these explanations besides the love of the Father and how He meets humankind in the midst of all its sin, not as an accomplice but as a victim in Jesus Christ, and, like the father of the prodigal son, how he holds out his arms to embrace us. Again, how do we codify the two commandments that sum up all the law and the prophets, to love God with all our heart and all our mind, and to love our neighbour as ourselves, without damaging them? How often should we forgive our neighbour? Seven times? No, important as the Law is, the Gospel goes beyond the exigencies of Law as it does with God’s offer of salvation!
If the legal approach cannot get to the heart of the Gospel, it cannot get to the heart of the Church, which Vatican II identifies as the Eucharist.
What, then, is the status of the two dogmas?
Here is the dogma on the universal jurisdiction of the pope:
2. Wherefore we teach and declare that, by divine ordinance, the Roman Church possesses a pre-eminence of ordinary power over every other Church, and that this jurisdictional power of the Roman Pontiff is both episcopal and immediate. Both clergy and faithful, of whatever rite and dignity, both singly and collectively, are bound to submit to this power by the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience, and this not only in matters concerning faith and morals, but also in those which regard the discipline and government of the Church throughout the world.
It is important to note that the Council states that, even though “by divine ordinance, the Roman Church possesses a pre-eminence of ordinary power over every other Church, and that this jurisdictional power of the Roman Pontiff is both episcopal and immediate,” it takes nothing away from the power of the local bishops who also rule as successors of the apostles, having been appointed by the Holy Spirit:
This power of the Supreme Pontiff by no means detracts from that ordinary and immediate power of episcopal jurisdiction, by which bishops, who have succeeded to the place of the apostles by appointment of the Holy Spirit, tend and govern individually the particular flocks which have been assigned to them. On the contrary, this power of theirs is asserted, supported and defended by the Supreme and Universal Pastor; for St. Gregory the Great says: “My honor is the honor of the whole Church. My honor is the steadfast strength of my brethren. Then do I receive true honor, when it is denied to none of those to whom honor is due.”
The Dogma of Papal Infallibility says this:
9. Therefore, faithfully adhering to the tradition received from the beginning of the Christian faith, to the glory of God our savior, for the exaltation of the Catholic religion and for the salvation of the Christian people, with the approval of the Sacred Council, we teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman Pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the Church, irreformable.
So then, should anyone, which God forbid, have the temerity to reject this definition of ours: let him be anathema.
I am not going to defend or refute these dogmas, merely to discuss their status in a Catholic Church which is made up of sister churches. These apostolic churches belong to each other by their very nature because the whole Christ has manifested himself in the Eucharist of each from apostolic times to the present day, even though they have become separated by human weakness and sin. This has led each church to look at itself and to see the whole Church, which is true because Christ is present, and then to misjudge the others, failing to see Christ there too.
“Where the Eucharist is, there is the Church.”
Hence, as Catholics in full communion with Rome, we look at Vatican I and accept it as an authoritative expression of the apostolic faith as we have received and lived it. It is a product of Tradition which is our ecclesial life as Catholics down the ages and is formed by the synergy between the Holy Spirit and the Church.
On the other hand, there are other traditions, other versions of the common Tradition, that do not accept these dogmas and consider the papacy and its claims to be the biggest hindrance to unity. They too have an orthodox Christian faith, with beliefs forged in the synergy of the Holy Spirit and the Church which is centred on the Eucharist. Why do they differ from us, and what are we going to do about the difference?
Truths about living the faith, whether on a personal or ecclesial level, never come into existence as abstract propositions. They all arise out of concrete experience lived in a particular set of circumstances. Thus, when we live our lives separately and our experiences diverge, then it is likely that our insights into living the Christian Mystery will also diverge, not completely because we share in the same Mystery, but in those areas that reflect the differences. The papacy is one of these areas.I am not going to support the papacy in this article. It is simply sufficient to quote from the Orthodox-Catholic dialogue at Chieti in 2016:
6. In the West, the primacy of the see of Rome was understood, particularly from the fourth century onwards, with reference to Peter’s role among the Apostles. The primacy of the bishop of Rome among the bishops was gradually interpreted as a prerogative that was his because he was the successor of Peter, the first of the apostles.(12) This understanding was not adopted in the East, which had a different interpretation of the Scriptures and the Fathers on this point. Our dialogue may return to this matter in the future.
The meeting in Chieti of Catholic and Orthodox experts agreed that the dogmas on the papacy reflect a western and not an eastern tradition. I think it is because the East relied on the emperors to foment the unity of the Church worldwide and thus could concentrate on other things, while the emperor had little or no effective authority in the West and the chaos that replaced Roman rule made it imperative for Rome to accentuate its authority as successor of St Peter for the sake of the unity and reform of the Church in the West. Those who opposed this authority were largely against reform and were defending their own corruption. When the reforming popes turned their attention to the East, they assumed the same corrupt reasons among the Eastern bishops, while the Eastern bishops assumed the popes were being arrogant.
For those of us who really believe that the western tradition is correct and that the papal ministry really is part of God’s plan for the Church, we must also accept the validity of the Orthodox objections as the fruit of the eastern tradition. For us, the Orthodox- Catholic dialogue between the two traditions is of the utmost importance, especially the balance between primacy and synodality.
Already this dialogue is changing the way the Catholic Church is doing things. We hope that one day, it may change the way the Orthodox do things because they have no real and credible alternative to the papacy in place at a universal level. This has been admitted by some Orthodox theologians. The squabbling between Moscow and Constantinople is hardly edifying and looks squalid when compared with recent popes.
For the moment, we must recognize that according to the wider Catholic Tradition, a papacy or any other kind of primacy is unacceptable without a corresponding synod. Pope Francis said:
.It is precisely this path of synodality which God expects of the Church of the third millennium.A synodal Church is a Church which listens, which realizes that listening “is more than simply hearing”.(12) It is a mutual listening in which everyone has something to learn. The faithful people, the college of bishops, the Bishop of Rome: all listening to each other, and all listening to the Holy Spirit, the “Spirit of truth” (Jn 14:17), in order to know what he “says to the Churches” (Rev 2:7).The Synod of Bishops is the point of convergence of this listening process conducted at every level of the Church’s life. The Synod process begins by listening to the people of God, which “shares also in Christ’s prophetic office”,(13) according to a principle dear to the Church of the first millennium: “Quod omnes tangit ab omnibus tractari debet”. The Synod process then continues by listening to the pastors. Through the Synod Fathers, the bishops act as authentic guardians, interpreters and witnesses of the faith of the whole Church, which they need to discern carefully from the changing currents of public opinion. On the eve of last year’s Synod I stated: “For the Synod Fathers we ask the Holy Spirit first of all for the gift of listening: to listen to God, so that with him we may hear the cry of his people; to listen to his people until we are in harmony with the will to which God calls us”.(14) The Synod process culminates in listening to the Bishop of Rome, who is called to speak as “pastor and teacher of all Christians”,(15) not on the basis of his personal convictions but as the supreme witness to the fides totius Ecclesiae, “the guarantor of the obedience and the conformity of the Church to the will of God, to the Gospel of Christ, and to the Tradition of the Church”.(16)
All this is at least in part the fruit of Catholic-Orthodox dialogue which is helping us to see our own tradition in the light of that of the East.
As the popes and orthodox have decided to base their dialogue and, we hope, eventual reunion on the position of the papacy’s relationship with Orthodoxy in the first millennium, we must remember that, until Vatican I, the popes could fulfill their Petrine functions without universal agreement on the meaning of the papacy and without the Vatican I dogmas to support them. This was why Cardinal J.H. Newman believed the papal dogmas were unnecessary and were likely to cause problems which were also unnecessary. If reunion occurs between the Orthodox and Catholic churches, the situation of the first thousand years is likely to happen again.
Source: http://fatherdavidbirdosb.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-elephant-in-room-when-orthodox-and.html
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