The Shepherd, August 2009
III. We are not Anti-Roman Catholic in our opposition to Papism and Vatican Policies
That our opposition to Papism and Vatican policies is not born of backwater anti-Catholic bigotry is evident in what we have said about religious toleration. Moreover, we have a common heritage with Rome—and, by extension, later with its Protestant scions—in the early Church. The Orthodox Church, to quote one encyclopedic source, “stands in historical continuity with the communities created by the apostles of Jesus.”12 As members of “Christendom’s oldest church,”13 in the words of another standard source book, we Orthodox resisters are acutely aware of our roots in the undivided Church, in a Christianity which knew no Papacy and which knew no Vatican, and of our responsibility, as the continuators of that Church, to preserve the principles and traditions handed down to us as the only paths to Christian unity.
A. Papism. It follows, therefore, that what we have said about the threats of ecumenism to the integrity of the Faith which we guard and preserve also applies to the Papacy, which introduced into the body of Christian doctrine, from an Orthodox perspective, the false claim that Christ built his Church on the person of St. Peter, and not on his confession of Christ’s Divinity, as well as the many heresies which this innovation spawned (Papal infallibility, the Immaculate Conception, etc.), thus cutting itself off from the Orthodox Church. As the late Czech Protestant theologian and veteran ecumenist, Joseph Hromádka, avers,
[i]n the judgment of Eastern Christians, ...the Roman Catholic Church...separated herself—way back in ancient times—from the one Apostolic Church. It was the Bishops of Rome that had set themselves against the mystical fellowship of faith, and followed their particular interests and designs.14
It would behoove the Orthodox ecumenists, in their dialogues with the Vatican, to be open and honest and to acknowledge anti-Papism, not only as a fundamental element of Orthodox ecclesiology, but as one of the chief psychological motives behind the tragic schism between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. It is inarguably, after all, the primary source of the theological differences separating Rome from Orthodoxy.
It is also inarguably the case that the “interests and designs” of the Papacy, and especially with the rise of the Papal Monarchy in the Middle Ages, brought much suffering on the Orthodox world (the Fourth Crusade and the conquest of Constantinople by Latin Crusaders in 1204, which Sir Steven Runciman describes as “one of the most ghastly and tragic incidents in history,”15 being but one instance that we might cite). While, much to his credit, the late Pope John Paul II apologized for these and other assaults and outrages against the Orthodox, and while we Orthodox—though never to such a degree as in the instance cited— have at times also treated Roman Catholic populations within our dominions improperly, and owe apologies for such lapses, one cannot simply dismiss as mere bigotry the historical sensitivities of Orthodox Christians and the rôle of those sensitivities in reinforcing our opposition to Papism.
The Orthodox East has always harbored, furthermore, serious misgivings about the specifically theological consequences of Papism. The Blessed Archimandrite Justin (Popovic) argues that the Papacy “replace[s] the God-Man [Jesus Christ] with an infallible man,” thereby elevating the Bishop of Rome to a status “greater than [that of] the holy Apostles, the holy Fathers, and the Œcumenical Synods.”16 In a similar vein, the well-known Russian writer A. Khomiakov observes that, for the Orthodox Church, “[t]he grace of faith is not to be separated from the holiness of life, nor can any single community or any single pastor be acknowledged to be the custodian of the whole faith of the Church.”17 Such misgivings have been expressed, too, in the theological polemics of the Orthodox Church. In reaction to the installation of a Latin Patriarch in Constantinople, after the city’s conquest by the Crusaders, an anonymous Byzantine author wrote, “The more we separate ourselves from the Pope, the closer we draw to the most blessed Peter and to God Himself.”18
When we resisters express our opposition to the Papacy, then, we embrace a long-established tradition in the Orthodox Church, which views Papism as antithetical to the structure of the Church established by Christ, a deviation from the consensus of the Church Fathers, and a source for the introduction of false doctrine, or heresy, into the body of Christian Truth. This does not constitute an assault against Roman Catholicism or an expression of religious bigotry. Indeed, even in its polemical characterizations of the Pope—as the Antichrist and the source of evil and discord within the Christian world, to quote such Orthodox luminaries as St. Kosmas Aitolos and the celebrated contemporary Elder, Archimandrite Philotheos (Zervakos)—the Orthodox Church does not ignore the good intentions and often fine character (notwithstanding many historical examples to the contrary) of some who have occupied the Papal See. It focuses, rather, on the anti-Christian spirit of human “infallibility” and, once more, on the demonic and diabolical consequences that fall upon the Church when its faithful are called to pay heed to anyone but Christ Himself and to recognize any authority outside the unity in Christ which defines the Orthodox Church.
|
