In a recent podcast on Ancient Faith Radio I reflected on the meetings between the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and the Pope Francis of Rome. I reflected a bit upon their meeting in Jerusalem, celebrating the meeting of Athenagoras and Paul VI 50 years ago and about subsequent activities between the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Pope of Rome. I mentioned in that podcast that in 2005 I was invited to a meeting, a conference, in Washington, D.C., about re-imagining the papacy in our time. Those who called this conference, Roman Catholic theologians from Woodstock, and the conference was held at Georgetown, brought together Christians of various church denominations to say what they thought would be required of the Bishop of Rome and the Roman Catholic Church for their churches to recognize the leadership of the Pope of Rome in Christianity on a global level. I was invited to that on behalf, so to speak, of Orthodoxy, or at least give my own opinion of what I thought the Orthodox Church would require, and I did that.
I never had a chance to deliver this paper. It wasn’t read. The leaders of the meeting read the papers, but there were seven or eight or more of people speaking: I from the Orthodox Church, there were some Roman Catholic also, but there were Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist, Society of Friends, Quakers, who spoke on this subject: what would it take for them and their churches to recognize the Pope of Rome as the leader of world Christianity. We only had ten minutes or so to present our view, each one of us, and we didn’t go into any depth, but I did have this paper. It was never published. The acts of this meeting were not published, and I’m not sure whether the other folks actually had written-out papers or not that they had sent in, but I did, and I have it, and it was in 2005 in September.
That’s a while ago, of course—nine years it’ll be—but in any case I wanted to share it with the readers of Ancient Faith Radio. I haven’t done that until now anywhere, but since there’s great discussion and reflection on the relationship between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, and very particularly upon the activities of the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Pope of Rome in our time, Bartholomew and Francis, I thought that I would just read this on Ancient Faith Radio, and people could just do with it what they like. They could think of what I said. In some sense, it’s a fantasy. It’s kind of like an ecclesiological fantasy of what could be imagined for the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church to be in communion with each other, in sacramental communion and in fact be in the same Church. It’s a little bit of a fantasy because so many things seem to be so out of the question that they’re just unreal. I’m pretty sure that is the truth, actually.
But in any case, I’ll share what I prepared for that meeting, and it maybe will contribute to the discussion of this issue. I think it’ll contribute even if people are radically opposed to what I say or have really serious questions about it. We have to say what we think, and this is what I think on this particular subject. I was asked by Ancient Faith Radio to share this, and that’s what I’m going to do right now. I’m going to do it in two parts, because it’ll take a bit of time, especially if I comment on what I said. It’ll take a bit of time, so today I’ll do the first part which was the beginning of the paper, with some historical considerations, and then I will, in the next podcast, read the concrete suggestions about doctrine and liturgy, worship, Church structure, that I think would be necessary for Eastern Orthodox to recognize the Bishop of Rome as the first among Christian bishops, the leader, the president, his church as the presiding church, the Roman Church, and standing, so to speak, in public as the leader of Christianity on earth.
So in any case, here it is. I called the paper, “Roman Presidency and Christian Unity in Our Time.” And this is what I wrote.
The Church of Rome held a special place of honor among the earliest Christian churches. It was first among the communities that recognized each others as catholic churches holding the orthodox faith concerning God’s Gospel in Jesus. According to St. Ignatius the God-bearer, the Bishop of Antioch who died a martyr’s death in Rome around the year 110, according to Ignatius, his words are, “The Church which presides in the territories of the Romans” was “a Church worthy of God, worthy of honor, worthy of felicitation, worthy of praise, worthy of success, worthy of sanctification, and presiding in love, maintaining the law of Christ, bearer of the Father’s name.” And that’s in the opening greeting of his epistle to the Romans, St. Ignatius of Antioch, in the very beginning of the second century.
The Roman Church held this place of honor and exercised a “presidency in love” among the first Christian churches for two reasons. It was founded on the teaching and blood of the foremost Christian apostles, Peter and Paul, and it was the church of the capital city of the Roman Empire that then constituted the “civilized world, ecumene.” According to St. Irenaeus of Lyons, the first bishop of Rome—St. Irenaeus, I should mention here, was an early Christian apologist and one of the first theologians living in the third century, end of second—St. Irenaeus of Lyons said that the first bishop of Rome was a certain Linus, a man named Linus. He was technically Rome’s first bishop, since the apostles were not overseers, that is, bishops, of local churches. Their unique and universal apostolic ministry, particularly that of the twelve apostles, led by Peter, was to be foundation-stones of God’s household, as eyewitnesses and servants of the risen Lord, the Church’s cornerstone (Ephesians 2:20).
Here I have a note on this in my paper. I refer to St. Irenaeus—Irenaeus of Lyons, Against the Heresies, Book III—where he writes:
The blessed apostles, Peter and Paul, then, having founded and built up the Church of Rome, committed into the hands of Linus the office of the episcopate. To him succeeded Anacletus, and after him in the third place from the apostles Clement was allotted the episcopate.
Irenaeus completes his list of Roman bishops with his contemporary bishop at the time, Eleftherius, “who holds the inheritance of the episcopate in Rome in the twelfth place from the apostles.” Then I write: Some scholars claim that it is impossible firmly to determine the existence of one bishop in the city of Rome until the early third century. They see a number of eucharistic communities coexisting in this city, each with its own “episcopal” or overseeing governing leader, without a clear “primate” among them. I also refer to the book, The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church, edited by Fr. John Meyendorff, St. Vladimir’s Press 1992, and particularly the Veselin Kesich’s article on “Peter’s Primacy in [the] New Testament and the Early Tradition.” I also mention that we should see the insightful chapters on the Church and the episcopate with commentary on the dogmas of the papacy defined at Vatican I in Sergius Bulgakov’s book, The Orthodox Church; English translation came out in 1988 by St. Vladimir’s Press.
So what we are saying here is that it is simply not true that Peter was the first bishop of Rome. A man named Linus was the first bishop of Rome. Now I continue in my paper: Linus and the bishops of Rome who followed him, many of whom are canonized saints, of the Orthodox Church as well as of the Roman Church, were successors of the apostles together with all orthodox bishops in catholic churches. They were also, like all bishops with whom they held the Church’s one episcopate in solidum, an expression of St. Cyprian of Carthage, who lived also in the third century, successors of Peter. They were all successors of Peter because they all confessed Peter’s faith that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:18).
Here I refer to interpretations, early interpretations of Matthew 16:13-23, “Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church,” and John 21:15-23, where the risen Lord says to Peter who had denied him three times, three times, “Do you love me? Feed my sheep.” It was a kind of reinstatement as the leadership of the Twelve. The interpretations that are found in Ignatius of Antioch, Clement of Rome, Irenaeus, Origen, Tertullian, Cyprian of Carthage, and others… So this book, The Primacy of Peter, is a very important book for this particular subject. In fact, I think sometimes everything that needs to be known and said is found in that particular book. In any case, I continue in my paper.
Like all catholic bishops holding the orthodox faith, the bishops of the Roman Church receive the Holy Spirit through the apostolic laying on of hands, cheirotonia, to “bind and loose human sins” (Matthew 16 and John 20). They did this by preaching God’s Gospel in Christ, teaching sound doctrine, conducting right worship, shepherding the faithful, caring for the poor and needy, regardless of their belief or behavior, and generally safeguarding “what had been entrusted to them,” “the good depositum”—bonum depositum in Latin, kalē parakatathēkē in Greek—that dwelt in them “through the Holy Spirit.” And that’s a quotation of 1 Timothy 6 and 2 Timothy 1 in the New Testament.
Now, these bishops also supervised the baptisms of repenting believers into Christ in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. They sealed the newly baptized with the gift of the Holy Spirit. They fed them the bread of life, that is Jesus himself (John 6), God’s incarnate Word, through their preaching and their teaching. And they nourished the faithful with Christ’s body and blood at the eucharistic meal that anticipates the marriage-supper of Christ, the Lamb of God, in God’s coming kingdom at the end of this age. I continue.
The orthodox bishops in catholic churches—and I keep using that expression, because there were plenty of bishops who were not orthodox in faith and their churches were not catholic according to the understanding of us Orthodox and the Roman Catholics, and even the Protestants; there were plenty of writings that were not canonized; they didn’t become part of the official witness of the Church. There were always churches around that were unorthodox and that were deformed in some way. Anyway, I write here: The orthodox bishops in catholic churches also had the duty to reunite those who strayed and to reconcile believing sinners to Christ through appropriate therapeutic penances. They were also obliged to defend the Christian faith against heretical teachers, most of whom were originally brother bishops. They rebuked and corrected erring and evil secular rulers. They made apologies for the Gospel to non-Christians, and they represented their churches in the societies in which they lived. In a word, all Christian bishops were ordained to preserve the unity, identity, integrity, solidarity, continuity, unanimity, and harmony of Christ’s Church and ministry on earth till the Lord’s coming.
But the Roman bishops were to do so, as we have already noted, in a unique and special way, both for those within the Church and those outside it, because they were the overseers of the church founded by Christ’s preeminent apostles, Peter and Paul, that was located in the capital of the empire that was then identified with the whole “civilized world, ecumene,” in the city, Rome, that symbolized “the end of the earth.” Acts 1 says that the Gospel will be preached to the end of the earth, and symbolically that was understood in the earliest Church as Rome. Once it reached Rome, it hit the end of the earth, so to speak. I continue.
Because of its unique place among the Christian churches, the Church of Rome in the person of its bishop was soon tempted to assume powers, prerogatives, and privileges among the churches beyond those belonging to its ministry to preside among them in love. The temptation to assume a special authoritative status among the churches, beyond loving presidential leadership, did not go unchallenged. We see attempts to control this tendency, for example, by such great bishops as St. Cyprian of Carthage in North Africa in the third century and St. Photius the Great of Constantinople in the ninth century and perhaps, most especially, by Pope St. Gregory the Great of Rome itself, who in the sixth century formulated his celebrated definition of a Christian bishop as “the servant of the servants of God—servus servorum Dei,” in Latin, in his powerful polemic against the bishop of Constantinople, the New Rome, for adopting the title “Ecumenical.”
Now what is being said here is that, in the sixth century, the Archbishop of Constantinople adopted the title, “Ecumenical,” for the firs time. He was called the Ecumenical Bishop, and Pope St. Gregory the Great was violently opposed to this. In his writings, this is what he said. He said that “the usurpation of this proud and foolish title” is a “contradiction to the grace that is poured out on all of us in common.” St. Gregory calls it a “sin against the whole Church” since, “by reason of this execrable title of pride, the Church is rent asunder, the hearts of the brethren are provoked to scandal.” That’s found in Letter XVIII to John, Bishop of Constantinople. Also Letter XIX, to the Deacon Sabinianus, Pope Gregory says that “to assent to this title is nothing less than to lose the faith.” Letter XX, to Mavricius Augustus, he writes: We see one cannot fail to notice that St. Gregory says nothing about special powers and privileges of his Roman Church nor of his office as Pope of Rome.
One can only wonder what St. Gregory would think of the modern imperial papacy and the dogmas concerning the Pope of Rome defined at Vatican I and Vatican II. Pope John Paul II, of course, applies the title “servant of the servants of God” to himself in his encyclical on ecumenism called, “Ut Unum Sint,” that came out in the 1990s. So I continue reading here, and this is very important, because the Pope of Rome is criticizing Constantinople for adopting the title, “Ecumenical.”
Fr. John Meyendorff used to teach that it really didn’t mean what the pope thought it meant, because in the city of Constantinople which was the imperial city, the New Rome, every high office was called “Ecumenical.” The chief judge was the ecumenical judge, the chief librarian was the ecumenical librarian, the chief physician was the ecumenical physician, the highest military officer was the ecumenical general, and the head of the Church was the ecumenical archbishop. So maybe Pope St. Gregory really didn’t understand what was being claimed here, and claiming that it claimed much too much, but his really very violent reaction, that this is a betrayal of the faith itself and a sin against the whole Church, that’s something we should consider today, I think, very seriously.
Now, continuing on what I have written here: The temptation to usurp unwarranted hierarchical authority and administrative control over all the world’s Christians was too powerful to be resisted by the Roman bishops through history, not only because of Rome’s legitimately unique status among the churches, but also because Rome was the only “apostolic see” in the Western half of the “ecumene, the civilized world.” And that was a teaching that grew up in Rome, that Rome was the apostolic see, and you were only truly an apostolic see if you were founded by Peter, and according to even Gregory himself, there were only three such sees: Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria. None of the rest were considered apostolic sees. However, as I write in the paper, in the East, on the other hand, practically every little church could justify a claim to be an “apostolic see.” In other words, how many churches in the East were founded by apostles, even the Apostle Paul and Peter! I continue now in my paper.
The unique authority of the Bishop of Rome over all other churches and their bishops was gradually developed and defended by applying certain interpretations of scriptural passages about Peter’s first place among the apostles to the Pope of Rome’s first place among the bishops. So the idea was, as Peter was first among the apostles, so the Pope of Rome is first among the bishops. This presumed authority of the Bishop of Rome was also bolstered by references to allegedly historical documents affirming that particular view that were later proven to be inventions designed for this purpose. Here I have the note: I have here in mind such forgeries as the Donatio Constantini in the fourth century and the Isidorian Decretals later. In other words, there were documents that claimed Rome had this special authority, which everybody today recognizes were simply forged documents; they were not authentic historical documents. They were made to bolster the position of Rome within the Church, the Church of Rome.
So I write: The presumed authority of the Bishop of Rome was also bolstered by references to allegedly historical documents that were later proven to be inventions designed for this purpose, and it was shaped and developed by countless cultural and political events that produced the schism between the Roman Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches and later brought about the Protestant Reformation in the West, and so also the Roman reaction to the Reformation in the Counter-Reformation that made the papacy what it is today. Although the elaboration and development of what we have come to call the “imperial papacy” was not, as we have noted, without its opponents, even within the Roman Church. And there was the whole conciliar controversy about what has the ultimate last word. Is it a council or is it the pope? And historically, of course, the view that it was the pope is what won out in the Western Church.
What we see here is: although the elaboration and development of what we have come to call the “imperial papacy” was not, as we have noted, without its opponents even within the Roman Church, the current understanding and practice of the so-called Petrine ministry—that’s a word applied to the Pope of Rome’s place in the Church, the Petrine ministry reached its historical apex in the dogmatic decrees about the pope’s position and power promulgated by Vatican Council I that were slightly modified but not at all essentially changed by Vatican Council II. Here I have a note at this point about the teaching in Vatican Council II. Vatican II’s teaching about episcopal collegiality is neither helpful nor accurate from a traditional Orthodox point of view. Vatican II thought that the “college of bishops,” the Collegium altogether, in other words, all the bishops on earth, governed the universal Church together with the Pope of Rome and under his leadership and guidance. So that view is that the bishops govern over the universal Church, headed by the Pope of Rome as the “universal bishop.”
Orthodox would hold that the college of bishops does not govern the universal Church together with the Pope of Rome or anybody else, including the Ecumenical Patriarchate, under his leadership and guidance. Each bishop governs his own church and gives an account of his governance to his brother bishops within his own regional synod. There is no universal episcopal authority within or without the Roman Pope. There is no universal episcopal authority over the universal Church, just as no “college of apostles” governed the apostolic Church under the leadership and authority of Peter in the very beginning. So here I say that the idea that the bishops together with the Pope govern all the Church on earth—that’s not true. The bishops govern their own dioceses, then together they meet with each other in council to see if they affirm the same faith, the same worship, and the same structure, hopefully, with one another. So I continue in my paper here.
The Roman Church’s current official teaching about papal privilege and power that are unacceptable to the Eastern Orthodox churches are the dogma of the Pope’s infallibility when speaking officially from the Chair of Peter, ex cathedra Petri, on matters of faith and morals. Then you have this line, “Ex sese et non [autem] ex consensu ecclesiae,” in the decree; it either means, “From himself and not from the consensus of the Church,” or that his statements are in themselves, from themselves, infallible and authoritative, not from the consensus of the Church. “Ex sese et non ex consensu ecclesiae.” I continue.
The binding character of the Pope’s infallible decrees on all Christians, and certainly all Catholics now—not Orthodox or Protestants—in the world, the Pope’s direct episcopal jurisdiction over all Christians in the world—certainly all Catholic Christians—the Pope’s authority to appoint and so also to depose the bishops of all Christian (nowadays Roman Catholic) churches and those united to Rome, and the affirmation that the legitimacy and authority of all Christian bishops in the world, certainly those in unity with Rome, derive from their union with the Roman see and its bishop, the supreme pontiff, the unique successor of Peter, and the vicar of Christ on earth. So what was denied by the Orthodox that was dogma in Vatican II is that the Pope in certain conditions speaks infallibly on faith and morals and must be received as infallible. This comes from himself or in themselves and not from a Church consensus, and the same authorities give the Pope direct episcopal jurisdiction over every Christian in the world, including all the other bishops, whom he appoints and puts into office, and can depose by his own authority. That is the teaching and practice of the Roman Catholic Church today.
Now I continue here, bringing it up to date. The revolutionary advances in technology in the last century, the 20th century, that coincided with such traumatic events as the World Wars, the rise and fall of Communism, the Jewish Holocaust, the most severe and widespread persecution of Christians in history, and the inner decay of Christianity especially, excuse me, Protestantism, under the various secularizing forces of Western society strongly contributed to the Pope of Rome’s position as the leader of Christianity in the modern and now post-modern world. The papacy as we now know it is not simply the result, as Marshall McLuhan would have it, of the invention of the phonetic alphabet in the Greco-Latin world shortly before Christ’s birth that shaped early Western Christianity and the later invention of the printing press that produced the Protestant Reformation in the West and so also the Counter-Reformation that solidified the imperial papacy that was theologically and politically created in history by such popes as Gregory VII in the eleventh century in his decree, Dictatus Papae, and Innocent III and Boniface VIII in his encyclical, Unam Sanctam in the 13th century. So in the eleventh and 13th centuries you have this being theologically formulated.
It is also the direct result of the immediate impact of modern technology and electronic media that served to bring the Roman popes of the last half-century, the last half of the last century, especially the remarkably gifted and charismatic Pope John Paul II, out of their Vatican enclosures and directly and immediately into the daily lives of people all around the world. Like it or not, by God’s inscrutable providence, the emergence of contemporary electronic technology inevitably and inexorably led to the Pope of Rome becoming the universally acknowledged leader of Christianity in the world. Barring something wholly unforeseen, the Roman Pope, the Bishop of Rome, is sure to remain the world’s Christian leader as long as the planet Earth and its global electronic culture endures. In other words, the point I’m trying to make there is: because of the events, the Pope of Rome is seen as the leader of Christianity, I think even much like the Dalai Lama would be considered the leader of Tibetan Buddhism or something. In other words, when you put all Christians together and say, “Who’s the head of all this?” certainly in the popular imagination it would be the Pope of Rome. Of course, as we just saw, he holds the greatest claim to this office, except not in the way that it developed, at least according to Eastern Orthodoxy. So I continue my paper.
The question now stands before all Christians concerning what they should do about the Pope of Rome’s de facto leadership of Christianity in our modern world, our present world. Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, who met with Athenagoras 50 years ago in Jerusalem, were moved to raise this question as an essential part of their papal ministry, the so-called Petrine ministry. Pope John Paul II explicitly did so many times and with particular strength and urgency in his “apostolic letter” commending Christian ecumenism. That letter was called, “Ut Unum Sint.” Of course, Pope John Paul II also had an apostolic letter specifically about the Eastern churches—it was called, “Orientale Lumen”—where he discusses the unique relation between the Church of Rome and the churches of the East, the Orthodox churches of the East, both Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian.
In any case, I say this, and Pope Benedict XVI, who recently retired, of course, has already repeated this question several times on significant occasions. Here I would just add I don’t think Francis I has done it so explicitly, but certainly John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II—John Paul I only was there for a month or two—and Benedict XVI, they all specifically said, “We must discuss the papacy. We must discuss what the ministry of the primacy and the presidential see in Christendom, what that means, how it should operate.” There’s even a new book now—it came out by a Greek Orthodox scholar—about the ecclesiology of the Roman Church from Vatican I to Vatican II, and now we have many discussions today going on right now as we speak about what is universal primacy in the Church.
And then that discussion extends to the Orthodox Church: What do we Orthodox believe about universal primacy in the Christian Church, and who should be the primate and why, and what does primatial leadership mean? That’s very, very confusing in the modern time, especially since in the popular mind the Ecumenical [Patriarch] Bartholomew is constantly appearing in public with Pope Francis. He went to Jerusalem, then he went to the famous prayer service with the Jews and the Muslims in the Vatican garden. So the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew is putting himself out there, and in some sense in a right way because, as a matter of fact, he is the first among the equals of Orthodox bishops. But how does his ministry differ from the ministry of the Bishop of Rome, the Pope of Rome? That’s a huge question for us today.
So I say this question stands before all Christians, and the question is this… And I don’t mention in my paper anything that I believe the Orthodox would have to do to be able to enter into communion with Rome and have Rome recognize the Orthodox. I don’t mention that at all. My paper is about what Orthodox would think the Roman Church would have to do to make it Orthodox, to make it acceptable to Orthodoxy. So this question is before us, I say. Then I continue.
I can hardly speak on behalf of the Eastern Orthodox churches about the exercise of the Roman papacy in our time. In other words, I’m no spokesman for Orthodoxy; that’s for darn sure, and sometimes just the opposite: people think that I’m not very Orthodox. But in any case, I am encouraged here to offer my opinions on the subject, and I was asked to do so for this conference, my personal opinion on how I think all this should work itself out. So I write: I am encouraged to offer my opinions on this subject on the basis of the traditional Orthodox teaching testified to in the letter of the Eastern Orthodox patriarchs in 1848 in response to Pope Pius IX’s epistle to the Easterners. It was an epistle urging the Easterners to consider reunion with Rome. This is in the 19th century, 1848.
The Eastern Orthodox bishops responded to the pope’s epistle, and this is what they wrote. They said: This is the principle, that “for Orthodoxy, the protector of religion, piety, is the very body of the Church, even the people themselves” who desire to preserve the Church’s faith and life free from unacceptable changes and novelties. Here you could read that encyclical epistle, the encyclical epistle of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church to the faithful everywhere. It’s in print from South Canaan, Pennsylvania, 1958, but you could get it online, this encyclical epistle of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church to the faithful everywhere, and then there was also the reply of the Church of Constantinople to the letter of Pope Leo XIII in 1895 after the doctrine of infallibility was promulgated. So if you go online you can find these documents.
Now, I am encouraged—I write in my paper; I continue my paper—by Pope John Paul’s request for forthright dialogue about the papacy in our time. In Pope John Paul II’s admonition to all Christians not to be afraid, a request and admonition regularly repeated by Pope Benedict XVI, who recently retired and whom Pope Francis replaced, of course. I will therefore proceed to list what I believe must happen if the Orthodox churches would consider recognizing the Bishop of Rome as their world leader who exercises “presidency in love among all the catholic churches of Christ which hold the orthodox faith concerning God’s Gospel in Jesus.” So then I continue in my paper to list, doctrinally, theologically, and then liturgically, sacramentally, and then in structure what I actually believe would be required by the Orthodox for the Orthodox to be able and even to be compelled to recognize the Bishop of Rome as exercising presidency in the universal Church on earth.
So in my next podcast I will read to you, if you care to listen, what I really think would be required for a reunion of the Church of Rome and the Eastern Orthodox Church, what the Orthodox would require of Rome. Now, of course, there’s an additional question: What would we require of ourselves? What kind of repentance or what kind of change of mind would have to take place in the Orthodox Church for this to happen, and what would the Orthodox ask Rome to do? But here what I’m going to do next time is simply read what I think are the doctrinal, liturgical, sacramental, and structural, ecclesiological issues that Rome would have to change from what they have now in order for the Orthodox to be able to recognize the Bishop of Rome as the first among the Christian bishops, at least the bishops of the traditionally Catholic-tradition churches who hold the orthodox faith in our time.
So next time I will do that, but for today this is Fr. Thomas Hopko. I’m not speaking on behalf of Ancient Faith Radio here. Be warned of that. But Ancient Faith Radio has asked me to share my opinions and you might even say imaginations or fantasies on this issue through the radio, for which I am grateful to do.
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In my last podcast for Ancient Faith Radio about the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Pope of Rome, I introduced a paper that I prepared for a conference in 2005 in Washington, D.C., sponsored by Roman Catholics, the Woodstock Theological Institute, and the Georgetown University, about what non-Catholics would require of the Church of Rome and of the Pope of Rome in order to be in sacramental communion with the Roman Catholic Church. At this conference, representatives of various non-Catholic churches, non Roman churches:, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist, Calvinist, Society of Friends, Quakers—I think there were about eight or nine of us—had this task: to say what we thought would be required for us to be in communion with Rome. I was the one invited to say what I thought the Orthodox Church would require.
I did that, and I wrote a paper for it, even; I sent it to the organizers of this conference, which they read before they came so they’d have some idea of what I was going to say, but I was only given ten minutes to summarize it at the actual conference, as were the other people there from the various Anglican, Lutheran, and the Protestant churches generally. We each had ten minutes [to] summarize our position, and there was some kind of discussion, and then the conference was over. So the paper was never delivered, and it was never published anywhere—maybe that’s merciful; I don’t know—but I just thought I would share it at this point, with the listeners of Ancient Faith Radio.
As I said, it was prepared in the year 2005, September, so that’s a long time ago—I think nine years, I believe, ago—but basically I would still hold pretty much the same things now. But I will read what I have written, and I will maybe make some comment on it here for the radio so that you could just see what I think would be required for the Orthodox churches to be in communion with the Church of Rome, and even to recognize its bishop as the first among the equal bishops in Christianity on earth. So I’ll pick up where I left off at the podcast last time. I wrote…
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First of all, I believe the Orthodox would insist—or would have to insist—that the bishop of Rome would hold the orthodox faith of the catholic Church through history and teach and defend true Christian doctrine. This means that the pope would have to do several specific things, chief among which, I would think are the following. This is what I believe Orthodox would ask.
First, the bishop of Rome would have to confirm the original text of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Symbol of Faith and defend its use in all the churches, beginning with his own. At the very least, should some churches for pastoral reasons be permitted to keep the filioque in their Creed, if that were the case, he (the bishop of Rome) would have to insist on an explanation of the filioque that would clearly teach that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Son” only in relation to God’s saving dispensation in the world, in the oikonomia, in other words, the Holy Spirit who proceeds eternally from the Father is given to the world through the Son, for the sake of understanding the proper relations of the Persons of the Trinity. The pope would have to make certain that no Christian be tempted to believe that the Holy Spirit essentially proceeds from the Father and the Son together, and certainly not “from both as from one—ab utroque sicut ab uno,” which was a traditional position of the Roman Church at a later time when the filioque was discussed between East and West.
In other words, the Creed without the filioque would have to be endorsed. If for some reason in some places on earth Roman churches would keep the filioque in the Creed, it would have to be clear to those who want to understand that this does not mean that there is an eternal procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son, and even not from the Father and Son “as if from one”; that would not be acceptable to Orthodoxy.
Then I say that the bishop of Rome, the pope, would also teach that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are three distinct Persons or hypostases and not simply “subsistent relations” within the one God, who is identified with the one divine nature. He would have to insist and ensure that the one true God of Christian faith is not the Holy Trinity understood as a quasi-unipersonal subject who reveals himself as Father, Son, and Spirit, which, for traditional Christianity, is unacceptable and in fact would be understood as a version of a Modalism, namely, there is one God, who is the Father, who is the Son, who is the Holy Spirit—no.
There is One who is the Father, One who is the Son, One who is the Holy Spirit; their unity is perfect. Their divinity is perfect, but the divinity of the Son and the Spirit derive eternally, before the foundation of the world, before time or space, from the Person of the Father. The Father communicates his whole divinity to his Son and Spirit from all eternity and the God, for Christians, is the tri-Personal, tri-hypostatic divinity, tri-hypostatic Godhead.
The pope also would have to insist that human beings can have real communion with God through God’s uncreated divine energies and actions toward creatures, which come from the Father, through the Son, and in the Holy Spirit. That little paragraph there would mean that Palamism would have to be accepted, because this teaching, the Palamite teaching, was conciliarly received by all Orthodox churches, that indeed there is a distinction between the essence and energies of God: the unknowable, super-essential Godhead that is hidden, and then the activities of God that we creatures can really participate in through the revelation of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit.
Also I say that the bishop of Rome, the pope, would also officially say that the immaculate conception of Christ’s mother, Mary, from her parents, and Mary’s total glorification in the risen Christ at the right hand of the Father have been improperly explained in the papal bulls that originally accompanied the Roman Church’s ex cathedra dogmas on these two articles of faith. The pope would explain that Mary’s conception by her parents was pure and holy, without a need for God extraordinarily to apply “the merits of Christ” to Joachim and Anna’s sexual act of conceiving their daughter in order to free her from “the stain of original sin.” The pope would also have to make it clear that Mary really died and was not assumed bodily into heaven before vanquishing death through her own death, by faith in her Son, Jesus Christ.
Here what I’m saying is: Orthodox Church would affirm that Mary was immaculately conceived from her parents, Joachim and Anna, but it did not require any special exceptional act on the part of God from the moment of her conception to free her from the stain of the original sin. We should note that some Orthodox churches, who are very anti-Roman, still have a version of this teaching, and they would say that the stain of the original sin was washed away at the Annunciation, not at the conception of Joachim and Anna, but in any case there would have to be an explanation of the immaculate conception and the Dormition, the assumption of Mary, bodily, into the presence of God, that would conform with Orthodox doctrine and liturgical practice.
Also, next, the pope would also officially say, clearly state, that, though there may be a purification and cleansing from sin in the process of human dying, there is no state or condition of purgatory after death where sinners pay off the temporal punishment that they allegedly owe to God for their sins. The pope would also stop the practice of indulgences whereby, through certain pious activities, Christians can allegedly reduce the “days” of purgatorial suffering for themselves and others.
Here, of course, this means that the allegory of the toll-houses in Orthodox tradition, which I believe is an Orthodox traditional teaching, is not that sinners have to be punished for the sins that they committed on earth before dying, according to those 22 toll-houses that were formulated in the second century in Constantinople, but that they would have to be freed from those passions and cleansed from them in order to enter into the kingdom of God, and therefore prayer for those departed, entreating the Lord to be merciful, entreating the Lord to give the grace to the people to accept Christ, and therefore to be delivered from their sins, this would be the Orthodox—I believe—understanding that would have to be shared with the Roman Catholic Church on this issue.
Then I say that the pope would also make it clear that Christ’s crucifixion was not a payment of the debt of punishment that humans allegedly owe to God for their sins. The bishop of Rome would rather teach, with his co-bishops in the Western patriarchate, that Christ’s self-offering to his Father was the saving, atoning, and redeeming payment of the debt of perfect love, perfect righteous, obedience, gratitude, and glory that human beings owe to God, that God must have from human beings for their salvation from sin and their deliverance from death, and now, in fact, do have because of the redeeming death, in total love for God and humanity, of Jesus, the crucified Christ, who is the new and the last Adam.
In other words, there would have to be an explanation of why Christ’s death on the cross is atoning, and the explanation would not be because humans have to be punished and Christ takes that punishment, but rather that humans have to be good and holy and keep the law of God, which only Christ does, and therefore by faith in him we can have our own sins forgiven and our own way into paradise and restoration guaranteed to us human beings.
I also then continue and say that the pope would also ensure all Christians that the bishop of Rome will never do or teach anything on his own authority, from himself or in itself, and not from the consensus of the Church. “Ex sese et non ex consensu ecclesiae,” in Latin. The bishop of Rome would promise to serve in his presidency solely as the spokesperson for all the bishops in apostolic succession, who govern communities of believers who have elected them to serve as their bishops, and whose validity and legitimacy as bishops depend solely on their fidelity to the Gospel and the faith once and for all delivered to the saints, in communion with their predecessors in the archpriestly and archpastoral episcopal office and with each other.
Here this of course means that the doctrine of the infallibility of the pope, as formulated in Vatican I and defended in Vatican II, that would have to be rejected or radically modified for the Orthodox to be in communion with Rome.
Also, I believe, that on undecided doctrinal and moral issues—open questions, so to speak—the pope of Rome would use his presidential authority to ensure that everyone, clergyman or layperson, would be encouraged to freely present his or her arguments concerning Christian teaching and practice, as witnessed in the Church’s formal testimonies to Christian faith and life, that is, the canonized Scriptures (the Bible), the traditional liturgies, the universally received Christian Councils and canons, and the witness and writings of the canonized saints—not for everything that the saints have said and done, but specifically for the specific reasons that these saints are glorified in the Church and their teaching has been accepted by the universal Church.
So it’s the pope’s duty to see that proper conciliar and synodical activity takes place among the bishops and the people in order for the Church to reach a decision on doctrinal and moral issues.
Finally, the pope of Rome would use his presidential authority to guarantee a spirit of freedom, openness, respect, and love in and among all churches and all Christians and, indeed, all human beings, so that the Holy Spirit, Christ’s sole “vicar on earth,” may bring to remembrance what Christ has said and guide people into all the truth (John 14:25, 16:13). The pope would in this way truly be the great bridge-builder, the pontifex maximus.
The point there is that the pope would ensure and guarantee and promote and defend and shepherd a spirit of freedom, openness, respect, and love in and among all churches, Christians, and all people, so that the Holy Spirit, who alone is Christ’s “vicar on earth”—the vicar of Christ on earth is the Holy Spirit—may bring to remembrance what Christ has said, which acts, then, through the whole body together.
Now I continue about the Liturgy, and I write: In order for the pope of Rome to exercise “presidency in love” among the churches and Christian leadership in the world, his church, the Church of Rome, would also have to exemplify proper Christian worship. This, too, for Orthodox Christians would mean some very specific things. First of all, I believe, the bishop of Rome would have to insist that, except for extraordinary pastoral reasons, baptisms would be done by immersion in water in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
And he would also affirm that the newly baptized be immediately chrismated with the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit and brought into communion with Christ by participation in the holy Eucharist. This includes infants who enter the Church’s sacramental life by virtue of the faith of the adults who care for them. The practice of a later episcopal laying on of hands, confirming the faith of the baptized—what is called today “confirmation”—may be permitted in churches desiring to continue this pious practice for customary pietistic reasons.
Then I say: Concerning participation in the holy Eucharist, the pope would also insist that the faithful receive holy Communion from the Gifts—that is, the bread and the wine—actually offered at the Eucharistic Liturgy which they are celebrating. The faithful would not be given Communion at Eucharistic Liturgies from reserved Gifts which are kept exclusively for those unable to participate in the Liturgy for good reasons (usually sickness or infirmity, or because they are involved in service to others and therefore miss the Liturgy of the Church).
In other words, the point here is: you can’t have a Mass and then give Communion to the people from the reserve sacrament that’s kept in a ciborium on the altar. The bread has to be offered and consecrated and lifted up at that Liturgy for the communion of the people present, doing that Liturgy altogether.
I also say—and this is the next point—that the pope would also ensure that the faithful people always participate in the consecrated wine, the blood of Christ, at holy Communion. How this is practically done may differ in different churches, but it must be done without exception. As for the bread, unleavened wafers may be used for pastoral reasons in the churches with this customary practice, but the pope would affirm leavened bread, the artos, as normative for the Christian Eucharist.
Also, I write: The pope would insist on the celebration of the holy Eucharist with psalmody, scriptural readings, and exegetical sermons according to local ecclesial practices as normative corporate worship for Christians on the Lord’s day and on the Church’s liturgical feasts. He, with his fellow bishops, would forbid private Eucharistic celebrations for particular intentions and for particular pietistic, political, or ideological purposes. He would support the celebration also of the prayer of the hours—vespers, compline, matins, and hours—in the churches. He would restore the practice of having the priestly celebrant in the Latin Liturgy face the altar—in other words, be turned toward the East—together with the faithful people during the prayers and Eucharistic offerings at the holy Liturgy. He would also consider enforcing the ancient ascetical and penitential practice of forbidding the celebration of the holy Eucharist in Christian churches on weekdays of the Great Fast, the Great Lenten season, except for the feast of the Annunciation.
Finally, I give my opinion on structural and administrative changes that I would envision would have to somehow be attended to. So I write: Finally, the Orthodox would hold that structural and administrative changes must occur if the pope of Rome will be accepted and recognized as the bishop who exercises presidency in love among the churches, being the bishop of the Church of Rome, which the church has the presidency in love—not the man, but the church has the presidency in love—and that the bishop of this church, the pope of Rome, would serve as Christianity’s world leader.
I would think that these changes would include the following. First, the bishop of Rome will be chosen by the Church of Rome. Each church elects its own bishop. His election, however, because of his church’s unique position among the churches, especially as it developed through history, and his position in the world today, may have to be affirmed in some way or other by the patriarchs and the primates of autocephalous, that is, self-governing, archbishoprics and metropolitanates throughout the world. But like the election of all Christian bishops, the pope’s selection and installation would be the canonical action of the community that he oversees, namely, the Roman Church, the Church of Rome.
A “college of cardinals,” constituted by men from all over the world, appointed by the pope and having nominal ministries in Rome, simply would no longer exist. In other words, it wouldn’t be papally appointed cardinals who elect the next pope, but it would be the heads of the Orthodox churches affirming and confirming what the Roman Church herself does in electing its own bishop. So the election would be by the Church of Rome; the confirmation would be by the primates of the other regional churches on earth.
Then I write that the pope would not select and appoint bishops in any churches as he does today. He would, however, affirm them, the bishops, in their ministries, and may even do so in some formal manner, as every bishop is called to affirm his brothers with whom he holds the one episcopate in solidum. That’s a reference to St. Cyprian of Carthage, who said, “Episcopatus unus est. The episcopate is one, and all bishops hold it in solidum, together in unity.”
The pope would surely have the right and duty to question the choice of a candidate for the episcopacy, especially for a regional presidency (that means the primates of the local churches) whom he considers unsuited or unworthy for the office. He may even have the opportunity to review candidates and to offer his opinion before an election occurs, especially of a presiding bishop in a territorial church. But the pope would do this like any other bishop or primate of a regional church. He would have no right or power to interfere in the internal affairs of any church or diocese other than his own.
Next I say the pope, the bishop of Rome, would appoint commissions and departments composed of competent men and women from all the world’s churches in communion with Rome to assist him in his service as Christianity’s world leader and chief spokesperson. He would also organize regular gatherings of the primates of the world’s churches to support him in his global mission as the universal head of the Christian Church on earth. The pope would have a commission dealing with Church doctrine, Christian doctrine, and theological thought in the world’s various churches, but no Roman office would exist with the authority to take disciplinary action in doctrinal matters which, when required, would be handled by the local bishop. The church’s bishops—and not a team of theologians in Rome, appointed by the pope, acting on his authority and speaking in his name—would constitute the Church’s formal doctrinal magisterium. Obviously, that means we’re calling for the end of the holy office, and also even for the curia, that there would be conciliar bodies in Rome, living there, representing all the churches of the world, working together in these various areas.
Then I say also: Each bishop would oversee the members of his flock. Each bishop would oversee the members of his flock. He would be especially attentive to the intellectual, charismatic, and activistic members of his church, and would exercise appropriate pastoral guidance, direction, and discipline in their regard. The local bishop would forbid holy Communion to a church member who denies Christian doctrines and/or practices that he and his brother-bishops, with the Roman pope as their leader, are called and consecrated to proclaim and defend.
Should a bishop be charged with teaching false doctrines (heresy) or engaging in immoral behavior or allowing those in his pastoral care to do so, he would be judged by the synod of bishops to which he belongs, in other words, the regional synod, who would discipline or depose him. In other words, he would not be judged directly by the Vatican or by Rome; it would go by way of the bishops of the synod to which he belongs, even should he be the president of that synod. If found guilty of wrong-doing, his own synod would discipline or depose him. If he wishes to appeal his case, he may turn to the bishop exercising presidency among the churches of his region, and as a last resort, he may appeal to the bishop of Rome, as the Church’s highest president, the ultimate board of appeals, so to speak.
The pope would not have the power to make authoritative jursidictional or juridical decisions, but would exercise the ministry of intercession and reconciliation. The same right of appeal to regional presidencies and ultimately even to the bishop of Rome would, of course, be available to any church member, clergy or lay, who is charged with wrong teaching or wrong-doing.
The next point I make is this: The bishop of Rome would also cease being an official head of state. As Christianity’s global leader, however, it is well that he would live in a place with minimal risks of governmental and political interference in his ministry. And that’s very important for Orthodox, whose bishops are always being somehow controlled or attempted to be controlled by the countries in which they live. So we would say here that it would be well if he was not an official head of state and would live in a place with minimal risks of governmental and political interference in his ministry. The place where the pope would live, and where the global inter-Church commissions and departments would also be located, would be governed by a lay person, assigned by the Roman Church. Heads of state would relate to the pope solely as a Christian bishop and a spiritual leader, and not as another head of state. In other words, there still would be a place like Vatican City that would be a city in and of itself, but its political and secular head would be a lay person, chosen by that Church. It would not be the pope, who would have a specific, churchly, spiritual, pastoral, doctrinal function.
Then finally, in this area, I say: As leader of the world’s Christians, the pope of Rome would travel extensively. He would take full advantage of contemporary means of transportation and communication. He would master electronic media to serve his ministry in proclaiming Christ’s Gospel, propagating Christian faith, promoting ethical behavior, protecting human rights, and securing justice and peace for all people. He would be the servant of unity among all human beings, and first of all his fellow Christians, not as a unique episcopus episcoporum—that’s an expression of St. Cyprian—not as a bishop of other bishops—there is no bishop of other bishops, as was decreed already in the Council of Carthage in the third century: he is not the bishop of bishops; he is one of the equal bishops with all the others—so he would not have that position, but he would have the position as the leading bishop in the world, that Pope St. Gregory the Great called servus servorum Dei, the servant of the servants of God, among all the Christian bishops in the world.
Now, enormous goodwill, energy, and time, I write, would be necessary to refashion the papacy so that the pope of Rome might be Christianity’s world leader as the bishop whose church presides in love among all the world’s catholic churches who hold and teach the orthodox faith. As recent popes have insisted, radical repentance would also be required, beginning with the Roman Church itself, whose calling as first among Christian churches is to show the way to all the others.
Now I continue: the Orthodox churches would surely have to undergo many humbling changes in its attitude, structure, and behavior to be in sacramental communion with the Roman Church and to recognize its presidency among the churches in the person of its pope, its bishop, should such changes occur. In other words, these changes would cause tremendous changes within Orthodoxy, also.
The Orthodox would certainly have to overcome their own inner struggles over and against ecclesiastical power and privilege, because the Orthodox bishops today can hardly agree where they would sit at the table if they had a council. It’s a scandal, really. And the Orthodox would have to candidly admit their sinful contributions to Christian division and disunity through history, and to repent of those things sincerely. They would also have to forgo all desires or demands for other churches to repent publicly of their past errors and sins. They would be willing to allow God to consign everything of the past to oblivion for the sake of bringing about the reconciliation and reunion of Christians at the present time.
Here also we would have to mention that the practice of having churches, organized according to ethnicity and [culture], like Greek, Russian, Syrian, that would have to be radically changed—in Orthodoxy, I mean—and really understood in the proper way, which I believe today it is not understood properly.
In a word, the Orthodox would have to sacrifice everything except only the faith itself for the sake of building a common future together with Christians who are willing and able to do so with them under the leadership of an Orthodox Pope of Rome. What we need is an Orthodox Pope of Rome. Like Roman Catholics and Protestants, the Orthodox would have to be willing to die with Christ to themselves in their personal, cultural, ethnic, and ecclesiastical and political interests for the sake of being in full unity with all who desire to be saved by the crucified Lord within the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church which is, according to Scripture, the Church which is his—Christ’s—body, the fullness of him who fills all in all (Ephesians 1:23). The Church which is “the household of God,” that is, the Church of the living God, the pillar and the bulwark of the truth (I Timothy 3:15).
Then I end my paper with this one sentence. With the firm conviction that with God all things are possible, we can dare to imagine, perhaps even to fantasize, about a global unity of Christians in the faith once and for all delivered by the saints under the presidency of an Orthodox Church of Rome.
So this is what I say in this paper, and I present it for discussion about what we Orthodox would like to see in the Church of Rome or be required to see in order to be in sacramental communion. But perhaps another paper and many other papers could be written about what we Orthodox would have to do for that to happen, because our record in the public life of unity, harmony, integrity, unanimity in all matters, it is not a very great record to see. While we all still hold doctrinal unity and moral unity in our teachings, in our structure and in our organization, and in our actual practices, there is, of course, very much to be desired from us Orthodox in the present world, among ourselves and in relation to the Church of Rome, and, indeed, in relation to all Christians and to all peoples of the earth.
So that’s what I had to say, that’s what I say to you now. May God bless our path, the God with whom all things are possible.
I never had a chance to deliver this paper. It wasn’t read. The leaders of the meeting read the papers, but there were seven or eight or more of people speaking: I from the Orthodox Church, there were some Roman Catholic also, but there were Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist, Society of Friends, Quakers, who spoke on this subject: what would it take for them and their churches to recognize the Pope of Rome as the leader of world Christianity. We only had ten minutes or so to present our view, each one of us, and we didn’t go into any depth, but I did have this paper. It was never published. The acts of this meeting were not published, and I’m not sure whether the other folks actually had written-out papers or not that they had sent in, but I did, and I have it, and it was in 2005 in September.
That’s a while ago, of course—nine years it’ll be—but in any case I wanted to share it with the readers of Ancient Faith Radio. I haven’t done that until now anywhere, but since there’s great discussion and reflection on the relationship between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, and very particularly upon the activities of the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Pope of Rome in our time, Bartholomew and Francis, I thought that I would just read this on Ancient Faith Radio, and people could just do with it what they like. They could think of what I said. In some sense, it’s a fantasy. It’s kind of like an ecclesiological fantasy of what could be imagined for the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church to be in communion with each other, in sacramental communion and in fact be in the same Church. It’s a little bit of a fantasy because so many things seem to be so out of the question that they’re just unreal. I’m pretty sure that is the truth, actually.
But in any case, I’ll share what I prepared for that meeting, and it maybe will contribute to the discussion of this issue. I think it’ll contribute even if people are radically opposed to what I say or have really serious questions about it. We have to say what we think, and this is what I think on this particular subject. I was asked by Ancient Faith Radio to share this, and that’s what I’m going to do right now. I’m going to do it in two parts, because it’ll take a bit of time, especially if I comment on what I said. It’ll take a bit of time, so today I’ll do the first part which was the beginning of the paper, with some historical considerations, and then I will, in the next podcast, read the concrete suggestions about doctrine and liturgy, worship, Church structure, that I think would be necessary for Eastern Orthodox to recognize the Bishop of Rome as the first among Christian bishops, the leader, the president, his church as the presiding church, the Roman Church, and standing, so to speak, in public as the leader of Christianity on earth.
So in any case, here it is. I called the paper, “Roman Presidency and Christian Unity in Our Time.” And this is what I wrote.
The Church of Rome held a special place of honor among the earliest Christian churches. It was first among the communities that recognized each others as catholic churches holding the orthodox faith concerning God’s Gospel in Jesus. According to St. Ignatius the God-bearer, the Bishop of Antioch who died a martyr’s death in Rome around the year 110, according to Ignatius, his words are, “The Church which presides in the territories of the Romans” was “a Church worthy of God, worthy of honor, worthy of felicitation, worthy of praise, worthy of success, worthy of sanctification, and presiding in love, maintaining the law of Christ, bearer of the Father’s name.” And that’s in the opening greeting of his epistle to the Romans, St. Ignatius of Antioch, in the very beginning of the second century.
The Roman Church held this place of honor and exercised a “presidency in love” among the first Christian churches for two reasons. It was founded on the teaching and blood of the foremost Christian apostles, Peter and Paul, and it was the church of the capital city of the Roman Empire that then constituted the “civilized world, ecumene.” According to St. Irenaeus of Lyons, the first bishop of Rome—St. Irenaeus, I should mention here, was an early Christian apologist and one of the first theologians living in the third century, end of second—St. Irenaeus of Lyons said that the first bishop of Rome was a certain Linus, a man named Linus. He was technically Rome’s first bishop, since the apostles were not overseers, that is, bishops, of local churches. Their unique and universal apostolic ministry, particularly that of the twelve apostles, led by Peter, was to be foundation-stones of God’s household, as eyewitnesses and servants of the risen Lord, the Church’s cornerstone (Ephesians 2:20).
Here I have a note on this in my paper. I refer to St. Irenaeus—Irenaeus of Lyons, Against the Heresies, Book III—where he writes:
The blessed apostles, Peter and Paul, then, having founded and built up the Church of Rome, committed into the hands of Linus the office of the episcopate. To him succeeded Anacletus, and after him in the third place from the apostles Clement was allotted the episcopate.
Irenaeus completes his list of Roman bishops with his contemporary bishop at the time, Eleftherius, “who holds the inheritance of the episcopate in Rome in the twelfth place from the apostles.” Then I write: Some scholars claim that it is impossible firmly to determine the existence of one bishop in the city of Rome until the early third century. They see a number of eucharistic communities coexisting in this city, each with its own “episcopal” or overseeing governing leader, without a clear “primate” among them. I also refer to the book, The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church, edited by Fr. John Meyendorff, St. Vladimir’s Press 1992, and particularly the Veselin Kesich’s article on “Peter’s Primacy in [the] New Testament and the Early Tradition.” I also mention that we should see the insightful chapters on the Church and the episcopate with commentary on the dogmas of the papacy defined at Vatican I in Sergius Bulgakov’s book, The Orthodox Church; English translation came out in 1988 by St. Vladimir’s Press.
So what we are saying here is that it is simply not true that Peter was the first bishop of Rome. A man named Linus was the first bishop of Rome. Now I continue in my paper: Linus and the bishops of Rome who followed him, many of whom are canonized saints, of the Orthodox Church as well as of the Roman Church, were successors of the apostles together with all orthodox bishops in catholic churches. They were also, like all bishops with whom they held the Church’s one episcopate in solidum, an expression of St. Cyprian of Carthage, who lived also in the third century, successors of Peter. They were all successors of Peter because they all confessed Peter’s faith that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:18).
Here I refer to interpretations, early interpretations of Matthew 16:13-23, “Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church,” and John 21:15-23, where the risen Lord says to Peter who had denied him three times, three times, “Do you love me? Feed my sheep.” It was a kind of reinstatement as the leadership of the Twelve. The interpretations that are found in Ignatius of Antioch, Clement of Rome, Irenaeus, Origen, Tertullian, Cyprian of Carthage, and others… So this book, The Primacy of Peter, is a very important book for this particular subject. In fact, I think sometimes everything that needs to be known and said is found in that particular book. In any case, I continue in my paper.
Like all catholic bishops holding the orthodox faith, the bishops of the Roman Church receive the Holy Spirit through the apostolic laying on of hands, cheirotonia, to “bind and loose human sins” (Matthew 16 and John 20). They did this by preaching God’s Gospel in Christ, teaching sound doctrine, conducting right worship, shepherding the faithful, caring for the poor and needy, regardless of their belief or behavior, and generally safeguarding “what had been entrusted to them,” “the good depositum”—bonum depositum in Latin, kalē parakatathēkē in Greek—that dwelt in them “through the Holy Spirit.” And that’s a quotation of 1 Timothy 6 and 2 Timothy 1 in the New Testament.
Now, these bishops also supervised the baptisms of repenting believers into Christ in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. They sealed the newly baptized with the gift of the Holy Spirit. They fed them the bread of life, that is Jesus himself (John 6), God’s incarnate Word, through their preaching and their teaching. And they nourished the faithful with Christ’s body and blood at the eucharistic meal that anticipates the marriage-supper of Christ, the Lamb of God, in God’s coming kingdom at the end of this age. I continue.
The orthodox bishops in catholic churches—and I keep using that expression, because there were plenty of bishops who were not orthodox in faith and their churches were not catholic according to the understanding of us Orthodox and the Roman Catholics, and even the Protestants; there were plenty of writings that were not canonized; they didn’t become part of the official witness of the Church. There were always churches around that were unorthodox and that were deformed in some way. Anyway, I write here: The orthodox bishops in catholic churches also had the duty to reunite those who strayed and to reconcile believing sinners to Christ through appropriate therapeutic penances. They were also obliged to defend the Christian faith against heretical teachers, most of whom were originally brother bishops. They rebuked and corrected erring and evil secular rulers. They made apologies for the Gospel to non-Christians, and they represented their churches in the societies in which they lived. In a word, all Christian bishops were ordained to preserve the unity, identity, integrity, solidarity, continuity, unanimity, and harmony of Christ’s Church and ministry on earth till the Lord’s coming.
But the Roman bishops were to do so, as we have already noted, in a unique and special way, both for those within the Church and those outside it, because they were the overseers of the church founded by Christ’s preeminent apostles, Peter and Paul, that was located in the capital of the empire that was then identified with the whole “civilized world, ecumene,” in the city, Rome, that symbolized “the end of the earth.” Acts 1 says that the Gospel will be preached to the end of the earth, and symbolically that was understood in the earliest Church as Rome. Once it reached Rome, it hit the end of the earth, so to speak. I continue.
Because of its unique place among the Christian churches, the Church of Rome in the person of its bishop was soon tempted to assume powers, prerogatives, and privileges among the churches beyond those belonging to its ministry to preside among them in love. The temptation to assume a special authoritative status among the churches, beyond loving presidential leadership, did not go unchallenged. We see attempts to control this tendency, for example, by such great bishops as St. Cyprian of Carthage in North Africa in the third century and St. Photius the Great of Constantinople in the ninth century and perhaps, most especially, by Pope St. Gregory the Great of Rome itself, who in the sixth century formulated his celebrated definition of a Christian bishop as “the servant of the servants of God—servus servorum Dei,” in Latin, in his powerful polemic against the bishop of Constantinople, the New Rome, for adopting the title “Ecumenical.”
Now what is being said here is that, in the sixth century, the Archbishop of Constantinople adopted the title, “Ecumenical,” for the firs time. He was called the Ecumenical Bishop, and Pope St. Gregory the Great was violently opposed to this. In his writings, this is what he said. He said that “the usurpation of this proud and foolish title” is a “contradiction to the grace that is poured out on all of us in common.” St. Gregory calls it a “sin against the whole Church” since, “by reason of this execrable title of pride, the Church is rent asunder, the hearts of the brethren are provoked to scandal.” That’s found in Letter XVIII to John, Bishop of Constantinople. Also Letter XIX, to the Deacon Sabinianus, Pope Gregory says that “to assent to this title is nothing less than to lose the faith.” Letter XX, to Mavricius Augustus, he writes: We see one cannot fail to notice that St. Gregory says nothing about special powers and privileges of his Roman Church nor of his office as Pope of Rome.
One can only wonder what St. Gregory would think of the modern imperial papacy and the dogmas concerning the Pope of Rome defined at Vatican I and Vatican II. Pope John Paul II, of course, applies the title “servant of the servants of God” to himself in his encyclical on ecumenism called, “Ut Unum Sint,” that came out in the 1990s. So I continue reading here, and this is very important, because the Pope of Rome is criticizing Constantinople for adopting the title, “Ecumenical.”
Fr. John Meyendorff used to teach that it really didn’t mean what the pope thought it meant, because in the city of Constantinople which was the imperial city, the New Rome, every high office was called “Ecumenical.” The chief judge was the ecumenical judge, the chief librarian was the ecumenical librarian, the chief physician was the ecumenical physician, the highest military officer was the ecumenical general, and the head of the Church was the ecumenical archbishop. So maybe Pope St. Gregory really didn’t understand what was being claimed here, and claiming that it claimed much too much, but his really very violent reaction, that this is a betrayal of the faith itself and a sin against the whole Church, that’s something we should consider today, I think, very seriously.
Now, continuing on what I have written here: The temptation to usurp unwarranted hierarchical authority and administrative control over all the world’s Christians was too powerful to be resisted by the Roman bishops through history, not only because of Rome’s legitimately unique status among the churches, but also because Rome was the only “apostolic see” in the Western half of the “ecumene, the civilized world.” And that was a teaching that grew up in Rome, that Rome was the apostolic see, and you were only truly an apostolic see if you were founded by Peter, and according to even Gregory himself, there were only three such sees: Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria. None of the rest were considered apostolic sees. However, as I write in the paper, in the East, on the other hand, practically every little church could justify a claim to be an “apostolic see.” In other words, how many churches in the East were founded by apostles, even the Apostle Paul and Peter! I continue now in my paper.
The unique authority of the Bishop of Rome over all other churches and their bishops was gradually developed and defended by applying certain interpretations of scriptural passages about Peter’s first place among the apostles to the Pope of Rome’s first place among the bishops. So the idea was, as Peter was first among the apostles, so the Pope of Rome is first among the bishops. This presumed authority of the Bishop of Rome was also bolstered by references to allegedly historical documents affirming that particular view that were later proven to be inventions designed for this purpose. Here I have the note: I have here in mind such forgeries as the Donatio Constantini in the fourth century and the Isidorian Decretals later. In other words, there were documents that claimed Rome had this special authority, which everybody today recognizes were simply forged documents; they were not authentic historical documents. They were made to bolster the position of Rome within the Church, the Church of Rome.
So I write: The presumed authority of the Bishop of Rome was also bolstered by references to allegedly historical documents that were later proven to be inventions designed for this purpose, and it was shaped and developed by countless cultural and political events that produced the schism between the Roman Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches and later brought about the Protestant Reformation in the West, and so also the Roman reaction to the Reformation in the Counter-Reformation that made the papacy what it is today. Although the elaboration and development of what we have come to call the “imperial papacy” was not, as we have noted, without its opponents, even within the Roman Church. And there was the whole conciliar controversy about what has the ultimate last word. Is it a council or is it the pope? And historically, of course, the view that it was the pope is what won out in the Western Church.
What we see here is: although the elaboration and development of what we have come to call the “imperial papacy” was not, as we have noted, without its opponents even within the Roman Church, the current understanding and practice of the so-called Petrine ministry—that’s a word applied to the Pope of Rome’s place in the Church, the Petrine ministry reached its historical apex in the dogmatic decrees about the pope’s position and power promulgated by Vatican Council I that were slightly modified but not at all essentially changed by Vatican Council II. Here I have a note at this point about the teaching in Vatican Council II. Vatican II’s teaching about episcopal collegiality is neither helpful nor accurate from a traditional Orthodox point of view. Vatican II thought that the “college of bishops,” the Collegium altogether, in other words, all the bishops on earth, governed the universal Church together with the Pope of Rome and under his leadership and guidance. So that view is that the bishops govern over the universal Church, headed by the Pope of Rome as the “universal bishop.”
Orthodox would hold that the college of bishops does not govern the universal Church together with the Pope of Rome or anybody else, including the Ecumenical Patriarchate, under his leadership and guidance. Each bishop governs his own church and gives an account of his governance to his brother bishops within his own regional synod. There is no universal episcopal authority within or without the Roman Pope. There is no universal episcopal authority over the universal Church, just as no “college of apostles” governed the apostolic Church under the leadership and authority of Peter in the very beginning. So here I say that the idea that the bishops together with the Pope govern all the Church on earth—that’s not true. The bishops govern their own dioceses, then together they meet with each other in council to see if they affirm the same faith, the same worship, and the same structure, hopefully, with one another. So I continue in my paper here.
The Roman Church’s current official teaching about papal privilege and power that are unacceptable to the Eastern Orthodox churches are the dogma of the Pope’s infallibility when speaking officially from the Chair of Peter, ex cathedra Petri, on matters of faith and morals. Then you have this line, “Ex sese et non [autem] ex consensu ecclesiae,” in the decree; it either means, “From himself and not from the consensus of the Church,” or that his statements are in themselves, from themselves, infallible and authoritative, not from the consensus of the Church. “Ex sese et non ex consensu ecclesiae.” I continue.
The binding character of the Pope’s infallible decrees on all Christians, and certainly all Catholics now—not Orthodox or Protestants—in the world, the Pope’s direct episcopal jurisdiction over all Christians in the world—certainly all Catholic Christians—the Pope’s authority to appoint and so also to depose the bishops of all Christian (nowadays Roman Catholic) churches and those united to Rome, and the affirmation that the legitimacy and authority of all Christian bishops in the world, certainly those in unity with Rome, derive from their union with the Roman see and its bishop, the supreme pontiff, the unique successor of Peter, and the vicar of Christ on earth. So what was denied by the Orthodox that was dogma in Vatican II is that the Pope in certain conditions speaks infallibly on faith and morals and must be received as infallible. This comes from himself or in themselves and not from a Church consensus, and the same authorities give the Pope direct episcopal jurisdiction over every Christian in the world, including all the other bishops, whom he appoints and puts into office, and can depose by his own authority. That is the teaching and practice of the Roman Catholic Church today.
Now I continue here, bringing it up to date. The revolutionary advances in technology in the last century, the 20th century, that coincided with such traumatic events as the World Wars, the rise and fall of Communism, the Jewish Holocaust, the most severe and widespread persecution of Christians in history, and the inner decay of Christianity especially, excuse me, Protestantism, under the various secularizing forces of Western society strongly contributed to the Pope of Rome’s position as the leader of Christianity in the modern and now post-modern world. The papacy as we now know it is not simply the result, as Marshall McLuhan would have it, of the invention of the phonetic alphabet in the Greco-Latin world shortly before Christ’s birth that shaped early Western Christianity and the later invention of the printing press that produced the Protestant Reformation in the West and so also the Counter-Reformation that solidified the imperial papacy that was theologically and politically created in history by such popes as Gregory VII in the eleventh century in his decree, Dictatus Papae, and Innocent III and Boniface VIII in his encyclical, Unam Sanctam in the 13th century. So in the eleventh and 13th centuries you have this being theologically formulated.
It is also the direct result of the immediate impact of modern technology and electronic media that served to bring the Roman popes of the last half-century, the last half of the last century, especially the remarkably gifted and charismatic Pope John Paul II, out of their Vatican enclosures and directly and immediately into the daily lives of people all around the world. Like it or not, by God’s inscrutable providence, the emergence of contemporary electronic technology inevitably and inexorably led to the Pope of Rome becoming the universally acknowledged leader of Christianity in the world. Barring something wholly unforeseen, the Roman Pope, the Bishop of Rome, is sure to remain the world’s Christian leader as long as the planet Earth and its global electronic culture endures. In other words, the point I’m trying to make there is: because of the events, the Pope of Rome is seen as the leader of Christianity, I think even much like the Dalai Lama would be considered the leader of Tibetan Buddhism or something. In other words, when you put all Christians together and say, “Who’s the head of all this?” certainly in the popular imagination it would be the Pope of Rome. Of course, as we just saw, he holds the greatest claim to this office, except not in the way that it developed, at least according to Eastern Orthodoxy. So I continue my paper.
The question now stands before all Christians concerning what they should do about the Pope of Rome’s de facto leadership of Christianity in our modern world, our present world. Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, who met with Athenagoras 50 years ago in Jerusalem, were moved to raise this question as an essential part of their papal ministry, the so-called Petrine ministry. Pope John Paul II explicitly did so many times and with particular strength and urgency in his “apostolic letter” commending Christian ecumenism. That letter was called, “Ut Unum Sint.” Of course, Pope John Paul II also had an apostolic letter specifically about the Eastern churches—it was called, “Orientale Lumen”—where he discusses the unique relation between the Church of Rome and the churches of the East, the Orthodox churches of the East, both Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian.
In any case, I say this, and Pope Benedict XVI, who recently retired, of course, has already repeated this question several times on significant occasions. Here I would just add I don’t think Francis I has done it so explicitly, but certainly John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II—John Paul I only was there for a month or two—and Benedict XVI, they all specifically said, “We must discuss the papacy. We must discuss what the ministry of the primacy and the presidential see in Christendom, what that means, how it should operate.” There’s even a new book now—it came out by a Greek Orthodox scholar—about the ecclesiology of the Roman Church from Vatican I to Vatican II, and now we have many discussions today going on right now as we speak about what is universal primacy in the Church.
And then that discussion extends to the Orthodox Church: What do we Orthodox believe about universal primacy in the Christian Church, and who should be the primate and why, and what does primatial leadership mean? That’s very, very confusing in the modern time, especially since in the popular mind the Ecumenical [Patriarch] Bartholomew is constantly appearing in public with Pope Francis. He went to Jerusalem, then he went to the famous prayer service with the Jews and the Muslims in the Vatican garden. So the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew is putting himself out there, and in some sense in a right way because, as a matter of fact, he is the first among the equals of Orthodox bishops. But how does his ministry differ from the ministry of the Bishop of Rome, the Pope of Rome? That’s a huge question for us today.
So I say this question stands before all Christians, and the question is this… And I don’t mention in my paper anything that I believe the Orthodox would have to do to be able to enter into communion with Rome and have Rome recognize the Orthodox. I don’t mention that at all. My paper is about what Orthodox would think the Roman Church would have to do to make it Orthodox, to make it acceptable to Orthodoxy. So this question is before us, I say. Then I continue.
I can hardly speak on behalf of the Eastern Orthodox churches about the exercise of the Roman papacy in our time. In other words, I’m no spokesman for Orthodoxy; that’s for darn sure, and sometimes just the opposite: people think that I’m not very Orthodox. But in any case, I am encouraged here to offer my opinions on the subject, and I was asked to do so for this conference, my personal opinion on how I think all this should work itself out. So I write: I am encouraged to offer my opinions on this subject on the basis of the traditional Orthodox teaching testified to in the letter of the Eastern Orthodox patriarchs in 1848 in response to Pope Pius IX’s epistle to the Easterners. It was an epistle urging the Easterners to consider reunion with Rome. This is in the 19th century, 1848.
The Eastern Orthodox bishops responded to the pope’s epistle, and this is what they wrote. They said: This is the principle, that “for Orthodoxy, the protector of religion, piety, is the very body of the Church, even the people themselves” who desire to preserve the Church’s faith and life free from unacceptable changes and novelties. Here you could read that encyclical epistle, the encyclical epistle of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church to the faithful everywhere. It’s in print from South Canaan, Pennsylvania, 1958, but you could get it online, this encyclical epistle of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church to the faithful everywhere, and then there was also the reply of the Church of Constantinople to the letter of Pope Leo XIII in 1895 after the doctrine of infallibility was promulgated. So if you go online you can find these documents.
Now, I am encouraged—I write in my paper; I continue my paper—by Pope John Paul’s request for forthright dialogue about the papacy in our time. In Pope John Paul II’s admonition to all Christians not to be afraid, a request and admonition regularly repeated by Pope Benedict XVI, who recently retired and whom Pope Francis replaced, of course. I will therefore proceed to list what I believe must happen if the Orthodox churches would consider recognizing the Bishop of Rome as their world leader who exercises “presidency in love among all the catholic churches of Christ which hold the orthodox faith concerning God’s Gospel in Jesus.” So then I continue in my paper to list, doctrinally, theologically, and then liturgically, sacramentally, and then in structure what I actually believe would be required by the Orthodox for the Orthodox to be able and even to be compelled to recognize the Bishop of Rome as exercising presidency in the universal Church on earth.
So in my next podcast I will read to you, if you care to listen, what I really think would be required for a reunion of the Church of Rome and the Eastern Orthodox Church, what the Orthodox would require of Rome. Now, of course, there’s an additional question: What would we require of ourselves? What kind of repentance or what kind of change of mind would have to take place in the Orthodox Church for this to happen, and what would the Orthodox ask Rome to do? But here what I’m going to do next time is simply read what I think are the doctrinal, liturgical, sacramental, and structural, ecclesiological issues that Rome would have to change from what they have now in order for the Orthodox to be able to recognize the Bishop of Rome as the first among the Christian bishops, at least the bishops of the traditionally Catholic-tradition churches who hold the orthodox faith in our time.
So next time I will do that, but for today this is Fr. Thomas Hopko. I’m not speaking on behalf of Ancient Faith Radio here. Be warned of that. But Ancient Faith Radio has asked me to share my opinions and you might even say imaginations or fantasies on this issue through the radio, for which I am grateful to do.
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Part 2
In my last podcast for Ancient Faith Radio about the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Pope of Rome, I introduced a paper that I prepared for a conference in 2005 in Washington, D.C., sponsored by Roman Catholics, the Woodstock Theological Institute, and the Georgetown University, about what non-Catholics would require of the Church of Rome and of the Pope of Rome in order to be in sacramental communion with the Roman Catholic Church. At this conference, representatives of various non-Catholic churches, non Roman churches:, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist, Calvinist, Society of Friends, Quakers—I think there were about eight or nine of us—had this task: to say what we thought would be required for us to be in communion with Rome. I was the one invited to say what I thought the Orthodox Church would require.
I did that, and I wrote a paper for it, even; I sent it to the organizers of this conference, which they read before they came so they’d have some idea of what I was going to say, but I was only given ten minutes to summarize it at the actual conference, as were the other people there from the various Anglican, Lutheran, and the Protestant churches generally. We each had ten minutes [to] summarize our position, and there was some kind of discussion, and then the conference was over. So the paper was never delivered, and it was never published anywhere—maybe that’s merciful; I don’t know—but I just thought I would share it at this point, with the listeners of Ancient Faith Radio.
As I said, it was prepared in the year 2005, September, so that’s a long time ago—I think nine years, I believe, ago—but basically I would still hold pretty much the same things now. But I will read what I have written, and I will maybe make some comment on it here for the radio so that you could just see what I think would be required for the Orthodox churches to be in communion with the Church of Rome, and even to recognize its bishop as the first among the equal bishops in Christianity on earth. So I’ll pick up where I left off at the podcast last time. I wrote…
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First of all, I believe the Orthodox would insist—or would have to insist—that the bishop of Rome would hold the orthodox faith of the catholic Church through history and teach and defend true Christian doctrine. This means that the pope would have to do several specific things, chief among which, I would think are the following. This is what I believe Orthodox would ask.
First, the bishop of Rome would have to confirm the original text of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Symbol of Faith and defend its use in all the churches, beginning with his own. At the very least, should some churches for pastoral reasons be permitted to keep the filioque in their Creed, if that were the case, he (the bishop of Rome) would have to insist on an explanation of the filioque that would clearly teach that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Son” only in relation to God’s saving dispensation in the world, in the oikonomia, in other words, the Holy Spirit who proceeds eternally from the Father is given to the world through the Son, for the sake of understanding the proper relations of the Persons of the Trinity. The pope would have to make certain that no Christian be tempted to believe that the Holy Spirit essentially proceeds from the Father and the Son together, and certainly not “from both as from one—ab utroque sicut ab uno,” which was a traditional position of the Roman Church at a later time when the filioque was discussed between East and West.
In other words, the Creed without the filioque would have to be endorsed. If for some reason in some places on earth Roman churches would keep the filioque in the Creed, it would have to be clear to those who want to understand that this does not mean that there is an eternal procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son, and even not from the Father and Son “as if from one”; that would not be acceptable to Orthodoxy.
Then I say that the bishop of Rome, the pope, would also teach that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are three distinct Persons or hypostases and not simply “subsistent relations” within the one God, who is identified with the one divine nature. He would have to insist and ensure that the one true God of Christian faith is not the Holy Trinity understood as a quasi-unipersonal subject who reveals himself as Father, Son, and Spirit, which, for traditional Christianity, is unacceptable and in fact would be understood as a version of a Modalism, namely, there is one God, who is the Father, who is the Son, who is the Holy Spirit—no.
There is One who is the Father, One who is the Son, One who is the Holy Spirit; their unity is perfect. Their divinity is perfect, but the divinity of the Son and the Spirit derive eternally, before the foundation of the world, before time or space, from the Person of the Father. The Father communicates his whole divinity to his Son and Spirit from all eternity and the God, for Christians, is the tri-Personal, tri-hypostatic divinity, tri-hypostatic Godhead.
The pope also would have to insist that human beings can have real communion with God through God’s uncreated divine energies and actions toward creatures, which come from the Father, through the Son, and in the Holy Spirit. That little paragraph there would mean that Palamism would have to be accepted, because this teaching, the Palamite teaching, was conciliarly received by all Orthodox churches, that indeed there is a distinction between the essence and energies of God: the unknowable, super-essential Godhead that is hidden, and then the activities of God that we creatures can really participate in through the revelation of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit.
Also I say that the bishop of Rome, the pope, would also officially say that the immaculate conception of Christ’s mother, Mary, from her parents, and Mary’s total glorification in the risen Christ at the right hand of the Father have been improperly explained in the papal bulls that originally accompanied the Roman Church’s ex cathedra dogmas on these two articles of faith. The pope would explain that Mary’s conception by her parents was pure and holy, without a need for God extraordinarily to apply “the merits of Christ” to Joachim and Anna’s sexual act of conceiving their daughter in order to free her from “the stain of original sin.” The pope would also have to make it clear that Mary really died and was not assumed bodily into heaven before vanquishing death through her own death, by faith in her Son, Jesus Christ.
Here what I’m saying is: Orthodox Church would affirm that Mary was immaculately conceived from her parents, Joachim and Anna, but it did not require any special exceptional act on the part of God from the moment of her conception to free her from the stain of the original sin. We should note that some Orthodox churches, who are very anti-Roman, still have a version of this teaching, and they would say that the stain of the original sin was washed away at the Annunciation, not at the conception of Joachim and Anna, but in any case there would have to be an explanation of the immaculate conception and the Dormition, the assumption of Mary, bodily, into the presence of God, that would conform with Orthodox doctrine and liturgical practice.
Also, next, the pope would also officially say, clearly state, that, though there may be a purification and cleansing from sin in the process of human dying, there is no state or condition of purgatory after death where sinners pay off the temporal punishment that they allegedly owe to God for their sins. The pope would also stop the practice of indulgences whereby, through certain pious activities, Christians can allegedly reduce the “days” of purgatorial suffering for themselves and others.
Here, of course, this means that the allegory of the toll-houses in Orthodox tradition, which I believe is an Orthodox traditional teaching, is not that sinners have to be punished for the sins that they committed on earth before dying, according to those 22 toll-houses that were formulated in the second century in Constantinople, but that they would have to be freed from those passions and cleansed from them in order to enter into the kingdom of God, and therefore prayer for those departed, entreating the Lord to be merciful, entreating the Lord to give the grace to the people to accept Christ, and therefore to be delivered from their sins, this would be the Orthodox—I believe—understanding that would have to be shared with the Roman Catholic Church on this issue.
Then I say that the pope would also make it clear that Christ’s crucifixion was not a payment of the debt of punishment that humans allegedly owe to God for their sins. The bishop of Rome would rather teach, with his co-bishops in the Western patriarchate, that Christ’s self-offering to his Father was the saving, atoning, and redeeming payment of the debt of perfect love, perfect righteous, obedience, gratitude, and glory that human beings owe to God, that God must have from human beings for their salvation from sin and their deliverance from death, and now, in fact, do have because of the redeeming death, in total love for God and humanity, of Jesus, the crucified Christ, who is the new and the last Adam.
In other words, there would have to be an explanation of why Christ’s death on the cross is atoning, and the explanation would not be because humans have to be punished and Christ takes that punishment, but rather that humans have to be good and holy and keep the law of God, which only Christ does, and therefore by faith in him we can have our own sins forgiven and our own way into paradise and restoration guaranteed to us human beings.
I also then continue and say that the pope would also ensure all Christians that the bishop of Rome will never do or teach anything on his own authority, from himself or in itself, and not from the consensus of the Church. “Ex sese et non ex consensu ecclesiae,” in Latin. The bishop of Rome would promise to serve in his presidency solely as the spokesperson for all the bishops in apostolic succession, who govern communities of believers who have elected them to serve as their bishops, and whose validity and legitimacy as bishops depend solely on their fidelity to the Gospel and the faith once and for all delivered to the saints, in communion with their predecessors in the archpriestly and archpastoral episcopal office and with each other.
Here this of course means that the doctrine of the infallibility of the pope, as formulated in Vatican I and defended in Vatican II, that would have to be rejected or radically modified for the Orthodox to be in communion with Rome.
Also, I believe, that on undecided doctrinal and moral issues—open questions, so to speak—the pope of Rome would use his presidential authority to ensure that everyone, clergyman or layperson, would be encouraged to freely present his or her arguments concerning Christian teaching and practice, as witnessed in the Church’s formal testimonies to Christian faith and life, that is, the canonized Scriptures (the Bible), the traditional liturgies, the universally received Christian Councils and canons, and the witness and writings of the canonized saints—not for everything that the saints have said and done, but specifically for the specific reasons that these saints are glorified in the Church and their teaching has been accepted by the universal Church.
So it’s the pope’s duty to see that proper conciliar and synodical activity takes place among the bishops and the people in order for the Church to reach a decision on doctrinal and moral issues.
Finally, the pope of Rome would use his presidential authority to guarantee a spirit of freedom, openness, respect, and love in and among all churches and all Christians and, indeed, all human beings, so that the Holy Spirit, Christ’s sole “vicar on earth,” may bring to remembrance what Christ has said and guide people into all the truth (John 14:25, 16:13). The pope would in this way truly be the great bridge-builder, the pontifex maximus.
The point there is that the pope would ensure and guarantee and promote and defend and shepherd a spirit of freedom, openness, respect, and love in and among all churches, Christians, and all people, so that the Holy Spirit, who alone is Christ’s “vicar on earth”—the vicar of Christ on earth is the Holy Spirit—may bring to remembrance what Christ has said, which acts, then, through the whole body together.
Now I continue about the Liturgy, and I write: In order for the pope of Rome to exercise “presidency in love” among the churches and Christian leadership in the world, his church, the Church of Rome, would also have to exemplify proper Christian worship. This, too, for Orthodox Christians would mean some very specific things. First of all, I believe, the bishop of Rome would have to insist that, except for extraordinary pastoral reasons, baptisms would be done by immersion in water in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
And he would also affirm that the newly baptized be immediately chrismated with the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit and brought into communion with Christ by participation in the holy Eucharist. This includes infants who enter the Church’s sacramental life by virtue of the faith of the adults who care for them. The practice of a later episcopal laying on of hands, confirming the faith of the baptized—what is called today “confirmation”—may be permitted in churches desiring to continue this pious practice for customary pietistic reasons.
Then I say: Concerning participation in the holy Eucharist, the pope would also insist that the faithful receive holy Communion from the Gifts—that is, the bread and the wine—actually offered at the Eucharistic Liturgy which they are celebrating. The faithful would not be given Communion at Eucharistic Liturgies from reserved Gifts which are kept exclusively for those unable to participate in the Liturgy for good reasons (usually sickness or infirmity, or because they are involved in service to others and therefore miss the Liturgy of the Church).
In other words, the point here is: you can’t have a Mass and then give Communion to the people from the reserve sacrament that’s kept in a ciborium on the altar. The bread has to be offered and consecrated and lifted up at that Liturgy for the communion of the people present, doing that Liturgy altogether.
I also say—and this is the next point—that the pope would also ensure that the faithful people always participate in the consecrated wine, the blood of Christ, at holy Communion. How this is practically done may differ in different churches, but it must be done without exception. As for the bread, unleavened wafers may be used for pastoral reasons in the churches with this customary practice, but the pope would affirm leavened bread, the artos, as normative for the Christian Eucharist.
Also, I write: The pope would insist on the celebration of the holy Eucharist with psalmody, scriptural readings, and exegetical sermons according to local ecclesial practices as normative corporate worship for Christians on the Lord’s day and on the Church’s liturgical feasts. He, with his fellow bishops, would forbid private Eucharistic celebrations for particular intentions and for particular pietistic, political, or ideological purposes. He would support the celebration also of the prayer of the hours—vespers, compline, matins, and hours—in the churches. He would restore the practice of having the priestly celebrant in the Latin Liturgy face the altar—in other words, be turned toward the East—together with the faithful people during the prayers and Eucharistic offerings at the holy Liturgy. He would also consider enforcing the ancient ascetical and penitential practice of forbidding the celebration of the holy Eucharist in Christian churches on weekdays of the Great Fast, the Great Lenten season, except for the feast of the Annunciation.
Finally, I give my opinion on structural and administrative changes that I would envision would have to somehow be attended to. So I write: Finally, the Orthodox would hold that structural and administrative changes must occur if the pope of Rome will be accepted and recognized as the bishop who exercises presidency in love among the churches, being the bishop of the Church of Rome, which the church has the presidency in love—not the man, but the church has the presidency in love—and that the bishop of this church, the pope of Rome, would serve as Christianity’s world leader.
I would think that these changes would include the following. First, the bishop of Rome will be chosen by the Church of Rome. Each church elects its own bishop. His election, however, because of his church’s unique position among the churches, especially as it developed through history, and his position in the world today, may have to be affirmed in some way or other by the patriarchs and the primates of autocephalous, that is, self-governing, archbishoprics and metropolitanates throughout the world. But like the election of all Christian bishops, the pope’s selection and installation would be the canonical action of the community that he oversees, namely, the Roman Church, the Church of Rome.
A “college of cardinals,” constituted by men from all over the world, appointed by the pope and having nominal ministries in Rome, simply would no longer exist. In other words, it wouldn’t be papally appointed cardinals who elect the next pope, but it would be the heads of the Orthodox churches affirming and confirming what the Roman Church herself does in electing its own bishop. So the election would be by the Church of Rome; the confirmation would be by the primates of the other regional churches on earth.
Then I write that the pope would not select and appoint bishops in any churches as he does today. He would, however, affirm them, the bishops, in their ministries, and may even do so in some formal manner, as every bishop is called to affirm his brothers with whom he holds the one episcopate in solidum. That’s a reference to St. Cyprian of Carthage, who said, “Episcopatus unus est. The episcopate is one, and all bishops hold it in solidum, together in unity.”
The pope would surely have the right and duty to question the choice of a candidate for the episcopacy, especially for a regional presidency (that means the primates of the local churches) whom he considers unsuited or unworthy for the office. He may even have the opportunity to review candidates and to offer his opinion before an election occurs, especially of a presiding bishop in a territorial church. But the pope would do this like any other bishop or primate of a regional church. He would have no right or power to interfere in the internal affairs of any church or diocese other than his own.
Next I say the pope, the bishop of Rome, would appoint commissions and departments composed of competent men and women from all the world’s churches in communion with Rome to assist him in his service as Christianity’s world leader and chief spokesperson. He would also organize regular gatherings of the primates of the world’s churches to support him in his global mission as the universal head of the Christian Church on earth. The pope would have a commission dealing with Church doctrine, Christian doctrine, and theological thought in the world’s various churches, but no Roman office would exist with the authority to take disciplinary action in doctrinal matters which, when required, would be handled by the local bishop. The church’s bishops—and not a team of theologians in Rome, appointed by the pope, acting on his authority and speaking in his name—would constitute the Church’s formal doctrinal magisterium. Obviously, that means we’re calling for the end of the holy office, and also even for the curia, that there would be conciliar bodies in Rome, living there, representing all the churches of the world, working together in these various areas.
Then I say also: Each bishop would oversee the members of his flock. Each bishop would oversee the members of his flock. He would be especially attentive to the intellectual, charismatic, and activistic members of his church, and would exercise appropriate pastoral guidance, direction, and discipline in their regard. The local bishop would forbid holy Communion to a church member who denies Christian doctrines and/or practices that he and his brother-bishops, with the Roman pope as their leader, are called and consecrated to proclaim and defend.
Should a bishop be charged with teaching false doctrines (heresy) or engaging in immoral behavior or allowing those in his pastoral care to do so, he would be judged by the synod of bishops to which he belongs, in other words, the regional synod, who would discipline or depose him. In other words, he would not be judged directly by the Vatican or by Rome; it would go by way of the bishops of the synod to which he belongs, even should he be the president of that synod. If found guilty of wrong-doing, his own synod would discipline or depose him. If he wishes to appeal his case, he may turn to the bishop exercising presidency among the churches of his region, and as a last resort, he may appeal to the bishop of Rome, as the Church’s highest president, the ultimate board of appeals, so to speak.
The pope would not have the power to make authoritative jursidictional or juridical decisions, but would exercise the ministry of intercession and reconciliation. The same right of appeal to regional presidencies and ultimately even to the bishop of Rome would, of course, be available to any church member, clergy or lay, who is charged with wrong teaching or wrong-doing.
The next point I make is this: The bishop of Rome would also cease being an official head of state. As Christianity’s global leader, however, it is well that he would live in a place with minimal risks of governmental and political interference in his ministry. And that’s very important for Orthodox, whose bishops are always being somehow controlled or attempted to be controlled by the countries in which they live. So we would say here that it would be well if he was not an official head of state and would live in a place with minimal risks of governmental and political interference in his ministry. The place where the pope would live, and where the global inter-Church commissions and departments would also be located, would be governed by a lay person, assigned by the Roman Church. Heads of state would relate to the pope solely as a Christian bishop and a spiritual leader, and not as another head of state. In other words, there still would be a place like Vatican City that would be a city in and of itself, but its political and secular head would be a lay person, chosen by that Church. It would not be the pope, who would have a specific, churchly, spiritual, pastoral, doctrinal function.
Then finally, in this area, I say: As leader of the world’s Christians, the pope of Rome would travel extensively. He would take full advantage of contemporary means of transportation and communication. He would master electronic media to serve his ministry in proclaiming Christ’s Gospel, propagating Christian faith, promoting ethical behavior, protecting human rights, and securing justice and peace for all people. He would be the servant of unity among all human beings, and first of all his fellow Christians, not as a unique episcopus episcoporum—that’s an expression of St. Cyprian—not as a bishop of other bishops—there is no bishop of other bishops, as was decreed already in the Council of Carthage in the third century: he is not the bishop of bishops; he is one of the equal bishops with all the others—so he would not have that position, but he would have the position as the leading bishop in the world, that Pope St. Gregory the Great called servus servorum Dei, the servant of the servants of God, among all the Christian bishops in the world.
Now, enormous goodwill, energy, and time, I write, would be necessary to refashion the papacy so that the pope of Rome might be Christianity’s world leader as the bishop whose church presides in love among all the world’s catholic churches who hold and teach the orthodox faith. As recent popes have insisted, radical repentance would also be required, beginning with the Roman Church itself, whose calling as first among Christian churches is to show the way to all the others.
Now I continue: the Orthodox churches would surely have to undergo many humbling changes in its attitude, structure, and behavior to be in sacramental communion with the Roman Church and to recognize its presidency among the churches in the person of its pope, its bishop, should such changes occur. In other words, these changes would cause tremendous changes within Orthodoxy, also.
The Orthodox would certainly have to overcome their own inner struggles over and against ecclesiastical power and privilege, because the Orthodox bishops today can hardly agree where they would sit at the table if they had a council. It’s a scandal, really. And the Orthodox would have to candidly admit their sinful contributions to Christian division and disunity through history, and to repent of those things sincerely. They would also have to forgo all desires or demands for other churches to repent publicly of their past errors and sins. They would be willing to allow God to consign everything of the past to oblivion for the sake of bringing about the reconciliation and reunion of Christians at the present time.
Here also we would have to mention that the practice of having churches, organized according to ethnicity and [culture], like Greek, Russian, Syrian, that would have to be radically changed—in Orthodoxy, I mean—and really understood in the proper way, which I believe today it is not understood properly.
In a word, the Orthodox would have to sacrifice everything except only the faith itself for the sake of building a common future together with Christians who are willing and able to do so with them under the leadership of an Orthodox Pope of Rome. What we need is an Orthodox Pope of Rome. Like Roman Catholics and Protestants, the Orthodox would have to be willing to die with Christ to themselves in their personal, cultural, ethnic, and ecclesiastical and political interests for the sake of being in full unity with all who desire to be saved by the crucified Lord within the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church which is, according to Scripture, the Church which is his—Christ’s—body, the fullness of him who fills all in all (Ephesians 1:23). The Church which is “the household of God,” that is, the Church of the living God, the pillar and the bulwark of the truth (I Timothy 3:15).
Then I end my paper with this one sentence. With the firm conviction that with God all things are possible, we can dare to imagine, perhaps even to fantasize, about a global unity of Christians in the faith once and for all delivered by the saints under the presidency of an Orthodox Church of Rome.
So this is what I say in this paper, and I present it for discussion about what we Orthodox would like to see in the Church of Rome or be required to see in order to be in sacramental communion. But perhaps another paper and many other papers could be written about what we Orthodox would have to do for that to happen, because our record in the public life of unity, harmony, integrity, unanimity in all matters, it is not a very great record to see. While we all still hold doctrinal unity and moral unity in our teachings, in our structure and in our organization, and in our actual practices, there is, of course, very much to be desired from us Orthodox in the present world, among ourselves and in relation to the Church of Rome, and, indeed, in relation to all Christians and to all peoples of the earth.
So that’s what I had to say, that’s what I say to you now. May God bless our path, the God with whom all things are possible.
