Christian unity: No Pope, no hope.

I concluded my first article (CI, Dec. '99, pp. 11-13) by noting that Catholicism accepts and then goes beyond the Orthodox and Protestant interpretations of Peter's confession of faith, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God," and Christ's reply, "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church" (Mt. 16.16,18). But how can the Orthodox and Protestants now be brought to recognize the full extent of Peter's prerogative and its continuation in the Church, namely, that "communion of the particular Churches with the Church of Rome, and of their bishops with the bishop of Rome, is--in God's plan--an essential requisite of full and visible communion" (John Paul II, Ut unum sint, No. 97)?

There are two avenues open to a fruitful dialogue between Catholics and their fellow Christians on this topic. The first is to draw attention to what has already been achieved; the second, to exhibit the role of the papacy in a way that will lead the Orthodox and Protestants to recognize it as an essential feature of their understanding of the Church.

Orthodoxy

Let us begin with Orthodoxy. The word itself is susceptible of several meanings, each of which is relevant to our topic. The root meaning of orthodoxy is "right doctrine," and in that sense every Christian would want to claim it as his own.

Secondly, it has come to designate Christians in the liturgical, theological, and spiritual tradition known as "the Greek Church," including under that umbrella heading not only Greeks but also Serbians, Ukrainians, Russians, and so forth; in short, most of those Christian groups that have their origins, directly or indirectly, in the Eastern Mediterranean. Thirdly, in its most specific use "Orthodox" designates Christians whose bishop is in union with the Bishop of Constantinople (Istanbul), just as "Catholic" identifies Christians whose bishop is in union with the Bishop of Rome.

What is not always adverted to is the fact that one can be Orthodox in the second sense and simultaneously be Catholic; i.e., a Christian can follow fully the belief and practice of "the Greek Church" and still be under a bishop who is in communion with Rome, not Constantinople (cf. Ut unum sint, No. 60). Ukrainian Catholics, for example, the largest such group, can rightly claim to be Orthodox in the sense of being completely in the Eastern, the "Orthodox" tradition. Such Christians, and there are many of them, have somewhat derisively been labeled "Uniates," but their existence is a demonstration that Catholicism and Orthodoxy are not essentially incompatible. The Catholic Church is in fact the only Church that contains within itself Christians of East and West, honouring both traditions as complementary, not contradictory.

Thus as a Catholic, I can claim as my own not only all the forms of Christianity that were united in the universal, "Catholic" Church before the split between Constantinople and Rome in A.D. 1054, but also the Eastern Tradition as it has continued since. In other words, Catholicism is actually, in the here and now, a striking instance of ecumenical success. In reply to those Orthodox who deny the Catholic understanding of the papacy, we can point to millions of their co-religionists who have accepted it without abandoning Orthodoxy.

Of course, such arguments have no effect on the mass of Eastern Christians. There is a contempt for the West among them that hearkens back to, among other things, the brutal sack and subjugation of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in A.D. 1204 and the subsequent occupation of the city by Latins (West Europeans). Such memories, we must pray, will be healed with time. Theologically, however, the defence of the papacy can develop beyond simple statement and counter-statement: we claiming it as a legitimate development, they seeing it as a corruption. What is available is a demonstration that the papacy, as it is exercised today, is a vital and essential element of the early Church that has been lost in Orthodoxy but preserved in Catholicism. That demonstration is at hand in a consideration of the active magisterium; i.e., the solemn teaching authority of the Church.

An active magisterium

Throughout the first seven centuries of its existence, the Church exhibited an exhilarating confidence in its preaching, its worship, and its institutional life. Especially in the East, among Greek- and Syriac-speaking Christians and under the leadership of its bishops, the Church presented the Gospel to the Graeco-Roman world in a form it could understand and accept. New forms of worship developed, theology flourished, and daring novelties such as monasticism were launched.

The Church was alive. In their variety and number, such experiments required control and discrimination, and it fell to the bishops to direct the exuberant energy everywhere in evidence. Their task was to test and exhort, suppressing what was unsuitable and fostering what was legitimate. Still today the very names of these Fathers of the Church--Basil, Gregory, Cyril, Ambrose, Augustine, Athanasius... --remind both Catholics and Orthodox of those exhilarating times. As bishops they governed their dioceses, gathering in regional synods or universal councils when larger questions about doctrine or discipline arose. We still honour the first of these general councils when we recite the Nicene creed. It is thus apparent that an essential characteristic of the early Church was an active magisterium by means of which the local and universal Church spoke to the world, preserving intact the deposit of faith and the Christian way of life.

Eastern Orthodoxy 

It is this characteristic of the early Church that Orthodoxy has lost because it lacks an effective centre of unity. The bishops teach, of course, but piecemeal. Divided among themselves by what are often acrimonious national rivalries, they are limited to repeating what has been said and done in the past. The liturgy, the rules of fasting, the formulation of doctrines, moral teachings: all these are frozen in the form they assumed during the days of Basil and Gregory.

But truly to be the Church of the Fathers is to have the confidence that the Church today remains under the direction of the Holy Spirit and so is empowered to continue the sort of development that so enriched the primitive Church as it moved from the confines of Judaism into the wide world. In other words, Christianity needs its bishops to proclaim the Gospel to a new culture, the one which we live in and which, like that of the Greeks and Romans, contains good things to be honoured and evils to be corrected. This feature of the Church, which assures its members that they are in continuity with the Church of the Apostles and the first Christian centuries, is largely lacking in Orthodoxy.

The consequence is a paralysis that prevents; e.g., adaptation of extremely rigorous laws of fasting to the demands of modern life or, in a non-religious matter, the change to an accurate calendar. (The Orthodox still use a faulty one that dates back to Julius Caesar, with the result that the seasons of the year are gradually shifting. Christmas, currently well into January, is still advancing. Their great-great-grandchildren may end up celebrating it in June.)

Today it is only in Catholicism that an active magisterium continues in full operation. Properly exercised, the role of the papacy should attract the favourable attention of the Orthodox church as the vehicle by which the Holy Spirit can bring the Good News to modern man as to the people of the past.

Luther, Calvin, et al.

A thousand years of shared history is a strong basis for unity between East and West as differences of the past are re-examined and resolved. There seems to be, however, no hope of finding common ground between the Catholic and Protestant understandings of the Church. The Reformers, following the slogan "the Bible alone," insisted that "general councils can and have erred"; i.e., that the magisterium is not the divinely appointed guardian of authentic Christian teaching. This attitude seems to represent an impasse. The solution to this difficulty, to be effective, must come from what is common to the Catholic and Protestant understanding of Gospel truth.

Let us examine two characteristics of Protestantism: the individual's responsibility to accept and act upon God's word; and the need to reform in the light of God's word what is wrong or outdated. With regard to the first of these, individualism, we note that it can sometimes mean nothing more than the truism that only I can decide for myself: whatever the evidence for the Gospel, whatever the conclusion I draw about it, obviously only I can say yes or no to God. The scandal of Protestantism is not, therefore, in safe-guarding the necessity of an individual commitment to Christ; the scandal lies in the radical religious disagreements that have arisen and continue to arise among these individuals, each of whom claims to be guided by one and the same Holy Spirit. What is needed is a test by which the individual can avoid deluding himself into thinking that he is the sole judge of Gospel truth: "Test the spirits to see whether they are of God" (1 Jn 4.1).

Protestants half-acknowledge this need by grouping themselves into denominations. Ecumenical dialogue, too, by striving for external unity, has come to a recognition of the need for a centre of that unity, even on occasion grudgingly granting a role of some sort to the papacy in achieving it. It is this quest for Christian unity that the testing of spirits mentioned by Saint John comes in. The individual must test his ideas against the faith which comes to us from the Apostles, which has been expressed in Scripture, and which has been and continues to be articulated by the teaching Church. The role of the bishops and the pope, therefore, can be expressed in terms that preserve the supremacy of Scripture and honour the individual's allegiance to it but that, at the same time, avoid the scandal of discord.

The second element of Protestantism, the need for continuing reform, can be briefly dealt with. That the episcopacy and the papacy can function as instruments of reform and renewal in the Church has been relatively recently demonstrated by the Second Vatican Council. The point is that the important work of renewal requires not simply the prophetic voice of the reformer but also the guidance of the magisterium, to test the spirit of renewal, certainly, but also to assure continuity with the past and to place the apostolic seal on the new ways. Thus is the anarchy of Protestantism averted, and thus is the visible unity of the Church preserved.

An excellent statement of the ecumenical role of the papacy is the Holy Father's Ut unum sint (1995), his encyclical on Church unity, in which he carefully distinguishes the necessary role of Peter and his successors in the Church, expressing at the same time a willingness to remove from its exercise secondary features that have raised suspicion among non-Catholics.

Fr. Daniel Callam, a priest of the Congregation of St. Basil (C.S.B.), is head of the department of theology, University of Saint Thomas, Houston, Texas.