Ecumenical Endeavours

Since the mid-twentieth century a great deal of progress has been made toward healing the schisms within the Universal Church that have riven the Mystical Body of Christ for more than 1,500 years. Many of the disagreements and controversies of past centuries and millennia have, with recent dialogue and scholarship, been found to have arisen largely through poor translation and profound cultural differences. While this is in itself tragic, it nonetheless offers hope that the Apostolic Churches may one day be united, accepting their various differences in expression and emphasis of the one orthodox Faith.

The Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox communions have arguably come closest to realising this hope. In 1993, after three decades of dialogue, the Joint Commission of the Theological Dialogue Between the Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches proposed the lifting of anathemas between the two communions and recommended “that restoration of full communion for both sides is to be immediately implemented”, having concluded that the Christological formulas of both communions are, in fact, in agreement and were united in their condemnation of the Eutychian and Nestorian heresies at the Council of Chalcedon. Sadly these findings were rejected by some in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and so the recommended union was never implemented, but it nonetheless remains a promising framework for future unity.

An early expression among Catholics of the renewed desire for unity was the founding of a biritual Benedictine monastery in Chevetogne, Belgium, by Dom Lambert Beauduin in 1925. The monks celebrate daily services in both the Latin and Byzantine rites, and their work was instrumental in the adoption of ecumenism by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). This resulted in the lifting of the mutual anathemas of 1054 by Pope Saint Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I in 1965. While this did not immediately result in renewed communion between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, it did begin a long and fruitful ecumenical dialogue which has largely eliminated doctrinal obstacles to unity. The primary obstacle which remains is that of ecclesiology; specifically the nature of episcopal primacy and the ministry of the Pope of Rome. For much of its history, though particularly in the second millennium, the Apostolic See of Rome has claimed direct canonical authority over the Universal Church. This position has long been disputed in the East, which tends to stress the equality of all bishops and places universal authority in the hands of ecumenical councils, according the Pope of Rome limited privileges commensurate to a primacy of honour.

Dialogue on the nature of the Petrine primacy was opened by Pope Saint John Paul II in 1995 in his encyclical Ut Unum Sint (published only three weeks after his great letter of love to the Eastern Churches, Orientale Lumen), in which he invited other “Church leaders and their theologians to engage with me in a patient and fraternal dialogue” on the nature of papal primacy and even the limits of its jurisdiction. In 2016 the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church published Synodality and Primacy During the First Millennium: Towards a Common Understanding in Service to the Unity of the Church. This “Chieti Document” made several groundbreaking concessions to Orthodox ecclesiology, among them that: “Reception by the Church as a whole has always been the ultimate criterion for the ecumenicity of a council” and, perhaps most startlingly of all, a recognition that: “the bishop of Rome did not exercise canonical authority over the churches of the East” during the first millennium.”

Emphasis has instead shifted to bishop of Rome’s primacy as a “service of love” toward the unity of the entire Church, which by definition violates neither the dignity of the episcopate nor the catholicity of local churches, but strengthens them. In 2023 the Joint International Commission published Synodality and Primacy in the Second Millennium and Today (the “Alexandria Document”), which concluded: “The Church is not properly understood as a pyramid, with a primate governing from the top, but neither is it properly understood as a federation of self-sufficient Churches. Our historical study of synodality and primacy in the second millennium has shown the inadequacy of both of these views. Similarly, it is clear that for Roman Catholics synodality is not merely consultative, and for Orthodox primacy is not merely honorific.” The following year the Holy See published The Bishop of Rome: Primacy and Synodality in the Ecumenical Dialogues and in the Responses to the Encyclical Ut Unum Sint which took great pains to emphasize “the importance of interpreting the dogmatic statements of Vatican I not in isolation, but in the light of the gospel, of the whole tradition and in its historical context.” Let us pray that, as our separation stems largely from historical discordance on the nature of primacy, that both Catholic and Orthodox Christians may unlock a true understanding of the dynamic between primacy and synodality in the service of renewed communion. ✠