www.byzcath.org Forums News & Events Church News Moscow to Rome: Yes to cooperation, no to communion

Why? Why does dialogue between Catholics and Orthodox have to mean that only one, specifically-defined, view is to be represented from each side?

Quite true, if that were the case, we Orthodox would be unable to talk about much of anything, even among ourselves. Witness the breakdown of recent talks over what, in Western terms, related to which Church sat where at the table, i.e. the dyptychs.

Within the Orthodox world primacy has a function at a local and a regional level and this is regulated by the sacred canons but it does not extend any higher and there are no canons dealing with a higher level of primacy such as the global primacy claimed for the bishop of Rome.. The Church never had the need to formulate such canons. The intermittent claims by Rome to jurisdiction in pre-schism years were not acknowledged by the other Churches and never became the concern of any of the Ecumenical Councils.

The papacy as a universal primacy is something which will need to be dismantled before the Orthodox Church could unite with the Church of Rome.

The problem, of course, is the conflation of primacy with jurisdiction, when in fact, the patristic conception of primacy was usually separated from jurisdiction. This should not surprise anyone who understands the workings of a society based on honor and status.

Something from the conversion history of Fr Placide Deseille "Stages of a Pilgrimage" which can be read in "The Living Witness of the Holy Mountain: Contemporary Voices from Mount Athos"

"But on this point again, familiarity with the Fathers of the Church and the study of history exposed me to the fragility of the Roman position. Admittedly, the popes claimed a primacy of divine right from very early on, though without making a “dogma” of it as would later be the case. But this demand was never unanimously accepted in the Early Church. Quite the contrary, one can say that the present dogma of the Roman primacy and infallibility is opposed to the spirit and general practice of the Church during the first ten centuries. The same is true of other doctrinal differences, particularly the filioque, which appeared very early in the Latin Church, but which was never received by the rest of the Christian world as part of the deposit of faith (this is why its definition as dogma can only be considered by the Orthodox Church as an error in matters of faith).

"I observed that the analysis of Catholic historians agreed, in great part, with that of Orthodox theologians, even if they did not draw identical conclusions form the facts – the former’s main concern being often to discern in the distant past some faint indications of subsequent developments. Even so Mgr. Batiffol, for example, wrote concerning the idea of the Pope as successor of Saint Peter: “Saint Basil does not mention it, neither does Saint Gregory Nazianzus or Saint John Chrysostom. The authority of the bishop of Rom is one of the first importance, but in the East it was never seen as an authority by divine right.”"