Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy

Adam A. J. Deville

Description

Among the issues that continue to divide the Catholic Church from the Orthodox Church—the two largest Christian bodies in the world, together comprising well over a billion faithful—the question of the papacy is widely acknowledged to be the most significant stumbling block to their unification. For nearly forty years, commentators, theologians, and hierarchs, from popes and patriarchs to ordinary believers of both churches, have acknowledged the problems posed by the papacy.

In Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity, Adam A. J. DeVille offers the first comprehensive examination of the papacy from an Orthodox perspective that also seeks to find a way beyond this impasse, toward full Orthodox-Catholic unity. He first surveys the major postwar Orthodox and Catholic theological perspectives on the Roman papacy and on patriarchates, enumerating Orthodox problems with the papacy and reviewing how Orthodox patriarchates function and are structured. In response to Pope John Paul II’s 1995 request for a dialogue on Christian unity, set forth in the encyclical letter Ut Unum Sint, DeVille proposes a new model for the exercise of papal primacy. DeVille suggests the establishment of a permanent ecumenical synod consisting of all the patriarchal heads of Churches under a papal presidency, and discusses how the pope qua pope would function in a reunited Church of both East and West, in full communion. His analysis, involving the most detailed plan for Orthodox-Catholic unity yet offered by an Orthodox theologian, could not be more timely.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Religious
• Philosophie et théologie
• Juan Pablo II
• Pope John Paul II
• Christianity
• History

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268158804
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy
ADAM A. J. D E VILLE

ORTHODOXY
and the
ROMAN PAPACY
Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Copyright 2011 by the University of Notre Dame
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
DeVille, Adam A. J., 1972-
Orthodoxy and the Roman papacy : Ut Unum Sint and the prospects of East-West unity / Adam A. J. DeVille.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-268-02607-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-268-02607-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Christian union-Orthodox Eastern Church. 2. Christian union-Catholic Church. 3. Orthodox Eastern Church-Relations-Catholic Church. 4. Catholic Church-Relations-Orthodox Eastern Church. 5. Papacy and Christian union. 6. Orthodox Eastern Church-Doctrines. 7. Catholic Church-Doctrines. 8. Papacy. I. Title.
BX324.3.D44 2011
280 .042-dc22
2010049947
ISBN 9780268158804
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
ONE
Ut Unum Sint in Context
Catholic Ecumenism in the Postconciliar Period
Ut Unum Sint: An Overview of Its Contents
The Problematic of Orthodox Responses to Ut Unum Sint
TWO
Orthodox Positions on the Papacy
Literature, 1960-2006
Toward a Synthetic Conclusion
THREE
A Renewed Roman Patriarchate: Catholic Perspectives
Theological Literature on the Roman Patriarchate
Patriarchates According to the 1990 CCEO
FOUR
Patriarchates: Orthodox Perspectives
The Ecumenical Patriarchate
The Patriarchate of Alexandria (Chalcedonian, Greek)
The Patriarchate of Alexandria (Coptic)
The Patriarchate of Antioch (Chalcedonian Orthodox)
The Patriarchate of Antioch (Syriac, non-Chalcedonian)
The Patriarchate of Jerusalem
The Patriarchate of Moscow
The Patriarchate of Bucharest
The Patriarchate of Sofia
The Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Church
Toward a Differentiation of Roles: Synthesis and Summary
FIVE
Patriarchates within the Latin Church: Institutional Implications and Practical Applications
The Necessity of Practical Reforms
Establishing Latin Patriarchal Structures
Summary
SIX
Papal Structures and Responsibilities
Resisting Predetermined Juridical Solutions
Papal Responsibilities in Ut Unum Sint
A Permanent Ecumenical Synod
Particular Papal Prerogatives
Summary
Afterword: What Has Been Done and What Remains?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies at Saint Paul University, Ottawa, for providing the only doctoral program in Eastern Christian theology in all of North America. The Institute has been an enormously welcoming and gracious place, and the professors and staff there whom I have known have been a joy and gift to me. I am in an especial way grateful for several doctoral bursaries and other assistance granted to me by the Institute as well as other scholarships granted by Saint Paul University.
Among the people at the Institute, I am primarily indebted to her founding director and my Doktorvater , the mitred protopresbyter Andriy Chirovsky. His enormous wisdom, graciously and patiently imparted to me at every turn, has been a splendid gift. He is a living embodiment of the Evagrian dictum that the theologian is the one who truly prays, and only one who prays is a theologian properly so called.
I am grateful also to the Institute s Peter Galadza, not only for serving on my doctoral committee and jury, but for other kindnesses along the way, including our editorial collaboration on Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies and our work on Unit en division: Les lettres de Lev Gillet ( Un moine de l Eglise d Orient ) Andrei Cheptytsky 1921-1929 (Paris: Parole et Silence, 2009). He is a wonderful exemplar of someone who demands rigor and fidelity and refuses mediocrity in matters both academic and ecclesial.
Others to whom I am indebted include Professor Catherine Clifford and the archpriest and Professor John Jillions, who along with Professor Thomas Fitzgerald made up my jury, whose examination of my work so helpfully provided an Eastern Catholic, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Russian (OCA) Orthodox evaluation of my work.
I am grateful to the Province of Ontario for an Ontario Graduate Scholarship and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a Doctoral Scholarship. In highly competitive and financially straitened circumstances, both agencies provided very substantial funding for which I am grateful.
Others whose counsel along the way has been invaluable include the Archpriest Robert Anderson, whom I first met in Ukraine in 2001 and who has since been a wonderful adviser and friend from whom I continue to learn much. The two anonymous reviewers for the University of Notre Dame Press wrote very helpful reports which strengthened this work, and I thank them for their insights.
I am, finally and most importantly, grateful to my family: to my wife Annemarie, and to my children Ephraim, Aidan, and Anastasia: sine qua non .
Introduction
The issue of ecclesiology, and not minor liturgical and administrative adjustments, or even ecumenical statements, will finally solve the problem of Christian unity .
JOHN MEYENDORFF
Meyendorff s words, now nearly a half-century old, 1 are seen to be more and more correct with each passing decade. Spoken in the middle of the Second Vatican Council, the landmark ecclesiological and ecumenical event of the twentieth century, the truth of these words has been recognized by Orthodox and Catholic theologians in a variety of ways. Both sides have increasingly come to wrestle with questions of what constitutes the Church as such as well as other important questions of synodality, canonical territory, episcopacy, and especially primacy at the regional and international levels. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, much progress on ecclesiological issues may be noted, but much work remains to be done.
Nowhere is that dynamic of successful work-in-progress more clear than in the continuing efforts of both Catholics and Orthodox to grapple with the question of the Roman papacy. Among those issues that continue to divide the Catholic Church from the Orthodox Church-the two largest Christian bodies in the world-the question of the papacy is widely acknowledged by both Catholics and Orthodox to be the most significant stumbling block that remains to unity between these two Churches.
On the Catholic side, no less a figure than Pope Paul VI himself frankly acknowledged in 1967 that the papacy is undoubtedly the gravest obstacle to the path of ecumenism. 2 In 1971, the theologian Emmanuel Lanne argued that there is no doubt that the primacy of Rome is the principal obstacle standing in the way of a reconstituted unity with the Orthodox Churches. Other differences are not negligible but the Orthodox regard these as essentially papist innovations which stem from the pretensions of the See of Rome. 3 The Eastern Jesuit George Maloney would write in 1979 that no greater obstacle toward reunion exists than the question of papal primacy . No one can doubt that this remains the key issue. 4 The 1980s evidently saw little progress since the 1988 Valamo Statement of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue (JIC) between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church declared that the question [of] the primacy of the bishop of Rome constitutes a serious divergence among us which will be discussed in the future. 5 Finally and perhaps most authoritatively, Walter Cardinal Kasper, head of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity (PCPCU) in Rome, confirmed that the only seriously debated theological issue between us and the Orthodox Church is the question of Roman primacy. 6
On the Orthodox side, the French Orthodox layman Olivier Cl ment argued that the problem of the papacy is certainly the most difficult one today in the ecumenical dialogue, particularly between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. 7 This was seconded in 1997 by the prominent Orthodox theologian, Metropolitan John Zizioulas, who acknowledged that the most important and at the same time the most difficult problem in the Roman Catholic-Orthodox relations is undoubtedly that of papal primacy. 8 Later that year, the prominent Ukrainian Orthodox hierarch, Bishop Vsevolod Majdansky wrote that the most important difficulty between the Catholics and the Orthodox is the question of the basis, the significance, and the practical exercise of the universal primacy of the Bishop of Rome. 9
From the time of the Second Vatican Council, then, until the close of the twentieth century, there was an emerging consensus on the key issue about which Catholics and Orthodox disagree. This consensus is perhaps seen most clearly in the fact that the JIC, established officially in 1979, issued its first agreed statement in 1982 on eucharistic ecclesiology but quickly realized that primacy and especially papal primacy were the most significant issues. 10 These issues were placed at the top of its agenda for several years before the JIC was sidetracked by the Uniate problem (that is, by the re-emergence of the long-suppressed Eastern Catholic Churches, especially in Ukraine and Romania, where they had been forced into the underground by a collusion of Communist politicians and Orthodox hierarchs, each acting for different mot