Differences between Catholics and Orthodox.

In any dispute with the Orthodox, Catholics are at a disadvantage. We regard them as schismatics--i.e., the break between the Eastern and Western branches of Christianity in A.D. 1054 was more cultural and political than doctrinal--while they call us heretics--i.e., as preaching false doctrine. One immediate consequence of these different views is the presence in Catholicism of various groups of Eastern Christians, Ukrainian Catholics being the largest, which are recognized as authentically Catholic without any alteration required in their traditional liturgies, doctrines, and piety. But obviously there can be no counterpart in the Orthodox Church; that is, no Latin Christians whose bishops are in communion with the Patriarch of Constantinople instead of the Pope: to accept Orthodoxy is to abjure the "heresy" of Catholicism.

A further consequence is that the differences between the two Churches are magnified by the Greeks, but downplayed by us. They present our teaching on Original Sin, for example, as falsifying both the fall of man and redemption. For the Orthodox, Adam's sin introduced death into the world and with it, but subsequently, sin: anger, wrath, lust, greed.... Hence there is in man no inherited guilt (an idea they claim was invented by St. Augustine) because of which even an infant needs baptism. Since they see the two positions as incompatible, one must be right and the other wrong. Given their assurance that the Bible and Tradition are on their side, it follows that Catholics are wrong. And we have no easy riposte because we accept the theology of the Orthodox Church as complementary to our own.

That is why we look for ways of reconciling the two approaches. Consider our theology of Original Sin. Since no "sin" has been committed by the infant, he bears no personal guilt. The phrase is therefore shorthand for the fact that, because of Adam's sin, the whole human race is alienated from God: "it is a sin 'contracted' and not committed'--a state and not an act" (Catechism, paragraph 404). And so for us the two views are merely two sides of the same coin. In similar fashion, one could go through the extensive list of Orthodox objections to Catholicism and show that even long-standing disputes about the Trinity or the role of the papacy are susceptible to harmonization, but only on condition that one wants them to be reconciled.

Rather than examine the catalogue of Orthodoxy's grievances against Rome, I intend to account for the tragic break between the ancient churches of East and West historically.

Preliminary insight

The preliminary insight required is that, in revealing Him self to man, God spoke at a particular time and place to a people with a unique cultural identity. Their language was Hebrew, and their culture moved from patriarchy through tribe and kingdom to end in subservience to foreign rule and diaspora. This history, as recorded in the Old Testament, formed the inheritance of the Apostolic Church, which recognized itself as the continuation and fulfillment of what God had begun in "our father Abraham." Saint Paul, for example, could write to the Christian Galatians: "Peace and mercy be upon all who walk by this rule, upon the Israel of God" (6:16). The first disciples were all Jews, but they formed a sector of Judaism that differed from their compatriots in the conviction that in Jesus the long-awaited Messiah had come.

The advent of the messianic age was the signal for the universal mission of Israel to be realized, as the prophets had foretold: "All the nations shall say, 'Come, let us go up ... to the house of the God of Jacob'" (Is. 2:2-3). The "nations" that first received the Gospel dwelt in the Graeco-Roman world around the Mediterranean basin. The hyphenated adjective indicates that there were two pagan cultures which the early Church encountered, with the confidence that it could appropriate whatever was good and reject what was evil, and so reexpress the apostolic proclamation in new cultural modes. But even then, as later, there were Christians who believed that adaptation was a corruption. Their conviction was that Jewish culture, as initially chosen and formed by God Himself, was, in its entirety, necessary for all believers. The decision of the apostolic Church to honour its Jewish inheritance but not to reproduce it had far-reaching results, one of which was the rejection of Christianity by most of the Jews. It should be noted, however, that the Semitic form of Christianity continued--and continues--in the Christian communities that moved east from Syria into modern Iraq and Iran.

Ancient Greece and Rome

That there were two pagan cultures in the Mediterranean world the Apostles entered is discernible even today in the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. Consider the achievements we admire most in ancient Greece: poetry, philosophy, architecture, mathematics, drama. These arts and sciences were brought to Christ in homage, like gifts of new magi, and are still discernible in the Greek Church with its elaborate liturgy, beautiful artwork, noble architecture, and subtle theology. The movement of Christianity into a Greek mode led to the great doctrinal disputes of the early Church, all of which took place in the East. The first seven General Councils, which, significantly, are the only ones recognized by the Orthodox, expressed and confirmed Christian teaching about the Trinity and the person of Christ.

Where the Greeks were intellectual, the Romans were practical. Their genius lay in law, in engineering, in the military and in governance. The last of these was of particular importance for the future. Rome's ability to govern a vast empire has its modern counterpart in the remarkable unity which the See of Rome effects in Catholicism. In the early Church--the patristic era--these differences were recognized for what they were: two cultural forms which Christianity had appropriated (three, if we include Syria). It is worth noting, however, that during the first three or four centuries Latin-speaking Christians had little influence outside of Roman Africa because Greek was the universal language of the Empire, even among Christians in Rome. In any case, contemporary Orthodox and Catholics, unlike Protestants, recognize the success of this great work of inculturation which took place in the first six or seven centuries of the Christian era. In it, the Greeks led the way by daring doctrinal and liturgical innov ations, which were deeply marked by the development of trinitarian theology. The Latins, while accepting these developments, in the Nicene Creed, for example, were less adventurous and so kept closer to their Jewish roots in worship and doctrine. The ancient Roman Eucharistic Prayer--canon 1--in its original form, for example, had no invocation of the Spirit to effect consecration of the bread and wine, unlike the Greek canons which incorporated theological disputes about the Trinity into their liturgies.

Roman Empire is divided

The founding of the city of Constantinople (modern Istanbul) in A.D. 330 to be the "second Rome" began a cultural and political division of the Roman Empire that would eventually separate the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. After that date there were effectively two Roman Empires. Their differences have contributed to the distrust and suspicion that have kept the Churches apart, but another historical fact made such a break almost inevitable: the Western Empire ended under barbarian attack in the year A.D. 476, while the Eastern Empire continued until A.D. 1453 when Constantinople fell to the Moslems.

Because the Eastern Empire, and with it the Greek Church, continued almost 1,000 years after A.D. 476, it avoided the chaos the Latin West experienced. Another significant difference is that the barbarians who overran Europe were susceptible to conversion to Christianity as Moslems were not. Hence--and this is the crucial point--the Church was able to create a new and thoroughly Christian society in Europe during the Middle Ages. In this development, which represents a third reexpression of Christianity, coming after the biblical and patristic eras, the highly centralized ideal of ancient Rome was translated into the Catholic Church unified by the communion of its bishops with the bishop of Rome, the pope.

Needless to say, both Protestants and Orthodox reject the legitimacy of this third stage of inculturation, Protestants because of their exclusive allegiance to the biblical form of Christianity, and the Orthodox because their Tradition had solidified long before. Furthermore, the Church of the East never accepted or even knew Latin Christianity, mediaeval or patristic. In effect, the Orthodox Church recognizes as legitimate only its own cultural mold, an exclusivity that accounts to some extent for the breaks between the Church of Constantinople and, successively, the Churches of Syria (A.D. 431), Egypt

(A.D. 451) and Rome (A.D. 1054).

External differences

This historical sketch accounts for many of the striking differences between contemporary Christianity and the patristic era. Then it was the Greeks who were innovative and the Latins who were conservative, but today these roles are reversed. This alteration came about because Catholics had to repeat in Europe what the Church had accomplished among the ancient Greeks and Romans. Our history of adaptation has given Catholicism an openness to all sorts of cultures. Not so Orthodoxy: an Orthodox church building in Mexico City is pretty well identical to one in Greece or Japan, for in the cultural encounter, the contemporary must always surrender to the Greek. Catholicism, on the other hand, has what it needs to speak to our contemporaries in their own idiom, as the Fathers of the Church did to theirs in the early centuries.

One principle of this bold, and risky, approach to inculturation is the Church's confidence in its power to discriminate between what is compatible with Christianity and what is not. A second element that allows Catholicism "to change in order to remain the same" (to use a phrase from the Venerable John Henry Newman) is the papacy. Without an effective centre, Orthodoxy has disintegrated into a loose bundle of national churches, powerless to assemble and therefore unable to reformulate the smallest detail of doctrine or practice. Catholicism, on the other hand, recognizing that we live in a new age as different from the Middle Ages as they were from the early Church, is able to act so as to reexpress the traditional faith for our democratic, scientific and technological society.

The principal agent of this restatement was Vatican II (1962-1965) which was summoned by Pope John XXIII (1958-1963). And so the papacy is the means by which the Church as a whole is activated to meet the challenges of the modern age. Our society, like all others, needs to hear the Gospel in contemporary terms, but without the surrender of any of the achievements of the preceding three eras of Catholicism: the biblical which is normative for all time; the patristic which gave us our liturgies, creeds and monastic spirituality; and the mediaeval which by inventing the university produced the ordered and comprehensive statement of Christian belief known as scholasticism.

The differences between Orthodox and Catholic, then, are essentially historical. The Greek Church maintains a sort of unity among its national groupings by a common allegiance to a fixed, otherworldly form of worship, an antique canon law, and a monastic -- i.e., again, otherworldly -- spirituality. An alteration in any one of these, even the adoption of an accurate calendar, would break communion among the Churches. Plans for a Council of all the Orthodox Churches have been in the works for decades, but without result. In his "Postscript" to John Meyendorff's The Orthodox Church (4th edition [St. Vladimir's Press, Crestwood, 1996], p. 237), for example, Nicholas Lossky writes: "With respect to the actual convocation of the [pan-Orthodox] Council, Metropolitan Damaskinos (Papandreou), in charge of its preparation, said, in September 1993, that the Council would convene before the year 2000." What has gone wrong?

The main reason for not actually holding such a Council remains the national rivalries which have disfigured the Orthodox Churches; witness the recent rupture between the Patriarchs of Moscow and Constantinople. Another weakness of the nationalism of these Churches shows itself in their subservience to the state. Even under atheistic Communism, the Russian Orthodox Church was directed by the government and co-operated; e.g., in the brutal repression of Ukrainian Catholicism. The contrast with Catholic Poland is striking. In the independence, strength, and courage of the Catholic Church we see the modern fruit of the struggles between emperors and popes throughout the Middle Ages. Whatever the individual outcome for one or the other, the principle of an allegiance more fundamental than patriotism was established in Catholicism, to the distress and displeasure of tyrants and modem democrats alike.

Reunion

Reviewing what I have written, I see that I have left my reader in something of a quandary. Is reunion with the Orthodox likely, possible or even desirable? In some ways, from our side, it is at least two of the three. As the Holy Father has repeatedly made clear, liturgically, doctrinally, historically our Churches are close. Besides, after the break of A.D. 1054, two--admittedly short-lived--reunions have been effected, at the Councils of Lyons (A.D. 1274) and Florence (A.D. 1431-1445). That the Orthodox Church subsequently repudiated these Councils does not erase the fact that twice Orthodox and Catholic bishops have arrived at formulations of doctrine that were acceptable to both sides. A good indication of the difference between the Orthodox and Catholics is our listing Lyons and Florence among the General Councils. They are therefore as binding on us as the Councils of Nicaea and Trent. The actual presence in the Catholic Church of many groups (rites) of the Eastern Churches is another indication that the separation of the Churches is not inevitable. Reunion is therefore both possible and desirable.

I fear, however, that it is not likely. There is a deep-grained dislike, which at times has descended into something like hatred, for Catholics on the part of the Orthodox. A heavy reliance on Tradition has kept alive the still-smoldering resentment arising from events such as the brutal sack of Constantinople in A.D. 1204 by the Latin armies of the fourth Crusade. An ineradicable sense of superiority, coupled with a contempt for what are perceived as doctrinal and liturgical corruptions, means that the Orthodox look upon any accommodation to Catholicism as synonymous with betrayal. Perhaps, too, the not insignificant number of Protestant, and Catholic, converts to Orthodoxy who want a traditional form of Christianity without an active papal or episcopal Magisterium illustrates the widening gap between us.

Finally it must be said that Orthodoxy's otherworldly liturgy and monastic spirituality have led to a neglect of the here and now that shows itself in moral compromise at the individual as well as the political level. Not only has the Orthodox Church departed from the Gospel and the early Church by allowing remarriage after divorce, but also it has begun to alter its teaching on contraception. In the first edition of The Orthodox Church (London: Penguin, 1963), Timothy Ware (now Bishop Kallistos Ware) wrote, "Artificial methods of birth control are forbidden in the Orthodox Church." The revised edition (1980) reads:

The use of contraceptives and other devices for birth control is on the whole strongly discouraged in the Orthodox Church. Some bishops and theologians altogether condemn the employment of such methods. Others, however, have recently begun to adopt a less strict position, and urge that the question is best left to the discretion of each individual couple, in consultation with the spiritual father (p. 302).

Similarly, Thomas P. Hopko in volume 2 of The Orthodox Faith (New York: OCA, 1976) exhibits a softening of the Orthodox position on abortion with a statement whose muddled logic opens the path to abortion on demand:

Abortion cannot be justified in any way, except perhaps with the greatest moral risk and with most serious penitence in most extreme cases as that of irreparable damage to the mother or her probable death in the act of childbirth (Quoted in Ecumenism, no. 84, December 1986, 29).

There is more to Church union than mutually agreed-upon doctrinal statements. Overall, my conviction is that reunion between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches is impossible in the foreseeable future. But the openness of John Paul II to the East rebukes my pessimism, and so, docile to his leadership, I too dare to hope.

Fr. Daniel Callam of the Congregation of St. Basil (C.S.B.), is Associate Professor of Theology, University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas.