An Irenic Response to an Orthodox Convert’s Critique of the Papacy

Titian, Archbishop Filippo Archinto (1558) — Episcopacy half visible, half invisible: this will be the Orthodox error

Michael Warren Davis is an eloquent writer. I have long enjoyed reading his work. With many fellow Catholics, I regretted his decision to leave the Church of Rome for Eastern Orthodoxy — a path trodden nowadays by a small but vociferous number of traditionally-minded believers who feel they can no longer make sense of the claims Catholicism makes for itself and who believe they have found a timeless repository of authentic tradition in the East. As one who spent a number of years worshiping among Greek Catholics in the Byzantine rite, and who has devoted his life to arguing against the spirit of iconoclasm and modernism that has seemed to grip the West, I can truly sympathize.

In a recent post at his Substack The Yankee Athonite, Michael defends the Orthodox position that Christ alone is the head of the Church (for what could you be lacking if you have Him?). There is no need for papal primacy, for a visible head, since the Church already has a Head, the God-Man, who is really present among us in the Holy Eucharist, and who gives His faithful the Holy Spirit to lead them into all truth. With the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit vouchsafed to us sacramentally throughout our whole life, why would we seek an external divine authority that stands, as it were, in their place (as a “vicar” or substitute)?

There’s certainly a lot one could say in response — that is why so many tomes have been written in the millennium-old back-and-forth between East and West. For readers who are eager to understand the mind of the Eastern Fathers of the Church on the papacy, which looks to me a lot more like what the Catholic Church teaches and a lot less like what one finds among the post-schism Orthodox, I recommend two books in particular: Adrian Fortescue’s old classic The Orthodox Eastern Church and Erick Ybarra’s recent work The Papacy: Revisiting the Debate Between Catholics and Orthodox. (I agree with Timothy Flanders’s judgment that Ybarra’s work shines for its intellectual humility, honesty, rigor, and lack of point-scoring triumphalism.)

Here, I’d like to offer some thoughts of my own to this very common Orthodox line of argumentation. In my opinion, the problem with it is not that it proves nothing or too little, but that it proves far too much. I think, at root, it actually gives up on the entire idea of the visible Church and the sacramental-liturgical life. But are not the Orthodox known above all for the gorgeous liturgical life and their rich teaching on the “mysteries”? How could I say that their rejection of papal primacy amounts to undermining the rest of the Church? I will give my answer below. I don’t think the Orthodox live in exact accordance with the principles articulated in anti-Western polemics. There are older and deeper principles at work among them that prevent certain false ideas from bearing the bad fruits they might bear in a consistent rationalist (and that is not something one could ever accuse a devout Orthodox Christian of being!). These theological principles — supported by a healthy inertia that holds on to monuments of tradition, something the restless Faustian West would benefit from imitating — should draw a fair-minded Eastern Orthodox believer into the Catholic Church, joining one of the Eastern rites in communion with the Pope of Rome.

With that preface, here is my response to Davis’s essay.1

Continued below.