Primacy Time
The Primacy of the Bishop of Rome and the Ecumenical Dialogue by Adriano Garuti, O.F.M.
edited and translated by Michael J. Miller
Ignatius Press, 2004
(370 pages, $19.95, paperback)
reviewed by ADAM A. J. DEVILLE
With The Primacy of the Bishop of Rome and the Ecumenical Dialogue, the Franciscan theologian Adriano Garuti examines the one issue universally acknowledged as the most significant stumbling block to all ecumenical progress, especially with Orthodoxy: the papacy and its claims. Garuti, who teaches ecumenical theology in Rome and since 1975 has worked for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), offers a detailed summary and analysis of the topic of the papacy in the official Orthodox-Catholic, Anglican-Catholic, and Lutheran-Catholic international dialogues, giving about a third of the book to each.
The seventeen-page bibliography and copious footnotes are themselves worth the price of the book. It does provide some analysis—this, however, is the weakest part of the book—but it should be read primarily as an ecumenically useful reference work and as such belongs on every ecumenist’s shelf. It begins with a thin introductory chapter, “The Primacy as an Ecumenical Problem,” and ends with an appendix that contains a previously published article criticizing what the writer believes is excessive use of the phrase “sister Church” in ecumenical discussions.
Insufficient Attention
In the second chapter, he presents an overview of Orthodox ecclesiology before turning to the Orthodox-Catholic dialogue, in which, he concludes, “insufficient attention has been paid . . . to the problem of the primacy of the Bishop of Rome.”
The topic of papal primacy was to have been next on the agenda of the international dialogue, but with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the re-emergence of the Eastern Catholic Churches (known pejoratively as the Uniate Churches), it nearly collapsed under the strain of the many and complex issues, long suppressed, which have poisoned Orthodox-Catholic relations in Eastern Europe, especially Ukraine, for many decades. The dialogue has not held a proper meeting since 1993.
The chapter on the Lutheran-Catholic dialogue begins with an overview of Lutheran ecclesiology before turning to the question of primacy and the papacy in the theology of Luther and Melanchthon and in the modern ecumenical dialogues. Garuti concludes once more that “on the official level, the theme of the primacy of the Bishop of Rome has not been directly addressed.” Part of the reason for this is that the dialogue—unlike the Catholic-Orthodox and even the Catholic-Anglican dialogue—is still grappling with more foundational issues such as sacraments, ordained ministry, episcopacy, and apostolic succession.
The chapter on the Catholic-Anglican dialogue is, like the dialogue itself, the most hopeful. “No other commission in all of the worldwide bilateral theological dialogue,” Garuti argues, “gave more complete and explicit attention to the questions of primacy and the papacy,” leading to that remarkable document, The Gift of Authority (1999), which presents an encomium for the papacy—at least in theory.
Some Anglicans are quite prepared to accept the papacy as a gift to the Church, but very few are prepared to accept—and in this the Anglican concern parallels the Orthodox—the Roman claim to universal jurisdiction. So, while much progress has been made, much remains to be seen.
Adam A. J. Deville is a Ph.D. student at the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute for Eastern Christian Studies at St. Paul University, Ottawa, Canada, where he is writing a thesis on Orthodoxy and the Roman papacy in response to the papal encyclical Ut Unum Sint.
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