On Reunion Between East and West

When we published Joseph P. Bonchonsky’s guest column “With God in Russia” in our November 2007 issue, little did we expect that it would stir up a hor­net’s nest of negative reaction. We received several letters in response to Bonchonsky’s column — all of which we printed (in the Jan., Feb., April, and May issues). A few questioned our motives; in one case, calling us out for “veering…into the direction of the devastating ecumenism that has resulted, undeniably, in the compromised faith of millions…” (Dr. Robert Carballo, Jan.) That’s a charge we don’t take lightly. We responded to these letters, where necessary, to defend our decision to publish Bonchonsky’s column. (Bonchonsky replied, as well, to some of the more personal charges questioning his faith.) There was also a smattering of positive letters.

Not everyone who forms an opinion on the material we publish has the time or the inclination to write a letter to the editor. We generally assume that those who do write letters speak for more than just themselves. We don’t doubt that a number of our readers wonder why we chose to publish Bonchonsky’s column, which Willard King (Jan.) termed an “unabashed propaganda piece” for the Russian Orthodox Church. Others, on the other hand, have applauded Bonchonsky’s column. And there are undoubtedly some for whom the whole topic is simply uninteresting. (Those readers may want to skip to the next New Oxford Note.)

At the risk of further exercising those who are opposed to Catholic gestures of reunion toward the Orthodox Churches, we would like to explain why we believe reunion between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches is a worthy pursuit, and why it should be the foremost focus of Catholic relations with other ecclesial bodies.

But first it is important to distinguish between “reunion” and “ecumenism,” the latter a practice inimical to traditional Catholics. Briefly, ecumenism found its modern genesis in the 1910 World Missionary Conference, a Protestant effort to foster unity between the various denominations and splinter denominations in their missionary efforts. The Conference led to further grandiose efforts to promote doctrinal unity a­mong Protestants, including the Faith and Order Movement, and the Life and Work Movement. These efforts at Protestant ecumenism soon sank into a mire of modernist ideas, and appeals to pan-Christianity and the “branch theory,” in which each denomination represents a branch of the elusive One Christian Church. (The One True Church is, of course, the Catholic Church, and it is incorrect to suggest that Protestant communities are her “branches.”)

Around 1960, the various internal interests in the Church pushing for the reform that would find its expression in the Second Vatican Council were advocating Catholic participation in what was until then almost exclusively a Protestant enterprise. Pope John XXIII decided that it was time for the Church to enter the fray. “Christian unity,” writes Philip Trower in his 2003 book Turmoil & Truth: The Historical Roots of the Modern Crisis in the Catholic Church, was seen by Pope John as “one of the prerequisites for a successful apostolate to the modern world.”

As history has proven, the Catholic ecumenical movement has largely fallen victim to the heresy of modernism (or “neo-modernism,” as Trower calls it), which, in a nutshell, denies the unchanging nature of God’s revelation to man, favoring instead the numberless “revelations” of personal religious experience. Modernism, after the fashion of popular late-19th-century secular philosophies, evaluates God’s ever-changing revelation through the study of historical processes. Pope St. Pius X famously condemned modernism as the “synthesis of all heresies.”

Trower writes that Catholic ecumenists “had apparently decided that disagreements about doctrine and discipline should not be considered serious obstacles to unity [with Protestant communities], or even obstacles at all. Christians are already united in all that matters; baptism and belief in Christ as ‘Lord and Saviour.’ Catholics and other Christians should therefore be allowed to receive communion in each other’s Churches instantly. Differences in belief can be ironed out later — or tolerated as expressions of legitimate pluralism within an already existing one Christian Church.” This is the form of ecumenism that, as Dr. Carballo rightly observes, “has resulted, undeniably, in the compromised faith of millions,” and against which the NOR has spoken out on numerous occasions over the years.

Reunion, on the other hand, is a completely different animal. As Trower expresses it, “In the Catholic Church’s eyes, a separated church or community with validly ordained bishops and priests and valid sacraments can more truly be considered a detached ‘piece’ of the Church than can communities lacking them.” The Orthodox Churches maintain apostolic succession, and therefore enjoy a validly ordained clergy and valid Sacraments.

The attitude of liberal Catholic ecumenists toward the Orthodox Churches, Trower explains, is that reunion “should be put on the back burner, since an influx of Eastern Christians into the Catholic Church would reinforce the very beliefs and viewpoints which the theological revolutionaries [of Vatican II] were anxious to expel.”

Interestingly, Trower notes that reunion with the Orthodox was Pope John XXIII’s “first interest,” since he had previously served as a papal diplomat in Greece and Turkey. This might explain his decision to allow Catholic participation in the ecumenical movement, which had had contact with Orthodox representatives at its periphery.

Against this backdrop, we would like to call on the assistance of Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P., who, in his article “A Catholic View of Orthodoxy,” which appeared in the June 1996 issue of the British publication New Blackfriars, accurately distills our very thoughts on reunion.

“The Orthodox churches,” writes Fr. Nichols, “are churches in the apostolic succession; they are bearers of the apostolic Tradition, witnesses to apostolic faith, worship and order — even though they are also, and at the same time, unhappily sundered from the prima sedes, the first see” — i.e., Rome. Nevertheless, “Their Fathers and other ecclesiastical writers, their liturgical texts and practices, their iconographic tradition, these remain loci theologici — authoritative sources — to which the Catholic theologian can and must turn in his or her intellectual construal of Catholic Christianity [Pope John Paul II went to great lengths to make this point in his 1995 apostolic letter Orientale Lumen]. And that cannot possibly be said of the monuments of Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed or any other kind of Protestantism.”

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) backs up Fr. Nichols’s assessment of this dichotomy between the Orthodox Churches and the various Protestant communities. In his letter to the presidents of the national Catholic conferences of bishops introducing the CDF’s “Note on the Expression ‘Sister Churches'” (June 30, 2000), then-prefect Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger wrote, “The phrase ‘sister Churches’…is an expression that has become part of the common vocabulary to indicate the objective bond between the Church of Rome and Orthodox Churches” (italics added). That phrase, however, “has been applied improperly,” he says, to “the Anglican Communion and non-catholic ec­clesial communities.” The Note itself, which Cardinal Ratzinger declared “authoritative and binding,” stresses that “the expression sister Church­es…may only be used for those ecclesial communities that have preserved a valid Episcopate and Eucharist” — e.g., the Orthodox Churches. The Note is careful to stress that the phrase “sister Church­es” cannot be applied to the Catholic Church: “The one, holy, catholic and apostolic Universal Church is not sister but mother of all the particular Churches.”

More recently, the CDF under William Cardinal Levada reiterated the use of this phrase in its “Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine of the Church” (Jan. 29, 2007): “Because these [Orthodox] Churches, although separated, have true sacraments and above all — because of the apostolic succession — the priesthood and the Eucharist, by means of which they remain linked to us by very close bonds, they merit the title of ‘particular or local Churches,’ and are called sister Churches of the particular Catholic Churches.” On the other hand, the “Christian Communities born out of the Reformation,” according to the CDF, “do not enjoy apostolic succession in the sacrament of Orders, and…have not preserved the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic Mystery,” and “cannot, according to Catholic doctrine, be called ‘Churches’ in the proper sense.”

“To put the same point in another way,” writes Fr. Nichols, “the separated Western [Protestant] communities have Christian traditions — in the plural, with a small ‘t’ — which may well be worthy of the Catholic theologian’s interest and respect. But only the Orthodox are, along with the Catholic Church, bearers of Holy Tradition — in the singular, with a capital ‘T,’ that is, of the Gospel in its plenary organic transmission through the entirety of the life — credal, dox­ological, ethical — of Christ’s Church. There is for Catholics, therefore, a theological imperative to restore unity with the Orthodox which is lacking in our attitude to Protestantism….” That is the crux of the matter.

Therefore, says Fr. Nichols, “there cannot be any doubt that the Catholic Church must accord greater importance to dialogue with the Orthodox than to conversations with any Protestant body.”

The Orthodox Church has four distinctive features that suggest that reunion, rather than diluting Tradition and the “Catholicity” of the Church, would enhance said aspects of our beloved Catholic Church. The Orthodox Church, says Fr. Nichols, is “a dogmatic Church, a liturgical Church, a contemplative Church, and a monastic Church.” Let’s examine each of these four characteristics.

—  “Firstly, then, Orthodoxy is a dogmatic Church. It lives from out of the fullness of the truth impressed by the Spirit on the minds of the apostles at the first Pentecost, a fullness which transformed their awareness and made possible that specifically Christian kind of thinking we call dogmatic thought.

“The Holy Trinity, the God-man, the Mother of God and the saints, the Church as the mystery of the Kingdom expressed in a common life on earth, the sacraments as means to humanity’s deification — our participation in the uncreated life of God himself: these are the truths among which the Orthodox live, move and have their being.

“Orthodox theology in all its forms is a call to the renewal of our minds in Christ, something which finds its measure not in pure reason or secular culture but in the apostolic preaching attested to by the holy Fathers, in accord with the principal dogmata of faith as summed up in the Ecumenical Councils of the Church.”

—  “Secondly, Orthodoxy is a liturgical Church. It is a Church for which the Liturgy provides a total ambience expressed in poetry, music and iconography, text and gesture, and where the touchstone of the liturgical life is not the capacity of Liturgy to express contemporary concerns (legitimate though these may be in their own context), but, rather, the ability of the Liturgy to act as a vehicle of the Kingdom, our anticipated entry, even here and now, into the divine life.”

—  “Thirdly, Orthodoxy is a contemplative Church. Though certainly not ignoring the calls of missionary activity and practical charity, essential to the Gospel and the Gospel community as these are, the Orthodox lay their primary emphasis on the life of prayer as the absolutely necessary condition of all Christianity worth the name.”

—  “Fourthly, Orthodoxy is a monastic Church, a Church with a monastic heart where the monasteries provide the spiritual fathers of the bishops, the counselors of the laity and the example of a Christian maximalism. A Church without a flourishing monasticism, without the lived ‘martyrdom’ of an asceticism inspired by the Paschal Mystery of the Lord’s Cross and Resurrection, could hardly be a Church according to the mind of the Christ of the Gospels, for monasticism, of all Christian life ways, is the one which most clearly and publicly leaves all things behind for the sake of the Kingdom.”

Wouldn’t our Catholic Church — and the surrounding decadent Western culture — greatly benefit from the fourfold witness described above? The Orthodox Church is by no means perfect (nowhere has this been suggested). But our Catholic Church has become severely impoverished in each of the areas Fr. Nichols delineates, and such an infusion just might usher in the alleged “new springtime in the Church” for which we have longed for some time now.

“Catholics,” says Fr. Nichols, “need (at this time in history above all) the Orthodox Church.” As Bonchonsky points out in his November 2007 guest column, the Orthodox Church, particularly in Russia, needs us as well. We must ask ourselves, as the Orthodox must ask of themselves: What are we willing to do to make reunion possible?

We don’t see how reunion could not be appealing, even to those who’ve written in panning Bonchonsky’s column and the whole reunion project in general. The question among us should not be whether we should proceed, but how we are to proceed.