A Glimmer from the East
Orientale Lumen II—An Orthodox Account
by Patrick Henry Reardon
The ecumenical conference Orientale Lumen II, conducted at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., during June 9–12 of this year, was the second such conference named for the Apostolic Letter published by Pope John Paul II in 1995. In it he treated of the relations of the Roman papacy to the churches of the East, not only the Orthodox Church and the Byzantine Catholic branch of the Roman obedience, but also such bodies as the Copts, Armenians, and Assyrians.
The first Orientale Lumen conference, held a year earlier, had been devoted to the evolution of papal teaching on the Eastern churches, from Leo XIII to John Paul II, and the papers of that conference were published by the Eastern Churches Journal in a volume entitled Orientale Lumen Conference 1997 Proceedings. The papers delivered at this more recent conference will be published in the same way, and plans are already being made for an Orientale Lumen III in the summer of 1999.
Sponsored by the Eastern Churches Journal and the School of Religious Studies at Catholic University, this recent conference brought together some 125 Christians, men and women, clerical and lay, from both Eastern and Western Christianity. At least half of the participants appeared to be from various jurisdictions of the Byzantine Catholic Church.
Its stated purpose was to study the implications of the 1995 papal encyclical Ut Unum Sint (“That they all may be one”), in which Pope John Paul II humbly requested all Christians to assist him in finding ways of putting his own papal office and ministry at the service of the reunion of Christians. The conference itself, conceived as an attempt to honor that request of the Holy Father, was structured on six plenary sessions, each centered around lectures by speakers enjoying special expertise in certain fields associated with ecumenism.
Orthodox Reservations
The first lecturer, Archbishop Peter (L’Hullier), of the Orthodox Church in America, elaborated some of the historical and canonical problems still to be resolved relative to the question of any individual “primacy” in the Church. It took some time, he observed, for the East to become aware that Rome was really serious in its claim of universal jurisdiction over the whole Church. No such claim had been advanced, after all, during the first millennium of Christian history. What was at first perceived in the eleventh century as a mere eccentricity of Hildebrand (Pope Gregory VII) did not pose a canonical obstacle for the Orthodox until the end of the twelfth century, nor did it much preoccupy their canonical thought until the time of the Reformation, centuries later. Unfortunately, the archbishop argued, Orthodox apologists then adopted largely Protestant arguments against the papacy (just as, he added, they not infrequently used Roman Catholic polemics against the Protestants!).
More sound, he contended, and more traditional was the earlier attitude of St. Nicholas Cabasilas, who rejected Roman claims to universal “jurisdiction” while admitting Rome’s responsibility to exercise a universal “solicitude” over the whole Church. Such a canonical distinction had been standard from the earliest centuries, according to Archbishop Peter; “jurisdiction” (exousia) was the exclusive prerogative of local bishops, while a more general “solicitude” (phrontis) was proper to the oversight of popes, patriarchs, metropolitans, and other multi-diocesan pastoral ministries.
Archbishop Peter went on to indicate problems with some standard expressions that Orthodox have adopted to speak of their own position relative to the Roman primacy. He observed, for instance, that their favorite phrase “first among equals” is a formulation “not completely coherent,” while Orthodox insistence on maintaining the traditional Pentarchy (the five ancient patriarchates established by ecumenical councils: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem) is both artificial and at odds with Orthodoxy’s own practice of the autocephaly (regional independence) of churches along national lines. In general, he concluded, the Orthodox must work harder to clarify their own thinking about primacy—to be able to tell Rome what they do mean by it, not simply what they do not mean.
Catholic Enthusiasm and Scholarship
Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).
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