Clément’s Reply to Rome
You Are Peter: An Orthodox Theologian’s Reflection on the Exercise
of Papal Primacy
by Olivier Clément, translated by M. S. Laird, with a foreword by
Avery Dulles
New York: New City Press, 2003
(112 pages; $12.95, paperback)
reviewed by Anthony Dragani
One of the thorniest issues in ecumenical relations is the Catholic belief in the pope’s primacy. While Catholics believe that the papacy is a necessary and divinely mandated institution, Protestant and Orthodox Christians usually find it to be an ongoing source of division. There is a note of tragic irony in this, for Catholicism teaches that the purpose of the papacy is to safeguard and preserve the unity of Christ’s Church.
In the spring of 1995 something unexpected happened. In the encyclical Ut Unum Sint, Pope John Paul II asked other Christian leaders to engage with him in a frank dialogue on what the role of the pope should be. He expressed his own willingness “to find a way of exercising the primacy which, while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission, is nonetheless open to a new situation.” You Are Peter is Olivier Clément’s response.
Clément, who teaches in France, is one of the leading Orthodox theologians in the world today. His bestselling The Roots of Christian Mysticism is widely acknowledged as a contemporary masterpiece. This latest work is an authentically eastern and highly readable attempt to move the discussion on this issue past its current impasse.
The book’s title is an allusion to Matthew 16:18, in which Jesus tells Simon that “you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” Catholic teaching has traditionally cited this verse as proof that Christ divinely instituted the papacy. The title brings us to the heart of the controversy: Either the papacy is of supernatural origin or it is a human invention with no divine authority.
Clément tackles this question from a historical angle, by carefully examining “the history and experience of the undivided Church.” He recounts the controversies and councils, trying to determine what the historical role of the papacy actually was. It is in this analysis that he truly sets himself apart. Most Catholic and Orthodox writers tend to repeat the same polemical historical arguments for or against the papacy. Rarely does anyone say something truly original.
More than a few Catholic writers have a tendency to project the contemporary understanding of papal primacy, with its many developments, onto the undivided Church of the first millennium. Some Orthodox writers argue that the pope’s primacy, which was enshrined in the canons of the ancient councils, was simply a “primacy of honor,” with no real authority.
Clément rejects both of these readings of history. He argues that the papacy played a vital role throughout the first millennium, and that “the role of Rome, its Petrine charism, is therefore to keep watch over the communion of the local churches, to prevent them from breaking away, to intervene at the request of any one of them,” and “to serve as a point of reference to anyone seeking insertion in one of the most prestigious of the apostolic traditions.” He believes that the papacy has the potential to play such a key role in a reunited Christian Church.
Yet for this to become a reality, it is necessary for the papacy to significantly alter the way in which it currently functions, and in the later chapters Clément suggests what needs to change. He decries specific developments in the Catholic understanding of the papacy, and especially in the way that papal primacy has come to be exercised. In particular, he is disturbed by what he perceives as an unhealthy tendency to centralize all authority in Rome.
Rather than supporting the authority of the local churches, Rome has, he fears, usurped much of that authority for herself. Since the beginning of the second millennium, “while safeguarding the traditional ecclesial principle of her primacy, [Rome] has increasingly interpreted this primacy as absolute power over the Church.”
Anthony Dragani is a doctoral candidate in theology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and writes for the Eastern Churches Journal. He is a Byzantine Catholic.
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