www.byzcath.org Forums News & Events Church News Cardinal Dulles Article

Dear All,

I've read with interest this thread and its predecessor.

I get the sense from what is said that Eastern Christians, especially Eastern Catholics, consider themselves to be religious isolates about whom there is general ignorance among Latin Catholics. While there is truth in the radar blip metaphor used above, I think that it is important that someone who is not an Eastern Catholic point out that there is a significant degree of misinformation in this self perception.

I hope you'll bear with me while I try to share some reasons that lead me to say that.

As a Latin Catholic I've seen change among leaders and members of our Church in our awareness of your Churches as full Churches which exist by God's Choice and not by our indulgence. Here're a few things that lead me to this conclusion.

Joe Thur said that some Latin dioceses have made policies to point out and to support the postion of the other Churches that share communion with us. That is true. However, the awareness of the Eastern and Oriental Churches as Churches has grown from almost no recognition in the years before Vatican II to a much stronger awareness of the gift that communion with our sister Churches is to us.

It began with the great impact, denied by some who have posted here, of the Hierarchs of other Churches on the thought and practices of the Latin Church. As Council fathers, these Hierarchs helped shape the communion ecclesiology and other teachings that are found in the documents of the Council. Their intervention helped to educate a whole generation of seminarians and theologians in training at the time. They helped us to see ourselves differently.

Since then, a number of various activities have educated the wider body of laity. The writings of the Holy Father are one example. The trips of the Pope to Orthodox countries, the visits of Orthodox Patriarchs to the West, and the ecumenical discussions underway between the Catholic Communion and the Orthodox Communion are others.

Interactions between and among our leaders are increasingly common. They have become the fodder of routine news coverage. EWTN has begun to devote some of its programming to Eastern Christians. There is much happening to make us aware that we, though brothers and sisters, are not members of the same particular churches.

In the Florida Catholic published by the dioceses of the Latin Church here, there have been numerous articles about the Eastern and Oriental Churches in the short time that I have lived here. The visits of the Melkite Partiarch and the Marionite Patriarch to our area were extensively reported in secular and religious media.

There is some truth to the metaphor about the radar blips, but I think that it is fair and important to point out that more and more Western Catholics are learning about the light from the East that our Patriarch has encouraged us to look to.

We are looking and learning.

Communion with you is important to us! That awareness is growing. Not nearly as fast as we'd like, but it is growing.

Thanks for hearing me out!

Steve

Dear Amado,

Rome would definitely need to approve a Patriarchate to "recognize" it - there is no question about that.

I'm only saying that the Patriarchal movement in the UGCC has turned a new corner insofar as its Synod has proclaimed a Patriarchate as a de facto thing and His Beatitude Lubomyr as the Patriarch.

All Patriarchates, in Catholic and Orthodox Churches, have always been established this way. Over time, the other Churches got used to the idea and acknowledged it.

The Serbians had their Patriarchate for 400 years before world Orthodoxy acknowledged it as such. Then there are the Russians . . .

There is an internal self-legitimating process at work in this proclamation of a Patriarchate for Kyiv-Halych and all Rus'-Ukraine.

Rome or anyone else won't be able to stop the snowball that has been set in motion from getting bigger as it swings down the slopes.

The point is not whether Rome does or does not have to acknowledge the Patriarchate - the Ukrainian Church has opted for a path that is finally exclusive of the approval of anyone for what it does internally as a Particular Church.

And this is not lost on the Ukrainian Orthodox, canonical or not.

The Ukrainian Orthodox NOT in communion with Moscow have no problem with a patriarchate of the UGCC.

Even when Patriarch Josef Slipyj was alive, it was so embarrassing to see Ukrainian Catholic bishops refer to him as "Cardinal" and "Major Archbishop" when Ukrainian Orthodox referred to him matter-of-factly as "Patriarch."

Alex

Dear ChristTeen,

Why do I think the Catholic and Orthodox Churches are in fact truly one as of right now?

Yes, there are still some major administrative and even doctrinal differences.

But they are all things that developed much later in the lives of the Churches, particularly Rome's, and so are outside the shared patrimony of the first thousand years of the united Orthodox Catholic Church of Christ.

Both Churches have the same shared Apostolic doctrine of the first 1,000 years - with later doctrinal accretions that could become theological opinions and that don't affect the substance of the faith in any event to any considerable degree.

Both Churches have the same Mysteries/Sacraments and Apostolic Succession of the first 1,000 years.

There are no outstanding excommunications between these Churches that I know of.

Do you?

Alex

I think that we are operating at several cross purposes here.

First, as Alex notes, the notion of Patriarchal Church needs to be recognized, but this will only happen when the adherents ACT like they are a patriarchal Church and stop playing the "Mother May I" game.

In addition, I think that when talking about "Church", people focus a lot on the administrative structures that are established by Canon Law [Trumpet blast! Kettle Drum cascade!!]. But the reality is the lifestyle of the churches involved and the people's perceptions of what the "CHURCH" really is.

I am currently dealing with an erstwhile "urban Irish-American Roman Cathoilic" who is in the "Recovering Catholic" and F******* Christian mindset. And I realize that the cultural realization of the faith is going to create a myriad collection of images of the "Church". This person is dealing with the Irish-American ("we're Irish and we'll fight for it even though we haven't the foggiest idea of where Ireland is and what the place is like") Catholic perspective ("we're Catholic and we KNOW what the Church is about and we'll beat the crap out of anyone who disagrees"). And when this type of person encounters us Byzantines, not only are we "foreigners" (tolerated, out of Christian Charity), but also un-incorporated RCs, (and therefore subject to evangelization).

And so the conundrum is thrown back upon us to deal with the well-intentioned but incredibly ill-informed co-religionists.

How we do this has us walking on eggshells. We don't want to offend them, but at the same time we have got to shed some light on their provincial ignorance. Too "incorporated", we lost our identity; too "independent", we are verging on heresy/schism/lack-of-submission.

While a number of Roman dioceses have done a decent job of including the "East" in their publicized world-views (in the diocesan paper or elsewhere), the vast majority are clueless, the ecclesiastical equivalent of "valley girls".

The solution: BE as Eastern as we can stand. DON'T submit to "other-ly" influences, even in the name of charity. Support our bishops 120%, and make sure they have the tools ($$$$) to accomplish their mandate. Be up front, be visible, be smiling and welcoming to all who come up to say "Hi!". (And keep doing those "food-y" things -- "If you feed them, they will come") and make sure that our communities are just wonderful places to be.

GO GET 'EM!!!

Blessings!

(The Greek, unarmed.)

No, Alex, thankfully I am not aware of any current excommunications. If there are none, then why are not both the Churches communing, since there are no excommunications? This would seem to make sense. Also, when did the Orthodox Churches officialy separate with the Catholic Church, or have they? I know that the excommunications in 1054 were between the pope and Michael Ceralius (sp), but have there ever been officially stated separation between the Churches?

ChristTeen287

Dear ChristTeen, I have been asking the same question for a long time.

The reality is: although the excommunications have been lifted, they haven't "gotten around" to figuring out the administrative doo-doo. It would require a lot of "fixin'", and some folks would lose their jobs -- and of course the bureaucracy would not tolerate that.

So, take your cue from the Holy Father (Paul VI) and the Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople and acknowledge that the excommunications are gone bye-byes and there is no reason for us to remain separated. If we ordinary folks just "do it" (apologies to Nike), then perhaps the administrative structures will follow. There is an old saw: "If you get them by the hair, their hearts and minds will follow.".

There is nothing more powerful and grace-filled on this earth than a bunch of Christians doing Christian things - with or without approbation.

Blessings!

ChristTeen --

The separation happened gradually. The lifting of the anathemas between Constantinople and Rome was a very good gesture, but didn't have a lot of meaning because (1) those excommunications were *personal* (ie, the churches themselves didn't excommunicate each other as *church*) and (2) it's likely that the Catholic excommunication of Patriarch Michael was invalid to begin with due to the fact that the Pope that sent Humbert was dead. So while these unfortunate events certainly accelerated the separation of the churches, they aren't the root cause of them.

In Orthodoxy, there is the concept of the "dyptychs", the list of all of the heads of churches with which one's church is in communion. Rome was removed from the dyptychs of Constantinople some time *before* the diplomatic mission (if you want to call it that) of Humbert et al arrived in Constantinople. That was the true first sign of a breach in communion, and AFAIK Rome has never been added back to the Constantinopolitan dyptychs, so there is no formal communion. The remainder of the Orthodox Churches remained in communion with Rome for a time, and only gradually severed that communion (keep in mind that at the time the church of Constantinople had a huge jurisdiction that included the entire Balkans and Rus as well as what are today Greece and most of Turkey). There was a state of de facto schism at this time. This is why the "reunion" councils of Lyon and Florence were held to begin with ... to restore communion (that presupposes that communion did not obtain at the time). Still there were many incidents of intercommunion over the centuries, particularly in the Greek islands that were under Ventian control. The straw that broke the camels back about all of this was really the Melkite schism of 1724 ... after that the Orthodox Churches -- particularly the Greek and Mediterranean Orthodox -- took a much more hardline stance vis-a-vis Catholicism, even to the point of requiring converts from Catholicism to be baptized.

Brendan

Gentlemen,
I think we have walked down this road before.

Cardinal Dulles, I would presume is just making a statement that it is "absolutely" necessary to be in Communion with the Apostolic See of Rome.
It belongs to the very nature of the Church.
That is what he was getting at.

Stephanos I
Unworthy Monk and Archsinner