A Catholic View of Eastern Orthodoxy (1 of 4)

First, I shall discuss why Catholics should not only show some ecumenical concern for Orthodoxy but also treat the Orthodox as their privileged or primary ecumenical partner.

Secondly, I shall ask why the schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches occurred, focussing as it finally did on four historic 'dividing issues'.

Thirdly, I shall evaluate the present state of Catholic-Orthodox relations, with particular reference to the problem of the 'Uniate' or Eastern Catholic churches.

Fourthly and finally, having been highly sympathetic and complimentary to the Orthodox throughout, I shall end by saying what, in my judgment, is wrong with the Orthodox Church and why it needs Catholicism for (humanly speaking) its own salvation.

Part 1 First, then, why should Catholics take the Orthodox as not only an ecumenical partner but the ecumenical partner par excellence? There are three kinds of reasons: historical, theological and practical - of which in most discussion only the historical and theological are mentioned since the third sort - what I term the 'practical' - takes us into areas of potential controversy among Western Catholics themselves.

The historical reasons for giving preference to Orthodoxy over all other separated communions turn on the fact that the schism between the Roman church and the ancient Chalcedonian churches of the East is the most tragic and burdensome of the splits in historic Christendom if we take up a universal rather than merely regional, perspective. Though segments of the Church of the Fathers were lost to the Great Church through the departure from Catholic unity of the Assyrian (Nestorian) and Oriental Orthodox (Monophysite) churches after the Councils of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451) respectively, Christians representing the two principal cultures of the Mediterranean basin where the Gospel had its greatest flowering - the Greek and the Latin - lived in peace and unity with each other, despite occasional stirrings and some local difficulties right up until the end of the patristic epoch.

That epoch came to its climax with the Seventh Ecumenical Council, Nicaea II, in 787, the last Council Catholics and Orthodox have in common, and the Council which, in its teaching on the icon, and notably on the icon of Christ, brought to a triumphant close the series of conciliar clarifications of the Christological faith of the Church which had opened with Nicaea I in 325.

The iconography, liturgical life, Creeds and dogmatic believing of the ancient Church come down to us in forms at once Eastern and Western; and it was this rich unity of patristic culture, expressing as it did the faith of the apostolic community, which was shattered by the schism between Catholics and Orthodox, never (so far) to be repaired. And let me say at this point that Church history provides exceedingly few examples of historic schisms overcome, so if history is to be our teacher we have no grounds for confidence or optimism that this most catastrophic of all schisms will be undone. 'Catastrophic' because, historically, as the present pope has pointed out, taking up a metaphor suggested by a French ecclesiologist, the late Cardinal Yves Congar: each Church, West and East, henceforth could only breathe with one lung.

No Church could now lay claim to the total cultural patrimony of both Eastern and Western Chalcedonianism - that is, the christologically and therefore triadologically and soteriologically correct understanding of the Gospel. The result of the consequent rivalry and conflict was the creation of an invisible line down the middle of Europe. And what the historic consequences of that were we know well enough from the situation of the former Yugoslavia today.

After the historical, the theological. The second reason for giving priority to ecumenical relations with the Orthodox is theological. If the main point of ecumenism, or work for the restoration of the Church's full unity, were simply to redress historic wrongs and defuse historically generated causes of conflict, then we might suppose that we should be equally - or perhaps even more - nterested in addressing the Catholic-Protestant divide. After all, there have been no actual wars of religion - simply as such - between Catholics and Orthodox, unlike those between Catholics and Protestants in sixteenth century France or the seventeenth century Holy Roman Empire.

But theologically there cannot be any doubt that the Catholic Church must accord greater importance to dialogue with the Orthodox than to conversations with any Protestant body. For the Orthodox churches are churches in the apostolic succession; they are bearers of the apostolic Tradition, witnesses to apostolic faith, worship and order - even though they are also, and at the same time, unhappily undered from the prima sedes, the first see. Their Fathers and other ecclesiastical writers, their liturgical texts and practices, their iconographic tradition, these remain loci theologici - authoritative sources - to which the Catholic theologian can and must turn in his or her intellectual construal of Catholic Christianity. And that cannot possibly be said of the monuments of Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed or any other kind of Protestantism.

To put the same point in another way: the separated Western communities have Christian traditions - in the plural, with a small 't' - which may well be worthy of the Catholic theologian's interest and respect. But only the Orthodox are, along with the Catholic Church, bearers of Holy Tradition - in the singular, with a capital 'T', that is, of the Gospel in its plenary organic transmission through the entirety of the life - credal, doxological, ethical - of Christ's Church.

There is for Catholics, therefore, a theological imperative to restore unity with the Orthodox which is lacking in our attitude to Protestantism - though I should not be misinterpreted as saying that there is no theological basis for the impulse to Catholic-Protestant rapprochement for we have it in the prayer of our Lord himself at the Great Supper, 'that they all may be one'. I am emphasising the greater priority we should give to relations with the Orthodox because I do not believe the optimistic statement of many professional ecumenists to the effect that all bilateral dialogues - all negotiations with individual separated communions - feed into each other in a positive and unproblematic way.

It would be nice to think that a step towards one separated group of Christians never meant a step away from another one, but such a pious claim does not become more credible with the frequency of its repeating. The issue of the ordination of women, to take but one particularly clear example, is evidently a topic where to move closer to world Protestantism is to move further from global Orthodoxy - and vice versa.

This brings me to my third reason for advocating ecumenical rapport with Orthodoxy: its practical advantages. At the present time, the Catholic Church, in many parts of the world, is undergoing one of the most serious crises in its history, a crisis resulting from a disorienting encounter with secular culture and compounded by a failure of Christian discernment on the part of many people over the last quarter century - from the highest office holders - to the ordinary faithful. This crisis touches many aspects of Church life but notably theology and catechesis, liturgy and spirituality, Religious life and Christian ethics at large. Orthodoxy is well placed to stabilise Catholicism in most if not all of these areas.

Were we to ask in a simply empirical or phenomenological frame of mind just what the Orthodox Church is like, we could describe it as a dogmatic Church, a liturgical Church, a contemplative Church, and a monastic Church - and in all these respects it furnishes a helpful counter-balance to certain features of much western Catholicism today.

Firstly, then, Orthodoxy is a dogmatic Church. It lives from out of the fullness of the truth impressed by the Spirit on the minds of the apostles at the first Pentecost, a fullness which transformed their awareness and made possible that specifically Christian kind of thinking we call dogmatic thought.

The Holy Trinity, the God-man, the Mother of God and the saints, the Church as the mystery of the Kingdom expressed in a common life on earth, the sacraments as means to humanity's deification - our participation in the uncreated life of God himself: these are the truths among which the Orthodox live, move and have their being.

Orthodox theology in all its forms is a call to the renewal of our minds in Christ, something which finds its measure not in pure reason or secular culture but in the apostolic preaching attested to by the holy Fathers, in accord with the principal dogmata of faith as summed up in the Ecumenical Councils of the Church.

Secondly, Orthodoxy is a liturgical Church. It is a Church for which the Liturgy provides a total ambience expressed in poetry, music and iconography, text and gesture, and where the touchstone of the liturgical life is not the capacity of liturgy to express contemporary concerns legitimate though these may be in their own context), but, rather, the ability of the Liturgy to act as a vehicle of the Kingdom, our anticipated entry, even here and now, into the divine life.

Thirdly, Orthodoxy is a contemplative Church. Though certainly not ignoring the calls of missionary activity and practical charity, essential to the Gospel and the Gospel community as these are, the Orthodox lay their primary emphasis on the life of prayer as the absolutely necessary condition of all Christianity worth the name.

In the tradition of the desert fathers, and of such great theologian-mystics as the Cappadocian fathers, St Maximus and St Gregory Palamas, encapsulated as these contributions are in that anthology of Eastern Christian spirituality the Philokalia, Orthodoxy gives testimony to the primacy of what the Saviour himself called the first and greatest commandment, to love the Lord your God with your whole heart, soul, mind and strength, for it is in the light of this commandment with its appeal for a God-centred process of personal conversion and sanctification - that all our efforts to live out its companion commandment (to love our neighbour as ourself) must be guided.

And fourthly, Orthodoxy is a monastic Church, a Church with a monastic heart where the monasteries provide the spiritual fathers of the bishops, the counsellors of the laity and the example of a Christian maximalism. A Church without a flourishing monasticism, without the lived 'martyrdom' of an asceticism inspired by the Paschal Mystery of the Lord's Cross and Resurrection, could hardly be a Church according to the mind of the Christ of the Gospels, for monasticism, of all Christian life ways, is the one which most clearly and publicly leaves all things behind for the sake of the Kingdom.

Practically speaking, then, the re-entry into Catholic unity of this dogmatic, liturgical, contemplative and monastic Church could only have the effect of steadying and strengthening those aspects of Western Catholicism which today are most under threat by the corrosives of secularism and theological liberalism.

I look at a lot of Eastern jurisdictions that I myself do not recognize any more than you as One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic. I look at some that come close but don't quite measure up, and I look at some that don't even come close.

Graves, my boy, you have just revealed who you really are. You are not Orthodox, you are a PROTESTANT, for you have denied the church visible in favor of the church invisible--an old Protestant trick. Thus there is no real apostolic authority handed down by our Lord Jesus Christ but only a disembodied collection of doctrine. But how are we to know where this church invisible truly is. By your reasoning we cannot look toward any external authority. The result is that each one is left to rely on his own private judgment: each man his own pope! You are a high church and extremely liturgical Protestant but a Protestant none the less.

icons of the Lord on earth, not as personified Christ.

You know, this is interesting because it really brings out the problem you have with our language. We'd regard those two things as equivalent. "For, what I have pardoned, if I have pardoned any thing, for your sakes have I done it in the person of Christ" (2 Cor. 2:10). Similarly we speak of the priest as "alter Christus" (another Christ) because he acts in the person of Christ. I think you are simply overreading our words. We certainly do not mean this: that the Pope and Christ are one and the same! Then the Roman Catholics should have no problems worshiping the Pope, who is then considered "God" on earth. In fact, we say that the Pope "hold[s] upon this earth the place of God Almighty" (Leo XIII, Praeclara Gratulationis), not that he is God Almighty!

Really, no one over here has ever suggested worshiping the Pope as "Christ on earth", so that should give you a real understanding of how we are using these terms...

"You are not Orthodox, you are a PROTESTANT, for you have denied the church visible in favor of the church invisible--an old Protestant trick."

I have said no more of the sad ecumenist present than did Pope St. Athanasius of Alexandria and St. Hilary of Poitiers in their own day. SS Athanasius & Hilary never denied the Orthodoxy of the Church visible, but only the Orthodoxy of certain visible "churches". "'They may have the churches, but we have the faith', said Saint Athanasius"(Source: http://www.popemichael.homestead.com/ENTHRONEMENT.HTML ).
"In these times St. Jerome could express his feelings with the sad exaggeration: 'The whole world groaned and was amazed to find itself Arian'" (Source: http://www.tanbooks.com/doct/doctors_church.htm).

"Finally, for the first time in their lives, they were able to really concentrate on theosis. And theosis, after all, is what it's all about or should be."

Is that what the Orthodox response to Pope Benedict (and John Paul before him) and the Orthodox approach to Catholic posters on FR is all about?

From Alexy II on down to the Orthodox posters on FR "it's all about theosis"?

Could have fooled me!

I thought it was just good ol' fashioned American anti-Catholic nastiness!

By the way, an Orthodox bishop once told a group of us, "Most Episcopal and Roman Catholic men who convert to Orthodoxy don't really convert to Orthodoxy, they convert to the Orthodox priesthood!"

You say, "Pope Benedict is pursuing ecumenism," and that Pope Benedict "thinks [ecumenism is] the right thing to do and what our Lord wants."

We say say, to you and to Pope Benedict XVI, "To those who attack the Church of Christ by teaching that Christ's Church is divided into so-called 'branches' which differ in doctrine and way of life, or that the Church does not exist visibly, but will be formed in the future when all 'branches' or sects or denominations, and even religions will be united into one body; and who do not distinguish the priesthood and mysteries of the Church from those of the heretics, but say that the baptism and eucharist of heretics is effectual for salvation; therefore, to those who knowingly have communion with these aforementioned heretics or who advocate, disseminate, or defend their new heresy of Ecumenism under the pretext of brotherly love or the supposed unification of separated Christians, Anathema!"
(The Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, 1983)

Because of its great importance to the Catholic Church, the above anathema is included in the Synodicon of Orthodoxy. And the person who saw to this anathema being promulgated in the first place has been glorified as a saint of the Church, St. Philaret of New York City, the New Confessor.

It's official. Your Pope is a heretic, as are also all who follow him.

That's final and there is no room for discussion.

"Who am I, unworthy sinner that I am, to judge him or any man as to his spiritual progress?"

"It's official. Your Pope is a heretic, as are also all who follow him."

"That's final and there is no room for discussion."

An apparent total inability to appreciate the inherent contradictions within your own posts combined with a mindset that would be right at home in Al-Qaida makes any notion of rationale discourse utterly impossible.

Not that this isn't what one might reasonably expect from an adherent of a Church that gladly licked Russian communist butt in order to be the immoral recipient of stolen Catholic Church property and point-of-the-gun converts within enslaved Ukraine for decades!

The posting reads like a Saturday Night Live spoof.

"Philaret of New York, the New Confessor" - as if!

As one of my OCA friends said, "They glorified him even before the medical examiner had signed the death certificate."

Their monastery specializes not only in incense but in Southern Baptist and Episcopalian converts. You know, people who, having left a very liberal denomination, find that even the Orthodox Church isn't strict enough for their tastes.

Besides, what fun would there be in leaving a denomination riddled with strife only to end up in one where there wasn't in-fighting. As I said, if you don't collect stamps or do model railroading, the antics of a group like the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia - hurling anathemas hither and yon - makes for endless hours of diversion.

But to suggest that anyone outside of a few small parishes filled (now) with disgruntled converts and (before) with Russian exiles, would take anything "Philaret of New York" would issue seriously . . . please.

Certainly not Roman Catholics in communion with Pope Benedict XVI.

No, Philaret was just one of . . . how many "Orthodox" bishops traisping around New York playing church?

I have said no more of the sad ecumenist present than did Pope St. Athanasius of Alexandria and St. Hilary of Poitiers in their own day. SS Athanasius & Hilary never denied the Orthodoxy of the Church visible, but only the Orthodoxy of certain visible "churches".

But the question that I pose is not is the church ORTHODOX but does the Church posses AUTHORITY? For you there is today no visible authority in the Church. Rather all those in positions of authority are to be judged by the individual faithful, i.e. private judgment.

Nor can you simply appeal to antiquity. The Church today is the same as that in the time of the Fathers. Either it possesses an infallible authority from Jesus Christ or it does not. If the visible Church of the Fathers had this authority then so does the visible Church today to which the individual believer must submit. If the visible Church today is fallible and cannot command obedience then the Church of the Fathers was also fallible and cannot command obedience two thousand years latter.

"In these times St. Jerome could express his feelings with the sad exaggeration: 'The whole world groaned and was amazed to find itself Arian'"

It was indeed the authority of the popes to which all could look that saved the Church from the Arian heresy. Thus we have the following quote affirming this authority from St. Jerome in his letter to Pope Damasus:

It is but with the successor of the fisherman and the disciple of the Cross that I speak. Following none in the first place but Christ, I am in communion with your beatitude, that is, with the Chair of Peter. On that rock I know the Church is built. Whosoever shall eat the Lamb outside that house if profane. If any be not with Noah in the Ark, he shall perish beneath the sway of the deluge.

In the end you either submit to the authority of the church visible or you are a Protestant.

"...a Church that gladly licked Russian communist butt in order to be the immoral recipient of stolen Catholic Church property and point-of-the-gun converts within enslaved Ukraine for decades!"
Come again????"

Merely two (2) excerpts from among the approximately 55,400 Google hits based upon a search of "Ukraine + Catholic + persecution":

"The Soviets had their reasons to fear Bishop Romzha. A young, energetic, and absolutely unyielding leader, Romzha had denounced the pressures being put on his people by the combined efforts of the Soviet authorities and the Russian Orthodox Church.The Orthodox themselves had suffered terrible persecution at Soviet hands and, no doubt, quite a few of them deplored the persecution of their Greek Catholic brothers and sisters. But the Moscow Orthodox leadership had been used by Stalin beginning in 1943 to help rouse the people for the "great patriotic war" against the Nazis. After the Germans were repelled, Stalin decided to continue manipulating the population by bringing as many believers as possible under the sway of the co-opted Moscow Patriarch Sergei. In much of Ukraine, this led to violent acts against Catholics who refused reunion with the Orthodox and the state-imposed substitution of Orthodox leaders in Catholic dioceses and parishes.

On Good Friday of 1947, in the Uzhgorod Cathedral, Romzha had publicly denounced these measures as "the lawlessness of the dark forces of hell." He was not exaggerating. Soviet agents organized an illegitimate sobor (council) of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, which no true bishop attended. All but Romzha, including the great national leader Metropolitan Joseph Slipyi, were imprisoned and several (M. M. Budka, H. L. Khomyshyn, Gregory Lakota, Petro Verhun) died under detention as did many priests, nuns and lay people. Those present at the sobor were manipulated into liquidating the Ukrainian Catholic Church by making it part of the Russian Orthodox system. In a single stroke, the Soviets had eliminated over 4 million Catholics together with the whole Church hierarchy within their post-World War II holdings. The Ukrainians became the largest suppressed group of believers on earth until they arose again after the 1989 fall of Communism."

Source:

"When Stalin liquidated the Ukrainian Catholic Church, forcing its several million adherents into the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexei and his bishops received these coerced "converts" gleefully. Instead of protesting prophetically against this persecution of fellow Christians, the Moscow Patriarchate shamelessly exploited their plight, heaping religious tragedy upon political atrocity."

Source:

"For you there is today no visible authority in the Church. Rather all those in positions of authority are to be judged by the individual faithful, i.e. private judgment."

Sorry. I misunderstood your point. So, here's back at you. I quoted St. Vincent of Lerins, most likely a lay monk in A.D. 435 on the island of Lerins, but he might have been a hieromonk. Nobody knows for sure. In any event St. Vincent is considered a canonical saint East and West because of his "Commonitory". Are you accusing St. Vincent of being a Protestant, or of promoting the idea of a visibly divided Church, or of promoting individualism? I ask because I'm just going with what he said we should do under the circumstances presented to us by Taxachusetts Man.

The challenge these days, at least in my opinion, is to FIND the Church. Once found, it is not for us to question her authority. But the Orthodox don't look at ecclesiastical authority as the azymites do. For us, a bishop loses his authority if he "preaches heresy with bared head". I suppose you might call that individualism. Orthodox Christians do not.

"When Stalin liquidated the Ukrainian Catholic Church, forcing its several million adherents into the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexei and his bishops received these coerced "converts" gleefully. Instead of protesting prophetically against this persecution of fellow Christians, the Moscow Patriarchate shamelessly exploited their plight, heaping religious tragedy upon political atrocity." ...and... so... forth

GMMAC, you are condemning St. Philaret of New York City (the New Confessor), and his fellow bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) in 1983 on the basis of what was being done and had been done by the KGB controlled Moscow Patriarchate from 1925 to the collapse of the Soviet Union. During those years, the ROCOR was not in communion, as it is now, with the Moscow Patriarchate. In fact, the two jurisdictions were literally at war with each other.

I personally have no use for Patriarch Alexey II, called by some the "Ghetto Patriarch" because of his KGB past. But what has he got to do with St. Philaret and the 1983 anathema against ecumenism? Nothing.

When I say he is Christ on Earth, I am really quoting my favourite Saint of all time, Caterina of Siena. She was a third order Dominican.

At the age of six, she had a vision of Christ Jesus dressed as the Bishop of Rome. At the age of 13 she became a hermit, leaving her room only to attend Mass. At the age of 15 she experienced a mystical espousal to Christ, after which she left her cloister to serve the sick and the poor.

Unrefined and uneducated, she nevertheless became a renowned teacher. With humility and charity, she zealously corrected the spineless misbehaviour of the Popes during their self-imposed exile in Avignon. She almost singlehandedly ended the Babylonian Captivity, and worked tirelessly to prevent Schisms of the Church in France and in the Italian states.

She had a mystical vision in which all people, Christian and pagan alike, marched into the wounded heart of Christ and were washed in the Divine Blood. Thereafter she especially abhorred disunity, and found a cure for it in obedience to the Bishop of Rome, whom she lovingly called "Daddy." In between her scoldings of him, she wrote that he was "Sweet Christ on Earth."

For the last several years of her life, she could not digest anything except the Holy Eucharist; she died at the age of 33.

Truly, a remarkable lady and a great squasher of corruption!

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