We Eastern Catholics should ponder the words of Pope Benedict and really examine our belief in the idea of being Orthodox in Communion of Rome. Not that all Eastern Catholics buy into the OICWR idea. It did strike me to the core and is making me examine my beliefs. The Ratzinger proposal was something I believed in, but it seems that Pope Benedict didn’t mean it as many see it, as his later clarification seems to imply.Read the rest here.
I ,and many, fully believe[d] that “Rome must not require more from the East with respect to the doctrine of primacy than had been formulated and was lived in the first millennium” but does Rome?
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This shows, I believe, that the oft quoted statement by Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict) that nothing more would be required from the East than what was lived and believed during the first millennium has been re-considered by him and is not a blueprint for unity between East and West. IOW, the later papal definitions are still on the table and not rejected.
ReplyDeleteI think this shows not a reconsideration as much as a clarification. Rome's idea has always been that from the very beginning the Roman Patriarch was supreme head and not just first among equals. So for them it wouldn't be "requiring more from the East" to require full submission to Rome.
ReplyDeleteAngela
I always wondered why anyone bothered to put much stock in the "nothing more than was formulated and practiced in the 1st millennium" idea of unity.
ReplyDeleteForgive me if I'm mistaken, but isn't the whole point of the schism that even in the 1st millennium there were serious disagreements over what exactly the role and nature of the papacy was, with the Orthodox maintaining that the Bishop of Rome was trying to claim more authority than he had ever actually held, while Rome was claiming that Eastern bishops were trying to deny authority that had clearly been invested in Peter's successors from the beginning?
The terms of the disagreement were never really about "how people felt about it in the 1st millennium", but rather how the very first generation of Christians would have understood Peter's primacy among the disciples and to what extent that primacy was conveyed to his successors.
And of course there's really know way of knowing absolutely what that first generation felt, except that both sides consider their understanding to be revealed truth passed on by sacred tradition. I don't see how that is overcome satisfactorily without one side or the other more or less wholly rejecting a lot of what they whole to be true.
Lo and behold, the Pope is Catholic.
ReplyDeleteThe Eastern Church gave into the “Roman” view of its authority at the Council held at Chalcedon. After “Leo’s Tome” the reply was, if I remember from my Seminary days: “Peter has spoken thru Leo.” Of course I know there is more to this; nothing is that simple, but certainly this could be the “starting” point of it all?
ReplyDeleteIt's too easy to read our current squabbles into the history of the early Church. Many Orthodox would grant a primacy to Rome but not on the level of what developed in the second millennium. Some of the differences between the first millennium and second millennium approach to primacy were noted in speeches at the recent Orientale Lumen Conference. Nonetheless, Ratzinger's (Benedict's) position appears to be that the entire Catholic position has to be maintained. It's consistent but not likely to convince the East.
ReplyDeleteThe views expressed by the pope in his 2002 interview seem not so much to be a case of his having “second thoughts,” as of him returning to his first thoughts, expressed in 1961, before the Second Vatican Council, when in a book entitled *The Episcopate and the Primacy* which he and Karl Rahner jointly authored, he wrote also of the “confusion” between the “administrative” patriarchal office and the “apostolic” papal universal primacy, but here as the emergence of the Eastern notion of a “patriarchal constitution” of the Church tending to “obscure” the apostolicity of “the Roman claim” by casting Rome itself more and more into an “administrative” light. “The overshadowing of the old theological notion of the apostolic see … by the theory of the five patriarchs must be understood as the real harm done in the quarrel between East and West,” Ratzinger wrote. As a patriarch, he writes, an office created by the Church, the pope is but first among patriarchal equals, but as “holder of the office of the Rock” he occupies a unique position.
ReplyDeleteI have a short review of Prof. DeVille’s book forthcoming in *First Things* and a longer one will appear subsequently in *New Oxford Review*.
Lo and behold, the pope is in no way Catholic at this point. Anaxios! Anathema!
ReplyDeleteMy standard statement: 'Orthodox in communion with Rome' are small, almost all converts and more online than in real life. They mean well (credally and sacramentally small-o orthodox Catholic and liturgically traditional, not liberals/Modernists), and externally (liturgically) are what Rome wants the Greek Catholics to be, but they don't make sense theologically. Of course Rome turns them down flat. They're like Protestants who happen to agree with the apostolic churches and particularly with the Orthodox Church, on their own terms and not the terms of either the church they belong to or the church they like. If they agree with the Orthodox on the scope of the Pope they should convert. A lot of them do. Most born ethnic Greek Catholics (most of them are Ukrainian Catholics) are like Roman Riters and don't identify with the Orthodox at all.
ReplyDeleteP.S. I think they think they're a cutting-edge fifth column who will achieve church union by converting Roman Catholicism to Eastern Orthodoxy from within (traitors as far as loyal Roman Catholics are concerned), which has about as much a chance as the Green Party winning the presidency.
ReplyDeleteThe only reason why the sometimes-feisty Melkites haven't been slapped into line is territorial. The Pope is a canny secular ruler as well as sophistical theologian. That's not to say, however, that none of Benedict's successors will go crazy over insubordination.
ReplyDeleteRome can do its little two step about "multiform fullness" and primacy of charity all it wants; it still thinks it is, was, and always will be, alpha dog, and wants all Christians under its umbrella.
ReplyDeleteMore and more word games are being played in the Roman Church, from the top down. It's business as usual, and it's very, very sad.