The search for unity A look at the 1,000-year-old divide between the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic churches — and what’s being done to bring them back together Adam A.J. DeVille OSV Newsweekly 5/14/2014
“Hail East and West, for whom both we fight and from both we are fought!”
— St. Gregory the Theologian
In 2011, I published “Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity” (University of Notre Dame Press, $38). There I tackled what serious observers describe as the one final substantial hurdle to unity between the Orthodox and Catholic Church: the role of the pope. The picture on the front cover features a beaming Pope Benedict XVI and beaming Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, arms united upward as though in victory salute at the latter’s church in Constantinople during a visit in 2006.
Now, this month, the imagery will soon be of Pope Francis and Bartholomew making their way to the Holy Land for another encounter. Though they have already met — Bartholomew made history by being the first patriarch from Constantinople to attend a papal inauguration last year — the encounter this year is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras meeting in Jerusalem in 1964. That gathering was the beginning of what has often been called the “dialogue of love” between the Eastern and Western churches after more than 900 years of estrangement.
After 50 years of this dialogue, where are we? How has the relationship changed over time, and what roles have the last several popes played in bringing Catholics and Orthodox closer? And what remains for us to finally achieve unity?
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