Primacy & Conciliarity
Addison H. Hart on Orientale Lumen V
“Who do you think that the ancient lady was from whom you received the little book?” . . . “Who is she, then?” I said. “The Church,” he said. . . . “She was created the first of all things. For this reason is she old; and for her sake was the world established.”
[The ancient lady] said to me: “Behold, do you not see before you a great tower being built on the water with shining square stones? . . . The tower which you see being built is myself, the Church . . . [T]he building of the tower shall be completed, and all shall rejoice together around the tower, and shall glorify God because the building of the tower has been completed.”
—The Shepherd of Hermas, Vis. II,iv,1; Vis. III,ii,4; Vis. III,iii,3; Vis. III,iv,2; written circa A.D. 150
It was this twofold vision of the Church, venerable for its being only barely sub-apostolic, to which Bishop Kallistos Ware of Diokleia pointed those present for the first evening’s gathering at the fifth Orientale Lumen Conference in Washington, D.C. The annual conference met once again at the Catholic University of America (CUA) in June, to reflect on the theme of “Primacy and Conciliarity: Finding a Common Vision.” The theme had been proposed by Archbishop Vsevolod of Scopelos, presiding hierarch of the Western Diocese of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA, and one of the main speakers at the event. Jointly co-sponsored by the Society of St. John Chrysostom, Eastern Christian Publications, and CUA’s School of Religious Studies, the Orientale Lumen Conferences, named for Pope John Paul’s 1995 Apostolic Letter, have engaged stimulating topics at the previous four gatherings, but none so important and challenging as this year’s theme.
It was to an auditorium filled with Orthodox, Eastern Catholics, Roman Catholics, and a sprinkling of Anglicans and others, then, that Bishop Kallistos held up the two visions of the Church found in The Shepherd of Hermas, suggesting that (in the words of the late Georges Florovsky) “the doctrine of the Church is still in process of development.” The Church imaged as an ancient woman (who, incidentally, grows younger in The Shepherd) is the “first of all things,” for whom “the world was established.” The Church pictured as an uncompleted tower implies that it is something ever new and not capable of being comprehended by time-bound human thought. Together these images indicate that the Church as we find it existentially combines Tradition and living experience, the past and the present, but that her self-understanding is as yet an uncompleted task. Bishop Kallistos interprets Pope John Paul II as saying something very similar in Ut Unum Sint.
This admirable approach to such a potentially touchy theme set the proper spiritual tone for the remainder of the conference. Given the nature of the topic—the seemingly impregnable barrier between Catholicism and Orthodoxy—and considering that such a conference is not intended to entertain or merely to stimulate the intellect, I believe that a number of significant contributions were made towards reintegrating unnecessarily separated Orthodox and Catholic ecclesiologies. I would like cursorily to offer only a handful of these, regretting that I must thereby do a disservice both to the more profound aspects of these insights and to those many others not mentioned here at all.
I will cluster insights from the various speakers under two headings: (1) The Nature of Primacy in the Context of Conciliarity, and (2) The Identity and Role of the Byzantine Catholic Churches.
The Nature of Primacy
This, of course, was the main theme of the conference, the real bone of contention between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Or, to put the matter differently: What about the papacy? Taking Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger at their word, that the dialogue on the role of the bishop of Rome needs to be opened and the issue discussed, what indeed would a universal papal primacy look like in a reunited Church, and how would it exercise its authority within an authentic collegial context?
The retired Catholic archbishop of San Francisco, John Quinn, picking up on themes addressed in his book, The Reform of the Papacy, noted the grave and intractable obstacle for the Orthodox of Vatican I’s seemingly maximalist definition of papal primacy as one of universal jurisdiction and infallibility. Archbishop Quinn, though, does not regard this as an insuperable difficulty, and he pointed out that a close reading of the Acts of Vatican I does not in fact support a maximalist doctrine of papal primacy, but one clearly set within the context of episcopal collegiality. “Primacy” can be exercised in a variety of ways, not simply or necessarily “jurisdictionally,” and it could be exercised by the Petrine Office in Rome in a way that would not undercut the synodal process—a mode of exercising primacy similar to that which we see operative in the first millennium of the church’s history. The real problem lies with how papal primacy has been exercised in the last thousand years, and it is in the exercising of that, and not in the concept of primacy itself, that one can appreciate the well-grounded fear of the Orthodox where any discussion of rapprochement with Rome is concerned. The history of the Eastern Catholic Churches (e.g., the Latinizing of faith and practice, the suppression of such ancient traditions as the married priesthood in some locales through Latin Church interference, and so on) provides cause for concern to the Orthodox that reunion would entail absorption by Rome and a disregard for the great Eastern Tradition, rather than a restoration of true conciliarity and primacy. The Orthodox would insist on their own traditional autonomy and reject a juridical authority over the whole Church by Rome.
Archdeacon Lawrence Cross of Melbourne, Australia, a Russian Catholic, noted that, without the balancing presence of the East, the West had come to understand universality as uniformity. On the other hand, without the balancing presence of the West, the East regarded its local churches as separate from each other, on their own, even when obvious needs should have led them to mutual assistance and regard. Primacy, Cross said, is a charism, not human government, not universal jurisdiction, and not a juridical power over the Churches of Christ (this latter, he added, being a concept impossible to “baptize” even after two millennia). Citing the nuanced understanding of papal primacy of the late Demetrios I, patriarch of Constantinople, Cross described it as a “service, an office of charity, resting on God’s grace.” Demetrios had stressed the authentic conciliar context of primacy with his memorable comment, made in 1983, that “bishop explains pope, and pope expresses bishop with greater force.”
Addison H. Hart is retired from active ministry as parish priest and university chaplain. He is the author of Knowing Darkness: On Skepticism, Melancholy, Friendship, and God and The Yoke of Jesus: A School for the Soul in Solitude (both from Eerdmans). His forthcoming book is a study of the Sermon on the Mount. He lives and writes in Norheimsund, Norway.
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