The Shepherd, August 2009
B. The Vatican. With regard to our resistance to Vatican policy, there are many who, in this age of ecumenism, would argue that our negative stance fails to acknowledge the ecumenical outreach of Rome, which has fostered good relations with the Orthodox Church by recasting the prerogatives of the Papacy in more conciliar language. To these would-be critics, we would respond with the words of Pope John Paul II, who on May 25, 1995, in his encyclical “Ut Unum Sint” (That They Might Be One), affirmed the rôle of the Pope as the “visible sign and guarantor” of Christian unity—and this in a document issued by the Vatican as a statement of its continued commitment to ecumenism and the ecumenical movement!
It is likewise often said that the Vatican, in its ecumenical outreach, has discarded the claims of Roman Catholicism to an ecclesiastical primacy in Christianity, approaching the Orthodox, as we see in the aforementioned document, “Ut Unum Sint,” as a “Sister Church” or as “one lung” of the “two lungs of Christianity.”19 Nonetheless, the ecclesiological definitions set forth in the Second Vatican Council’s decree on the nature of the Church, “Lumen Gentium” (A Light for the Nations)—upheld and ratified by every Pope in the four decades since the close of that council—affirm that the Roman Catholic Church is the “one holy catholic and apostolic Church founded by Jesus Christ” and that “the sole Church of Christ which in the Creed we profess to be one, holy, catholic and apostolic” is found concretely and solely “in the [Roman] Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him.”
It is with some justification, therefore, that we Orthodox critics of the ecumenical movement have accused the Vatican of disingenuousness and hypocrisy in its ecumenical overtures. At the same time that we are condemned as virtual bigots and ecclesiastical exclusivists for upholding the primacy of the Orthodox Church (and with no mean historical arguments to support our case), the Vatican at one and the same time supports the ecclesiological syncretism of the ecumenical movement and maintains that the Papacy is the source of Christian unity and that the Roman Catholic Church is the one Church. It, along with the World Council of
Churches, has also endorsed labels such as “official” and “uncanonical” in differentiating, respectively, those Orthodox who support and participate in the ecumenical movement from us Orthodox resisters: a distinction wholly foreign to the ecclesiological life of the Christian East, where “officialdom” is considered spiritually deadly to the Faith and where canonicity rests on adherence to the canonical directives that dictate the observance of Church traditions and the ascent to holiness.
It is, in the final analysis, obvious to any objective observer, whether he agrees or disagrees with our position, that the opposition of us Orthodox resisters to Papism and Vatican Policy is based on firm historical precedents and on theological and ecclesiological principles of long-standing importance, dating back to the age of an undivided Christianity. We moderate Orthodox resisters, moreover, are by no means motivated by bigotry or prejudice against Roman Catholicism; instead, it would seem, the characterizations and assessments of our efforts by our detractors in the ecumenical movement and in the Vatican leave them open to accusations of unfairness and harshness, if not hypocrisy and holding to a double standard.
IV. Old Calendarism Is Not a Mark of Orthodox Troglodytism
It is well known that the Holy Synod in Resistance adheres to the Church Calendar (the so-called Old Calendar); that is, to the Paschalion (or date of “Easter,” or in Orthodox nomenclature, “Pascha”) established by the Œcumenical Synod of Nicaea, in 325, and to a festal cycle determined by the Julian Calendar. This Calendar was everywhere used by the Orthodox Church until the early twentieth century, when some local
Orthodox Churches adopted the Gregorian Calendar, originally imposed on Western Christians by Pope Gregory XIII in the Papal Bull “Inter Gravissimas” (Among the Most Serious—a title taken from the first words of the initial sentence of the Bull), issued on February 25, 1582 (Old Style). The Pope, by virtue of “the attribute of sovereign pontiff,” thus declared that October 4 of the same year would be followed immediately by October 15, omitting the ten days separating the Julian from the Gregorian Calendar (a separation which is at present one of thirteen days).
With the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar by various local Orthodox Churches—including the Church of Greece, in 1924—the unity of the faithful in their liturgical celebrations was broken. In addition, among those Churches which adopted the Western date for Pascha (the Church of Romania briefly and the Church of Finland permanently), fidelity to the dictates of the Œcumenical Synods and Canons, by which the canonicity of any Orthodox body is established, was set aside as a criterion of the Faith. As a consequence of this serious rupture with Holy Tradition and the rudimentary definitions of Orthodoxy, the Orthodox world was divided into two camps: the Orthodox innovators, who accepted the calendar reform, and the Orthodox resisters (deprecatingly called “Old Calendarists” or “Old Stylists”), who rejected the reform and who hold forth today in several national Churches (those of Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania).
Here, too, our position has been misrepresented and we have been accused of promoting separatism and of troglodytic tendencies in adhering to an antiquated and meaningless calendar—of being triskaidekemerolaters, or worshippers of the thirteen days that separate the Julian and Gregorian Calendars. Some years ago, a Jesuit ecumenical activist penned an entry for a Roman Catholic guide to world religions that serves as an egregious example of these wrongful allegations. His comments are also, interestingly enough, marked by an apparently deliberate attempt to downplay the importance of the Greek Old Calendar movement by misrepresenting both its foundational precepts and its statistical profile:
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