ECUMENICALLY BENEDICTINE (Oh Ineffable Glory!!)

St. Elias...TODAY!: Russian Church Concerned Over Establishment of New...

2011-11-12T03:42:00.000-08:00

St. Elias...TODAY!: Russian Church Concerned Over Establishment of New...: SOURCE: RISU According to representatives of the Moscow Patriarchate, the recent establishment of three new metropolitanates of the Ukrai...

St. Elias...TODAY!: Interview with Ukrainian Orthodox Patriarch Filare...

2011-11-12T03:39:00.000-08:00

St. Elias...TODAY!: Interview with Ukrainian Orthodox Patriarch Filare...: By James D. Davis, Staff writer ...

2011-10-15T02:05:00.000-07:00

His Beatitude the Patriarch showing the new catechism of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church at its launch. It teaches Catholic Truth through the Liturgy. The article below is written by an Orthodox who hoped that there would be some move in the direction of Orthodoxy. This will be the subject of my next post. - David

http://orthocath.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/first-look-at-the-new-ukrainian-catholic-catechism/

Ukrainian Greek Catholic Patriarch Shevchuk introducing the new official Catechism Christ Our Pascha

In June of this year, after ten years of preparation, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) –an Eastern Catholic Church in union with the Pope of Rome– released its first official Catechism. Entitled Christ our Pascha, it received the unanimous support of all the Bishops of the Ukrainian Catholic Church and also was reviewed by the Eastern Congregation in Rome before publication. A description of the development process by the Patriarchal Catechetical Commission can be read here. Translation into other languages is proceeding, including Spanish, Russian, Portuguese and English.

There was speculation that the new Catechism might present some nuanced understandings of some of the issues that divide the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, especially with regards to the role of the papacy. However, some rough, unofficial translations of key paragraphs in the new UGCC Catechism indicate that this is not a breakthrough document that might suggest a way to resolve the doctrinal differences.

For example, here are two key paragraphs that describe the Pope:

291. Each local congregation in administering the Eucharist by its bishop and through community of faith comes into communion with the other local congregations. Local congregations being in communion form the Local Church headed by a primate – a bishop, archbishop, metropolitan or patriarch. The first among the local Churches is the Roman Church, since it has the Pope of Rome – a successor of Apostle Peter – as its primate. He is the teacher and the rule of the apostolic faith, to whom the Lord gives a gift of infallibility in the matters of faith and morals. Just as apostle Peter expressed a love to Christ that was bigger than that of the others and received a commission from Christ to tend his flock (cf. Jn 21:15-18), so the Roman Peter’s Chair “presides in love”244 and holds primacy among the local churches245. This primacy is effected through Peter’s ministry of the Roman bishops, which our Church confesses in the title “The Most Holy Universal Hierarch”.

Footnote 245 is translated below:

[Footnote]245. VATICAN II, Dogmatic Constitution about the Church Lumen Gentium, 13, see also i.d. 18: “So that the episcopate itself would be kept in unity and indivisibility, He put Saint Peter over the other apostles and established in him a continuous and visible origin and foundation for the unity of faith and communion (cf. Vatican I, Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus, (18.07.1870): Denz. 1821 (3050 w.). And this teaching about establishment, continuity, power and sense of the sacred primacy of the Roman Hierarch and about his infallible teaching is again given by the Sacred Council to all believers for their steadfast believing.”

It is important to note again that the translations provided here are unofficial. I would welcome input from those who know Ukrainian who might offer improvements in the translation. It does seem clear, however, that by citing both Pastor Aeternus from Vatican I and Lumen Gentium from Vatican II the traditional doctrines of papal infallibility and primacy taught at those Councils are being reaffirmed in the new UGCC Catechism.

A couple of paragraphs later, the Council of Florence (one of the failed “union” councils between East and West) is directly quoted to explain the Pope’s universal care of “the whole Church.”

293. Christ entrusts the ministry of Church universality to the apostle Peter: “I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have returned, strengthen your brothers.” (Lk. 22:32). The Bishop of Rome – a bearer of Peter’s ministry – convenes Ecumenical Councils, approves of their decisions, ascertains and expresses the infallible doctrines of the Church, resolves difficulties that arise in the life of local Churches. The ministry of the Roman Hierarch testifies of “the most ancient apostolic times”247. His ministry is to “strengthen the brothers” in common faith (cf. Lk. 22:31-42), be a “rock” (cf. Mt. 16:18) and a “shepherd” (cf. Jn. 21:15-18). “It is to him (the Roman Hierarch), in St. Peter, that Jesus Christ passed on the whole authority to tend, manage and take care of the whole Church, as it is established at the Ecumenical Councils and in the sacred canons”248.

247. See Dmytro Tuptalo, Lives of Saints. October 11. Remembering the 7th Ecumenical Council.

248. Council of Florence, Oros.

The union decree (available here under the date of July 6, 1439) of the Council of Florence, which was rejected by Orthodoxy as a whole, served as a basis for union of the various Eastern Catholic Churches with Rome. The Florentine decree is cited a few more times in the new UGCC Catechism: in a discussion of the procession of the Holy Spirit (paragraph 98), when discussing Purgatory (paragraph 250), and in discussing East-West unity (paragraph 306).

The new UGCC Catechism also reaffirms the teaching of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, quoting Pope Pius IX’s proclamation made in 1854:

311. The Church universally confesses that Mary, the Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, is the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin, and venerates her in the festivals of the liturgical year. In the festivals dedicated to the Theotokos the Church prayerfully commemorates the salvific events from Theotokos’s life: Conception by St. Anna 274, Christmas, Introduction to the Temple, Annunciation, Presentation and Dormition, seeing in her an example for our growing in holiness.

Footnote 274 is below:

274. The Pope of Rome Pius IX by his bull Ineffabilis Deus (December 8, 1854) proclaimed the dogma on the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary: “The Most Holy Virgin Mary from the moment of Her very conception by a special blessing and privilege from the Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was protected against any spot of the original guilt” (DS 2803; also CCC 491).

I asked about these issues in a letter to UGCC Bishop Peter Stasiuk (who was involved in the production of the new Catechism). In his reply, Bishop Peter explained that the new Catechism:

was not written as an ecumenical statement. You cannot speak of ecumenism if you do not know who you are. I suppose this is a starting point for our ecumenical dialogue with others. But at no time did we have ecumenism in mind. Our task was to explain our church as clearly as possible to our people.

The official English translation is due out in late 2012. I’m sure that further research on the new UGCC Catechism will reveal many areas of common identity between Eastern Catholics and Orthodox. A future article will go into the new Catechism in greater detail.

This initial look at the new Catechism indicates that it is solidly in the Catholic tradition and is not to be, as some had hoped, a document suggesting new approaches to issues that divide East and West.

The new UGCC Catechism was released in Ukrainian in June, 2011. Translation into other languages is in process. The English version is due out in late 2012

Patriarch Kirill strengths his position within the Orthodox Church and casts his eye towards RomeSOURCE: Vatican InsiderGiacomo GaleazziVatican city With regards to the “big freeze” between Moscow and Rome during the papacy of Polish Pope, Karol Wojtyla much of the resistance towards the Holy See, has disappeared over the past few years. Patriarch Kirill strengthens his position by reforming the Orthodox Church and looks towards Rome in the meantime. In practice, however, there is one thing standing in the way: the Ukraine. The Ukraine is the Russians’ birthplace. Russia rose from Kiev over a millennium ago, out of the Viking principality of Rus, and that is when it converted to Christianity; this is where the prototypes of its faith, art, the liturgy and monasticism are found. But the Ukraine is also home to the world’s largest Catholic Church of the Eastern Rite, with more than five million faithful. We are similar to the Orthodox faith in every aspect, in the Greco-Byzantine liturgies, in our customs and in the clergy’s right to marry. The two churches only differ in terms of showing obedience to the Pope. The Russian Orthodox faithful fear that Rome might decide to place Ukraine’s Greek Catholic Church at the head of the Patriarchate. Nothing would be more intolerable for Russian ecclesiology that a “Roman” Patriarchate that acts as a rival in a land where there is already an Orthodox Patriarchate. All the more so, if one bears in mind the existence of the Patriarchate of Moscow, which has carried the name of “third Rome” since the Sixteenth century. In sum, it all boils down to this: if Rome can show that it does not intend to raise Ukraine’s Greek Church to the Patriarchate, then a meeting between the Russian Patriarch and Benedict XVI can be arranged.

ROSARY CRUSADE PRESIDED BY Mgr NEWTON OF THE ANGLICAN ORDINARIATE.

2011-10-14T07:05:00.001-07:00

http://www.flickr.com//photos/ukordinariate/sets/72157627723751533/show/with/6224546070/

POPE BENEDICT XVI WITH METROPOLITAN HILARION

2011-10-07T09:03:00.001-07:00

2011-10-03T09:06:00.000-07:00

Brotherly Love-On the Church in Ukraine

Somehow I missed this posting from the middle of July. Better late than never:

SOURCE: Spirit of the Times, RiaNovosti

The latest meeting of the top Council of the Moscow-aligned Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) produced little tangible result, but nonetheless stirred deep passions among believers and underscored rising tensions along the spiritual frontier between Orthodox and Western Christianity.

On the eve of the Council meeting, rumors circulated that the 75-year-old head of the UOC, Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev and All Ukraine, would retire, with his ambitious young secretary Archbishop Alexander (Drabinko) of Pereyaslav-Khmelnitsky and Vishenyovoe poised to take over. In the last few days Kiev has witnessed numerous celebrations of Metropolitan Vladimir’s 45th year as a bishop, and he received a Hero of Ukraine award from President Victor Yanukovich. Metropolitan Vladimir’s personal authority has ensured that his church enjoys a good deal of independence from both the Ukrainian government and Moscow, and has helped keep the peace among various interest groups within his Church. But he is visibly frail.

The tension surrounding his successor was heightened by the fact that behind any church-related discussion in Ukraine looms the politically and emotionally loaded issue of relations with Moscow and the schism in Ukrainian Orthodoxy itself. The UOC’s decision to hold its own Council reinforced its autonomy, with Moscow church officials reportedly only finding out about the meeting on the Internet.

With Moscow or Against Moscow?

“The reason for a lot of the worry is that the majority of members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate refuse to accept the idea that they should be torn off from the Mother Russian Church,” said Archbishop Ionafan of Tulchin and Braclav. “A group of clerics and laymen within the church has been trying to push this issue for 20 years now, and people feel like they are living on a volcano.”

Finding a majority view in these church debates is tough. And rightly so, because church tradition insists that matters of principle should be decided not by a majority, but through either a revelation of the truth or by consensus.

Kiev Monastery of the Caves

But there are clearly opposing schools of thought within the Ukrainian Orthodox community on unity with Moscow. The pro-autocephalous movement, which emerged in Ukraine in the early 20th century, was reborn in the late 1980s and early 1990s and led to the appearance of two church structures which remain unrecognized by the International Orthodox Christian community: the Kiev Patriarchate and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Together, these churches account for about 4,000 parishes, or at least one quarter of all Orthodox communities in Ukraine. For Ukrainian nation builders, having their own church, which is not linked to Moscow, is one of the main symbols of national independence. Creating “a unified local Ukrainian Church” was an unfulfilled idée fixe of the former President Victor Yushchenko. As for the current President Victor Yanukovich, there were some expectations in the beginning of his term that he would favor the UOC – the Church he is a member of and with whom his Party of the Regions has extensive ties in Eastern Ukraine. But quite soon his religious policy became much more balanced.

Last but not least, the recent election of the young and well-educated Supreme Archbishop Svyatoslav (Shevchuk) as the new head of the third largest Ukrainian religious institution, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, is a major challenge to the fragmented Orthodox Christians in the country. The largest branch of Byzantine-rite Catholicism, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, considers itself to be the heir to Prince Vladimir’s Kiev baptism in 988 and has a great deal of public authority in the country.

Self-Rule and Autonomy

The UOC received the status of “self-rule with the rights of broad autonomy” in 1990. This means that it installs its own bishops and elects a primate, who has almost all the prerogatives and regalia of the head of an independent church. It has its own Synod and can convene its own Councils, but remains part of the framework of the Moscow Patriarchate. But this position has been somewhat shaken recently. Unlike his predecessor, Patriarch Kirill has launched an active Ukraine policy. He visits the country several times a year and is strongly promoting his concept of “Russky Mir” (Russian World) – the unity of people that comprised the former Russian Empire under the aegis of the Russian Orthodox Church. Without questioning the autonomy of the UOC, he has declared himself much more than its figurehead. At the same time, some UOC members and hierarchs have begun to speak about the need to return to the Soviet-era system of running the Church in Ukraine.

“Over the past 20 years, people in the UOC got the impression that they decide themselves what to do,” said the Secretary of the Synod of the unrecognized Kiev Patriarchate Bishop Yevstraty (Zorya). “Now this is coming up against the personality of Patriarch Kirill, who is a centralizer in character. Metropolitan Vladimir and the UOC have for over one and a half decades tried to create an image of a Ukrainian Church, not a Russian Church in Ukraine. Patriarch Kirill has leveled all this work,” he said.

The Russky Mir concept has been largely rejected in Ukraine, including in the UOC. “We cannot call upon people to return from the schism into the canonical Ukrainian Church, while at the same time call on them to enter the Russian world – that’s nonsense,” said a high level UOC representative, who wished to remain anonymous.

The Council Intrigue

It was in this context that the reportedly weakening health of Metropolitan Vladimir unleashed a chain of actions both real and rumored. On June 14, the UOC Synod decided to expand its membership from seven to ten people. This board of senior bishops, from whose ranks the temporary head is elected when the Metropolitan of Kiev dies or retires, co-opted three influential Ukrainian bishops: Archbishop Alexander (Drabinko), the 34-year old longtime secretary to Metropolitan Vladimir, recently appointed head of the UOC External Affairs Department; Metropolitan Pavel (Lebed) of Vyshgorod and Chernobyl – the vicar of the preeminent Kiev Monastery of the Caves, one of the founders of the Party of the Regions and a deputy of the Kiev City Council, he is also a man with a very dubious reputation here; and finally Metropolitan Hilarion (Shukalo) of Donetsk and Mariupol, a powerful bishop from the region intimately connected to the current Ukrainian authorities. All three have thus positioned themselves as potential successors to the Kiev See.

Two weeks later, on June 28, the Synod met again and decided to call the UOC Council, which includes all Ukrainian bishops plus elected representatives of clergy and laity for July 8. The second such Council in UOC history was called in ten days, and elections had to take place within three or four days – terms which were absolutely unrealistic for any decent nomination and election process as well as for an open discussion of the agenda. In a similar vein to Russian State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov’s famous comment that “the Parliament is not a place for discussions,” the UOC Press Secretary, Archpriest Georgy Kovalenko, said at a press conference here that “the Council is meeting not for discussions, but to adopt concrete decisions on a concrete set of issues.”

Clearly, such a statement did not dispel concerns, despite the fact that the Council was immediately renamed a Jubilee Council, saying that its main task was to mark the 20th anniversary of independence for the Ukrainian Church and state, as well as the 45th anniversary of Metropolitan Vladimir’s consecration as bishop.

According to several sources in the UOC, it was the power struggle within the church that was the main reason the Council was called, because it was utterly necessary to immediately legitimize the expansion of the Synod. But Archbishop Ionafan considers such a statement “an autocephalist trap.” He stressed that according to the UOC Statutes, Ukrainian bishops elect the Metropolitan of Kiev from among all the bishops of the Moscow Patriarchate. This point gave rise to speculation that both the patriarch’s closest aide Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeev) of Volokolamsk, as well as the Patriarch himself, are eligible to be elected to the Kiev See when it becomes vacant. And these speculations, in turn, are stirring fears that “Moscow’s hand” is ready to take away the independence of the Ukrainian Church.

Although deriding the rumor as “stupidity,” Archishop Ionafan said nonetheless that he would have welcomed the election of Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeev) as a “great gain for the UOC.”

“I am convinced that he would have become a 100 percent Ukrainian,” he said.

Collisions of the Statute

Several experts predicted that the Council would approve the UOC Statute, and some amendments to it, which contradicts the Moscow Patriarchate Statutes. For example the UOC statute keeps silent about some prerogatives for the Patriarch of Moscow. In response, the pro-Moscow faction led by Metropolitan Agafangel (Savvin) of Odessa and Izmail presented its amendments. Long-distance polemics ensued, involving those close to the Moscow Patriarchate, while Moscow church officials remained silent due to the delicacy of the issues.

Ultimately, several days before the Council, a carefully worded letter of blessing sent by Patriarch Kirill to Metropolitan Vladimir was published. In it, the patriarch thanks the Metropolitan of Kiev for “notifying” him about the Council (something he did not have to do, but apparently nonetheless did), gives his blessing for the Council (which is not required), wishes its members “wise decisions aimed at strengthening the unity” of the Russian Orthodox Church and overcoming the divisions within Ukrainian Orthodoxy and, with a clear hint at the internal strife, wished “unhypocritical brotherly love.”

According to Archbishop Ionafan, at a morning meeting of bishops, Metropolitan Vladimir took all the amendments to the Statute off the agenda and a special commission was set up to consider the amendments, under the chairmanship of Metropolitan Hilarion of Donetsk. However, after the break, the Council adopted a resolution, which approved the Statutes as of 2007 and, at the same time, all the Synod’s decisions, including those making amendments to the Statute. The decision says that the Statues take effect immediately, while the Russian Orthodox Church Statutes require that they be submitted for the patriarch’s approval.

The UOC leadership is trying to underestimate the importance of the Statutes. “It is the Statutes for the Church and not the Church for the Statutes,” Archpriest Kovalenko told journalists here.

Interim Results

Although major contradictions were either lifted or postponed, the decisions of the Kiev Council have created a number of legal collisions that need to be resolved. The way the Council was prepared reflects serious suspicion between church authorities in Kiev and in Moscow.

The appointment of Metropolitan Hilarion of Donetsk as the chairman of the commission on the Statutes also somewhat raises his stakes in the upcoming battle for the Kiev See. At the same time, the problems of moral standing and public reputation of some of the leading Ukrainian bishops could at any moment deal a heavy blow within the Church.

Strategically, though, the knot of contradictions surrounding the relationship between the Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox churches is unlikely to be resolved soon, because their identities are too closely interwoven. The Russian Church sees Kiev as its motherland and traditionally underestimates the Ukrainian otherness and aspirations to freedom. At the same time, the supranational character of the Moscow Patriarchate is primarily based on the fact that it includes a Ukrainian as well as a Russian component. Without each other, the two churches might be tempted to slide toward nationalism and become more dependent on their respective governments. In Ukraine, part of the Church considers itself Russian and another part indentifies itself as opposed to Russia. Everybody understands that succeeding today from the Moscow Patriarchate, even in the most legal of possible ways, would lead to another schism within the UOC. But even without changing the present status of the UOC within the Moscow Patriarchate, the UOC leadership will inevitably try to fill its autonomy with more and more meaning. That, in turn, will be perceived in Russia and by Ukrainian Russophiles as “steps away from Moscow.”

According to Russian political scientist Andrei Okara, cases when a Ukrainian figure seemingly loyal to Moscow or St. Petersburg suddenly turns away and begins to defend Ukrainian independence, occur century after century in both state and church relations. “It’s a paradigm of Russian-Ukrainian relations throughout history – since the middle of the 17th century,” Okara said. “Because Moscow wants vertical relations between senior and junior members and Kiev wants horizontal relations of equality.”

The next visit by Patriarch Kirill to Ukraine is scheduled to take place in two weeks time. The story continues…

source:St Elias Greek Catholic Blog (Canada)

2011-10-03T08:41:00.000-07:00

Orthodox Archbishop: We're Internally Divided On Question Of 'Primacy'

(http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=23450)

CASTEL GANDOLFO, ITALY, September 30 (CNA) - A leading Russian Orthodox official says the Eastern Orthodox churches have yet to resolve the question of authority among themselves, a condition for future progress on the issue of the papacy.

"I would say that there are certain divergences, and there are different positions, of the Orthodox churches on the question of the primacy," said Metropolitan Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev of Volokolamsk, head of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations, in a Vatican Radio interview following his Sept. 29 meeting with Pope Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo.

"As we discuss the primacy of the Bishop of Rome, within the framework of the next commission, we do not only discuss the primacy of Rome; but we have to touch the issue of the primacy in general," noted the Orthodox metropolitan, apparently referring to future proceedings of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.

"And here, of course, we have different traditions - not only between the Catholics and the Orthodox, because we never had such a centralized system as the Catholics have - but we also have some difference among the Orthodox, as to what should be the role of the 'first hierarch' in the Orthodox Church." The Patriarch of Constantinople occupies that role, but his prerogatives are not fully defined.

Metropolitan Hilarion was scheduled to participate in the last session of the Catholic-Orthodox commission, held in 2007 to discuss the question of papal primacy. But an internal dispute between Constantinople and Moscow, over an Orthodox group in Estonia, prompted the Russian representative to walk out. The two churches also dispute the status of the Orthodox Church in America.

On Thursday, the metropolitan made an apparent reference to these types of difficulties between the Patriarchs of Moscow and Constantinople, saying that "if a particular Orthodox church will want to impose its own vision of this primacy on other churches, then of course we will encounter difficulties. And this is what is happening at the moment."

Meanwhile, the world's local self-governing Orthodox churches are also attempting to organize a historic Pan-Orthodox Council, comparable to the Church councils held in the Byzantine empire during the first millennium. The new gathering has been in preparation for 50 years, as the Orthodox world seeks to determine how the Patriarch of Constantinople should exercise his authority.

"We believe that his role should be the primacy of honor, and also he is afforded some coordinating role: for example, he can convene the Pan-Orthodox Council," said Archbishop Hilarion. "Of course, previously - in the history of the ecumenical councils - it was not the Patriarch of Constantinople, neither was it the Pope of Rome, but it was the (Byzantine) Emperor, who convened the councils."

"So we have this model (of primacy), which is emerging in the Orthodox tradition. But generally, for centuries we had a very decentalized administration. Each autocephalous church is fully independent from other churches in its self-governance. And therefore we do not have a very clear picture as to what should be the role of the primate in the Orthodox tradition."

"Without having this clear and unified vision, we cannot easily discuss the issue of how we see the role of the 'Primus Inter Pares' ('first among equals,' an Orthodox concept of the papacy) in the universal Church," Metropolitan Hilarion admitted.

The phrase "first among equals" signifies the typical Orthodox view of the Pope as having a primacy of honor but not jurisdiction. In his 2010 book "Light of the World," Pope Benedict said the "first among equals" view of the Pope was "not exactly the formula that we believe as Catholics," due to the Pope's "specific functions and tasks."

Until Orthodoxy clarifies its own systems of authority, Archbishop Hilarion said, hopes for progress on the question of the papacy between Catholics and Orthodox are "probably not too high."

"But still, there is hope, because if there is willingness to accommodate different positions and to produce a paper - or several papers, maybe - which would clearly state the differences, which would outline the way forward, then we can progress."

The Moscow Patriarchate's ecumenical representative also expressed hesitation about a possible meeting between the Pope and the Patriarch of Moscow, which has never occurred in the centuries since Moscow's elevation to patriarchal status in 1589.

There are hopes that such a meeting could take place in 2013, on the 1,700th anniversary of Christianity's legalization by the Emperor Constantine. But Archbishop Hilarion said Catholics and Russian Orthodox believers should not jump to conclusions about when a meeting may occur between the Pope and the Patriarch of Moscow.

"We believe that such a meeting will take place at some time in the future. We are not yet ready to discuss the date, or the place, or the protocol of such a meeting - because what matters for us, primarily, is the content of this meeting."

"As soon as we agree on the content, on the points on which we still disagree or have divergent opinions, then I believe we can have this meeting. But it requires a very careful preparation, and we should not be hurrying up, and we should not be pressed to have this meeting at a particular point of time."

Despite his cautious attitude toward this meeting and other ecumenical matters, Metropolitan Hilarion spoke warmly of Pope Benedict XVI himself. During his recent trip to Germany, the Pope met with representatives of the Orthodox churches in the country, and spoke of a "common engagement" among Christians to ensure that "the human person is given the respect which is his due."

Leaving to Come--Pope & Patriarch May Finally Meet

SOURCE: "Spirit of the Times, RiaNovosti

A monument to Pope John Paul II is to be unveiled in Moscow in a couple weeks.

It will be a modest sculpture, presented by the Polish Embassy and erected not somewhere in the middle of a central square, but in the courtyard of the Library of Foreign Languages, where it will share the quiet space with the likenesses of Charles Dickens, Heinrich Heine, Raoul Wallenberg and several other predominantly European figures. In a way, there should be nothing outstanding about this event.

Yet in a broader context, it could be seen as a symbolic act, signifying an absolutely new atmosphere in the relations between the Vatican and Russia, Poland and Russia, and the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches. Just several years ago, erecting a monument to Pope John Paul in Moscow would have been unthinkable – or scandalous, if somebody had dared. Today, it appears almost inevitable and natural. Business as usual.

Yesterday, September 29, Pope Benedict XVI received in Castel Gandolfo Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeev, the highest-ranking Russian Orthodox official in charge of relations with other churches and the closest aide to Patriarch Kirill. It was at least their third meeting since the new leadership was installed in the Moscow Patriarchate in the beginning of 2009. Three days earlier, Patriarch Kirill received in Moscow the papal legate Josef Cardinal Tomko, who came to lead the celebrations marking the 100th anniversary of Moscow’s Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. As a part of the celebrations, a monument to Mother Teresa of Calcutta was opened near the cathedral – around the same time, unfortunately, that the Moscow city authorities destroyed one of the buildings belonging to her Missionaries of Charity after the sisters had lost a court case over its legality. But due to the protests around the destruction, we found out that both Patriarch Kirill and Metropolitan Hilarion had interceded with the authorities on behalf of the Catholic order, though to no avail.

September 30 also happens to be the day when many Russian women mark their name day. Faith (Vera), Hope (Nadezhda), Love (Lyubov) and their mother Sophia were early Roman martyrs who became particularly beloved in Russia (all the Nadyas, Lyubas and Sonyas are diminutives of these names). So the most popular Orthodox website, Orthodoxy in the World, led on Friday with a piece on a pilgrimage to the village of Eschau in Alsace, France, where the relics of these early Christian saints are kept in a Roman Catholic church. Pilgrimages to Rome and other early Christian holy sites in Europe – be it the Crown of Thorns in Paris or the Shroud of Turin – have in recent years become increasingly popular among Russian Orthodox Christians for the first time in history on such a large scale. On the other hand, several months ago, a group of 240 young Christians from Europe – mainly Catholic, but also Protestant – came to several Moscow parishes for an unprecedented pilgrimage to experience the Orthodox Holy Week and Easter.

There is a paradox here. Or something mystical, if you will.

The charismatic Pope John Paul II – who was predisposed to relations with the Christian East, who was widely credited with contributing to the demise of the atheist Soviet system, who spoke Russian and had wanted to come – could never do it. He had an invitation from the Russian government, but not from the Russian Orthodox Church. After his death, relations improved markedly and he finally arrives here, but in bronze. Why?

Indeed, the period of 1990s and early 2000s, when his pontificate coincided with what came to be known as “Russian religious revival,” was the low point in relations between the world’s two biggest churches in the past 50 or 60 years. There was a severe conflict in Western Ukraine, where Byzantine rite Catholics were actively reclaiming their dominant status and properties from the Orthodox Church, which in 1946 took them over, under the aegis of Stalin’s NKVD. It was so bad, in fact, that on occasions it led to violence and the hierarchy was unable – or unwilling – to do anything about it. And there were accusations of “proselytizing” in Russia, as the nearly defunct Roman Catholic communities used foreign aide to build grand new churches in Russian cities, especially in Siberia, where both the Tsarist and Soviet governments had once exiled thousands of Poles.

In the early 1990s, the Moscow Patriarchate was on the defensive against a legion of foreign missionaries who came here to “convert Godless Russia.” Of them, Roman Catholics were clearly not the biggest, but they were the only centuries-old threat and the only group the Orthodox takes seriously in the ecclesiological sense. The common claim was that the Roman Catholic Church was planning an expansion eastwards. Why else, then, was it building these large churches in Russia, much bigger than the actual needs of their small communities, Russian Orthodox officials at the time asked. In a lower voice, they complained about the “Polish lobby” in the Vatican aiming to “take a revenge” for centuries of “Russian oppression.” The widespread, grassroots anti-ecumenical movement in Russia accused the church leadership of “ecumenism heresy.” The late Patriarch Alexy II may have wanted to meet with the Pope, but could never afford it. “My flock would have not understood me,” he said in an interview. The Catholic Church always insisted that it was here only to serve the existing Catholics, and that it never poached believers intentionally but received those coming of their own will.

The situation was confusing and utterly unfair. But one thing was clear: the ecumenism of the 1960s that generated the concept of “Sister Churches” and all sorts of theological dialogues and niceties grossly failed the test of real competition on the ground once the Soviet constraints on religious activities were lifted.

Then, in 2005, Pope John Paul II died. One after another, the messages from Moscow to the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI were showing a markedly different style – praising Josef Ratzinger as an outstanding theologian and expressing hopes for improved relations. The Vatican responded by moving away from Moscow a highly visible Roman Catholic archbishop and persona non grata for the Moscow Patriarchate. In 2006, an Orthodox-Catholic conference in Vienna called “Return Soul to Europe” proclaimed a new agenda: it was no longer about the theological dialogue, no longer about the bickering about proselytizing. It was now about defending the Christian heritage of Europe and giving a common Christian witness to the increasingly secularized world.

In 2009, Metropolitan Kirill Gundyaev – for long the external relations chief of the Russian Orthodox Church and widely perceived as an admirer of Rome – was elected Patriarch of Moscow, and the new phase in relations became even more visible. The new “foreign minister” of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeev, proclaimed a new goal of a “strategic union” with the Roman Catholic Church in policy, if not in faith. The grassroots anti-Catholicism has not disappeared, of course, but has found itself in much lesser demand. On the other hand, the Moscow Patriarchate and the Roman Catholic Church in Poland are working on a reconciliation document that would attempt to bury the age-old mutual grievances between Russians and Poles.

I am certain that, barring extraordinary developments, in a year or two we will see the first ever meeting of the Pope and Moscow Patriarch in a third country.

So is it just the personalities of leaders who make such changes in the relations between the world’s two biggest religious bodies? The answer is “Yes, but...” Personalities do matter. But so does the weight of centuries of tragic history – such as the relationship between Russia and Poland – which bears heavily on the people involved. On the other hand, it is simply a more stable era for intra-Christian relations. The period of the 1990s is over and the new internal boundaries are largely set, while the external challenges, from both Islam and secularism, are all the more pressing.

As for the late Pope, one can probably feel sorry that Karol Wojtyla never realized his dream of coming to Moscow during his lifetime. But there is something very Christian about the fact that the Blessed John Paul had to die in order to come here.

ASSYRIAN CHURCH OF THE EAST: B9SHOP MAR BAWAI SORO

2011-09-22T19:11:00.000-07:00

This short paper on the perspective of the Church of the East on the question of communion was presented on November 2, 2005, by Bishop Mar Bawai Soro to the assembled members of the Holy Synod of the Assyrian Church of the East held in Chicago, IL. In the past two previous Holy Synods, Bishop Mar Bawai Soro made two other presentations exposing the understanding on the same question but from the view point of the other Traditions, i.e., Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant.

Mar Bawai Soro

Bishop of the Western Diocese of California

Assyrian Church of the East

1. A true Apostolic Church cannot possibly remain isolated and alone without being in full ecclesial communion with other Apostolic Churches. If the Apostles of the Lord: Thomas, Andrew, James, John and Peter were bound together in Apostolic communion then also their churches must also be bound with the same communion of their founders. However, due to historical factors, namely, political and geographical, between the Persian and the Roman Empires, ecclesial ties between the Assyrian Church of the East and the rest of Christendom, i.e., the three major ecclesiastical families in Christianity: the Catholic, Oriental Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox, communion was ruptured for many centuries. As a result of this regrettable reality, we notice that today the Assyrian Church of the East is not in ecclesial communion with any other Apostolic Church.

2. Therefore, the state in which we find our Church in today is for many legitimate reasons contrary to ecclesial logic and true theological and apostolic understanding. The following points below are the basis for us, as a church, to seek the restoration of communion with other Apostolic churches:

a. The dogmatic prayers of Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Saint John in which Jesus prays to the Father that all His followers be one just as He and His Father are one (Jn 17).

b. The ecclesial reality of the early New Testament Church shows the Apostles never were independent from one another but all were united in communion, prayer and charity (Acts 2: 42-47).

c. Model of communion between our Church of the East and the Western Church during the first five centuries of Christianity was characterized by the willingness of our Church Fathers to receive from the Western Fathers church teachings (creeds), liturgical texts and instructions and canonical legislations. An excellent example of such communion is the Synod of Mar Isaac in 410 AD.

d. Common sense dictates that in today’s world there is a need for Christians from all churches and traditions to form a strong bound of brotherly witness so that the world may believe in Jesus Christ. Furthermore, our people’s instinct of spiritual and cultural survival demands that we unite and form communion with other Apostolic churches to maximize our people’s chances of such survival in a world that is increasingly becoming more hostile by the day.

e. Various liturgical, canonical and patristic texts used and accepted until today in the Assyrian Church of the East during the Holy Qurbana and the Office for Prayer would certainly teach us two fundamental standpoints:

(i) The Assyrian Church of the East belongs to the Great Body (Gushma Rabba) of the one Holy Catholic Church established by our Lord, which is also the holy undivided Body of Christ (I Corinthians 12:27; Eph. 4:12). The following segment of a prayer recited by every priest and bishop celebrating the Holy Qurbana every Sunday illustrates the above point: “In your mercifulness, my Lord, you have deemed the vileness of our feeble nature worthy to be made recognized member in the Great Body of the Holy Catholic Church, to administer spiritual assistance to the souls of the faithful.” Within the one body of the Lord, which is the Church, there cannot be independence because the body is one. There can only be mutual recognition, respect, harmonized planning and action among Christian brethren. In a body, the hand cannot go independently from the feet and still belonging to the same body (I Corinthians 12:14-21). On the contrary in every functioning of the body there is inter-dependence and mutuality. Indeed, in the history of the Church there were and still are several particular churches who have their autonomy (self-government) but organically they are harmonized as one in the Body of the Lord Jesus Christ, i.e., His Holy Church. Such sacred objective of the unity of Christ’s Church must however be developed from an ecclesiological mentality not political, from an apostolic way of thinking not secular. Because, in a civic or political context a group of people ought to seek objectives as freedom and independence but in an ecclesiastical and spiritual reality, churches are a part of the holy Body of Christ and therefore are tied together in a communion that is characterized by charity, hope and faith. Again, we ought to learn how to think and behave like a church from the New Testament model of the early church to see how these churches were actually living in communion (Acts 2: 42-47).

(ii) The Church of the East attributes a prominent role to Saint Peter and a significant place for the Church of Rome in her liturgical, canonical and Patristic thoughts. There are more than 50 liturgical, canonical and Patristic citations that explicitly express such a conviction. The question before us therefore is, why there must be a primacy attributed to Saint Peter in the Church? If there is no primacy in the universal church, we shall not be able to legitimize a primacy of all the Catholicos-Patriarchs in the other apostolic churches. If the patriarchs of the apostolic churches have legitimate authority over their own respective bishops it is so because there is a principle of primacy in the universal Church. If the principle of primacy is valid for a local Church (for example, the Assyrian Church of the East), it is so because it is already valid for the universal church. If there is no Peter for the universal church there could not be Peter for the local Church. If all the apostles are equal in authority by virtue of the gift of the Spirit, and if the bishops are the successors of the Apostles, based on what then one of these bishops (i.e., the Catholicos-Patriarchs) has authority over the other bishops?

The Church of the East possesses a theological, liturgical and canonical tradition in which she clearly values the primacy of Peter among the rest of the Apostles and their churches and the relationship Peter has with his successors in the Church of Rome. The official organ of our Church of the East, Mar Abdisho of Soba, the last theologian in our Church before its fall, based himself on such an understanding when he collected his famous Nomocanon in which he clearly states the following: “To the Great Rome [authority] was given because the two pillars are laid [in the grave] there, Peter, I say, the head of the Apostles, and Paul, the teacher of the nations. [Rome] is the first see and the head of the patriarchs.” (Memra 9; Risha 1) Furthermore, Abdisho asserts “. . . . And as the patriarch has authority to do all he wishes in a fitting manner in such things as are beneath his authority, so the patriarch of Rome has authority over all patriarchs, like the blessed Peter over all the community, for he who is in Rome also keeps the office of Peter in all the church. He who transgresses against these things the ecumenical synod places under anathema.” (Memra 9; Risha 8). I would like to ask here the following: who among us would dare to think that he or she is more learned than Abdisho of Soba, or that they are more sincere to the church of our forefather than Mar Abdisho himself? This is true especially since we the members of the Holy Synod have in 2004 affirmed Mar Abdisho’s List of Seven Sacraments as the official list of the Assyrian Church of the East. How much more then we ought to consider examining and receiving Abdisho’s Synodical legislation in his Nomocanon?

3. As an implementation of the above mentioned principles of full-Communion and Christian Unity, the restoration of ecclesial unity with the Old Calendar and the Chaldean Churches would be the most historically fulfilling objective from any other project we may seek to fulfill. In fact this noble aim has been already recognized by our hierarchs in the past decade when letters of reconciliation and unity were exchanged with the Old-Calendar segment of the Church of the East, and a dialogue was opened and an agreement was reached and signed by the two Catholicos-Patriarchs and the rest of our bishops to bring about a comprehensive formula of unity between the Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Church of the East. Unfortunately, this serious dialogue has been interrupted and paralyzed from 1998 until the present time. In my opinion, this noble quest for unity is the only valid way for the Church of our forefathers, the Church of the East, to fulfill its historic destiny and thrive in the future. Such an action would be a solid ground for our people to activate the mechanism that may also lead one day to a national unity.

The above statement is also my conviction in front of God, you my brothers, and my own church and nation. This conviction I have learned from Mar Abdisho of Soba and cannot abandon it, for it will be a betrayal to my church fathers and to my duty as a bishop of the Church and a shepherd of my people. Accordingly, I do believe that we ought to Implement these principles with caution and in a Christian manner in order to fulfill the objective of church unity and ecclesial communion. This is done so that the Assyrian Church of the East could unite with both the Chaldean and the Old Calendar Churches and all three of them can once again become one United Church of the East. Then and there, this united Church of the East could formulate a common position to negotiate with the Catholic Church how this New United Church of the East could preserve its spirituality, canon law, liturgy, theological terminology and self-governance but at the same time be in full-communion with the Universal Church.

Assyrian Bishop Mar Bawai Soro

Explains His Journey into Communion with

The Catholic Church (click title for source)

Bishop Mar Bawai Soro

San Jose, CA., Jun 5, 2008 / 03:44 am (CNA).- Last month, Bishop Mar Bawai Soro and nearly 1,000 Assyrian Christian families were received into communion with the Chaldean Catholic Church in California. Bishop Bawai explained the process to CNA, and expressed his hope that other Assyrian churches will also consider uniting with the Catholic Church.

The Assyrian Church, centered in modern-day Iraq, dates back to the earliest days of Christianity. Around the fifth century, the Assyrian followers began to embrace the teachings of Nestorius, Archbishop of Constantinople whose doctrines were condemned by the Council of Ephesus in 431.

However, at the beginning in the sixteenth century, large numbers of Nestorian Assyrians came into union with Rome, creating the Chaldean Catholic Church which is now larger than the Assyrian Church.

Bishop Soro described the process of coming into communion with the Catholic Church to CNA: Twenty years ago, many of the Assyrian church’s faithful realized that other than Papal Primacy, there were no theological issues that existed between themselves and the Catholic Church. He explained that, “the more I studied Catholic theology, the more I became certain that both Churches were basically of the same apostolic faith and practice.”

The Assyrian prelate wasn’t the only one who saw this similarity. Bishop Soro recalled that, “at the same time, this hypothesis was also pondered upon by the official dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East. The conclusion after twenty years of casual ‘talks’ and official dialogue proved this hypothesis to be correct.”

However, in 2004 the patriarch and bishops “decided to suspend the dialogue with Rome” even though “all obstacles for restoring communion with the Catholic Church (Papal Primacy not included)” were proven not to exist.

Bishop Soro said that his fellow bishops’ rejection came despite a recognition that there was an agreement between the two traditions. He explained that, “they knew well that the ecclesial patrimony of the Assyrian Church of the East -- canonical, liturgical, and patristic -- recognizes the Primacy of the See of Rome. Despite the fact that this was my appeal and argument to my church leaders for many years - -be faithful to your tradition and enter the Catholic Communion, i.e., accept the Primacy of the Pope - - they did not listen.”

Instead, in 2005, “they decided both to break the dialogue with Rome and to suspend me from the Assyrian Church of the East. And so, since 2005, I have been able to rally those Assyrian faithful who became as discontent with their church’s attitude as I was and bring them to understand that the best step to be taken is the restoration of communion with Rome. In the past two and half years, we gradually paved the way for the historic move to unite with the Chaldean Church.”

Bishop Bar Mawai also spoke of his hope for the rest of the Assyrian Church of the East to unite with Rome. In an interview with Terrasanta.net, the bishop stated that while there is a possibility for community, two factors must be considered: time and hard work.

The prelate explained: “At the present time, some of the anger has to melt away before any realistic attempt is reinitiated. We are doing all that is humanly possible to reply with compassion and reason to all the accusation and condemnations some of the radical Assyrian groups and individuals are directing at us because of our union with Rome. We hope that ultimately the truth of God’s work and the message of His forgiving love will prevail over all trials.”

In regards to the second factor, the bishop emphasizes the importance of showing the world, “that church unity is a win/win proposition,” especially for Christians in Iraq. “The Christian communities out there need all the help and support they can muster. And, through such unity, for example, Iraqi Christians become more assertive of their commitment to all that will give witness to their Christian character and advance their genuine contribution Iraq.”

Sent by: Raymond George

Article by Martin Mirza (click name for source)

Photos by George Rasho

In an atmosphere of joy and serenity, on Sunday; July 19, 2009, Bishop Mar Bawai Soro celebrated Holy Qurbana at Saint Ephrem Church in Chicago. Saint Ephrem Church was established in 1904 and has served the Assyrian and Chaldean Catholic community for the last 105 years. The church was packed to its capacity. Present there were Father Zaia Marano, the newly assigned pastor, several deacons, church choir members and the faithful parishioners. Representing Bishop Mar Ibrahim Ibrahim, the Eparch of Saint Thomas Chaldean Diocese, Mar Bawai informed those present at the Church that the former name of Saint Thomas Parish has been changed to Saint Ephrem Parish because the altar the priest celebrates the offering of Holy Qurbana at this Church is named after Saint Ephrem. Saint Ephrem is an important fourth century Church Father who has written many church hymns that are in use until the present time in all the Churches of the East.

The message Mar Bawai preached during the Mass encouraged all faithful to be tolerant and more accepting of one another, just as God welcomes back to Himself all believers who love him and who repent from their sins. Charity, understanding and equality are the trademarks of a civilized, matured society and loving Christian community.

After the Mass, all those present moved to the Church hall facility to share a delicious meal that was prepared and served by the Daughters of the Church Committee. Many of those present for the Mass and at the Hall were the former parishioners of Saint Ephrem Church when Msgr. Edward Bikoma served as their pastor. The rest of those gathered were the parishioners of Mar Toma Parish. All parishioners from both sides now have formed one loving united community of Catholic Assyrians and Chaldeans under the Patronage of Saint Ephrem, and who share the same Catholic faith as all Catholics in the world.

Bishop Mar Bawai returned again to the Church to meet with a few dozens of parishioners who wanted to hear his comments on some of the recent, important developments in our community and church. The meeting lasted from 3:00 to 6:00 PM.

We (Father Zaia Marano, the deacons, Parish Council, Choir & Parishioners) at Saint Ephrem Chaldean Assyrian Church in Chicago are very grateful to Father Sanhareeb Youkhana, the Pastor of Saint Mary's Chaldean Church in Chicago, his deacons, committees, choirs and parishioners, who for the past two years opened their hearts and the doors of their churches for us, accepted us and made us all feel perfectly at home. We also wish to thank our Bishop Mar Ibrahim Ibrahim for receiving our parish into his Diocese and for granting us the right to use for our services Saint Ephrem Church, Hall and Rectory. We are also grateful for Bishop Mar Bawai who has led our spiritual journey back to our Chaldean Church of the East and the Catholic Church. We look forward for our Bishops future visits and pray in return for their well being and the well being of all of the People of God.

see THE ASSYRIAN CHURCH OF THE EAST AND THE CHALDEAN CATHOLIC CHURCH (click)

Aidan Nichols: The Ordinariates, the Pope, and the Liturgy

2011-07-07T08:24:00.000-07:00

Aidan Nichols: The Ordinariates, the Pope, and the Liturgy

Video of Cardinal Wuerl's Report on the Anglican Ordinariate (most informative!!)

2011-06-21T14:52:00.000-07:00

Video of Cardinal Wuerl's Report

please click above

THE CHURCH IS ONE by A. Khomiakov

2011-06-06T03:06:00.000-07:00

Of course, as a Catholic, I believe Khomiakov's ecclesiology to be inadequate; but it is so full of usable insights and is so often quoted, especially for the spirituality of liturgy, that this blog would be incomplete without it.
The Church Is One

I - Unity of the Church
The unity of the Church follows of necessity from the unity of God; for the Church is not a multitude of persons in their separate individuality, but a unity of the grace of God, living in a multitude of rational creatures, submitting themselves willingly to grace. Grace, indeed, is also given to those who resist it, and to those who do not make use of it (who hide their talent in the earth), but these are not in the Church. In fact, the unity of the Church is not imaginary or allegorical, but a true and substantial unity, such as is the unity of many members in a living body.

The Church is one, notwithstanding her division as it appears to a man who is still alive on earth. It is only in relation to man that it is possible to recognize a division of the Church into visible and invisible; her unity is, in reality, true and absolute. Those who are alive on earth, those who have finished their earthly course, those who, like the angels, were not created for a life on earth, those in future generations who have not yet begun their earthly course, are all united together in one Church, in one and the same grace of God; for the creation of God which has not yet been manifested is manifest to Him; and God hears the prayers and knows the faith of those whom He has not yet called out of non-existence into existence. Indeed the Church, the Body of Christ, is manifesting forth and fulfilling herself in time, without changing her essential unity or inward life of grace. And therefore, when we speak of "the Church visible and invisible," we so speak only in relation to man.

II - The Visible and Invisible Church

The Church visible, or upon earth, lives in complete communion and unity with the whole body of the Church, of which Christ is the Head. She has abiding within her Christ and the grace of the Holy Spirit in all their living fulness, but not in the fulness of their manifestation, for she acts and knows not fully, but only so far as it pleases God.

Inasmuch as the earthly and visible Church is not the fulness and completeness of the whole Church which the Lord has appointed to appear at the final judgment of all creation, she acts and knows only within her own limits; and (according to the words of Paul the Apostle, to the Corinthians, 1 Cor. 5:12) does not judge the rest of mankind, and only looks upon those as excluded, that is to say, not belonging to her, who exclude themselves. The rest of mankind, whether alien from the Church, or united to her by ties which God has not willed to reveal to her, she leaves to the judgment of the great day. The Church on earth judges for herself only, according to the grace of the Spirit, and the freedom granted her through Christ, inviting also the rest of mankind to the unity and adoption of God in Christ; but upon those who do not hear her appeal she pronounces no sentence, knowing the command of her Savior and Head, "not to judge another man's servant" (Rom. 14.4).

III - The Church on Earth

From the creation of the world the earthly Church has continued uninterruptedly upon the earth, and will continue until the accomplishment of all the works of God, according to the promise given her by God Himself. And her notes are: inward holiness, which does not allow for any admixture of error, for the spirit of truth and outward unchangeableness lives within her as Christ, her Preserver and Head does not change.

All the notes of the Church, whether inward or outward, are recognized only by herself, and by those whom grace calls to be members of her. To those, indeed, who are alien from her, and are not called to her, they are unintelligible; for to such as these, outward change of rite appears to be a change of the Spirit itself, which is glorified in the rite (as, for instance, in the transition from the Church of the Old Testament to that of the New, or in the change of ecclesiastical rites and ordinances since Apostolic times). The Church and her members know, by the inward knowledge of faith, the unity and unchangeableness of her spirit, which is the spirit of God. But those who are outside and not called to belong to her, behold and know the changes in the external rite by an external knowledge, which does not comprehend the inward [knowledge], just as also the unchangeableness of God appears to them to be changeable in the changes of His creations. Wherefore the Church has not been, nor could she be, changed or obscured, nor could she have fallen away, for then she would have been deprived of the spirit of truth. It is impossible that there should have been a time when she could have received error into her bosom, or when the laity, presbyters, and bishops had submitted to instructions or teaching inconsistent with the teaching and spirit of Christ. The man who should say that such a weakening of the spirit of Christ could possibly come to pass within her knows nothing of the Church, and is altogether alien to her. Moreover, a partial revolt against false doctrines, together with the retention or acceptance of other false doctrines, neither is, nor could be, the work of the Church; for within her, according to her very essence, there must always have been preachers and teachers and martyrs confessing, not partial truth with an admixture of error, but the full and unadulterated truth. The Church knows nothing of partial truth and partial error, but only the whole truth without admixture of error. And the man who is living within the Church does not submit to false teaching or receive the Sacraments from a false teacher; he will not, knowing him to be false, follow his false rites. And the Church herself does not err, for she is the truth, she is incapable of cunning or cowardice, for she is holy. And of course, the Church, by her very unchangeableness, does not acknowledge that to be error, which she has at any previous time acknowledged as truth; and having proclaimed by a General Council and common consent, that it is possible for any private individual, or bishop, or patriarch,(1) to err in his teaching, she cannot acknowledge that such or such private individual, or bishop, or patriarch, or successor of theirs, is incapable of falling into error in teaching; or that they are preserved from going astray by any special grace. By what would the earth be sanctified, if the Church were to lose her sanctity? And where would there be truth, if her judgements of today were contrary to those of yesterday? Within the Church, that is to say, within her members, false doctrines may be engendered, but then the infected members fall away, constituting a heresy or schism, and no longer defile the sanctity of the Church.

(1) As for instance, Pope Honorius, whose teaching was condemned at the sixth General Council.

IV - One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic

The Church is called One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic; because she is one, and holy; because she belongs to the whole world, and not to any particular locality; because by her all mankind and all the earth, and not any particular nation or country, are sanctified; because her very essence consists in the agreement and unity of the spirit and life of all the members who acknowledge her, throughout the world; lastly, because in the writings and doctrines of the Apostles is contained all the fulness of her faith, her hope, and her love.

From this it follows that when any society is called the Church of Christ, with the addition of a local name, such as the Greek, Russian, or Syrian Church, this appellation signifies nothing more than the congregation of members of the Church living in that particular locality, that is, Greece, Russia, or Syria; and does not involve any such idea as that any single community of Christians is able to formulate the doctrine of the Church, or to give a dogmatic interpretation to the teaching of the Church without the concurrence therewith of the other communities; still less is it implied that any one particular community, or the pastor thereof, can prescribe its own interpretation to the others. The grace of faith is not to be separated from holiness of life, nor can any single community or any single pastor be acknowledged to be the custodian of the whole faith of the Church, any more than any single community or any single pastor can be looked upon as the representative of the whole of her sanctity. Nevertheless, every Christian community, without assuming to itself the right of dogmatic explanation or teaching, has a full right to change its forms and ceremonies, and to introduce new ones, so long as it does not cause offence to the other communities. Rather than do this, it ought to abandon its own opinion, and submit to that of the others, lest that which to one might seem harmless or even praiseworthy should seem blameworthy to another; or that brother should lead brother into the sin of doubt and discord. Every Christian ought to set a high value upon unity in the rites of the Church: for thereby is manifested, even for the unenlightened, unity of spirit and doctrine, while for the enlightened man it becomes a source of lively Christian joy. Love is the crown and glory of the Church.

V - Scripture and Tradition

The Spirit of God, who lives in the Church, ruling her and making her wise, manifests Himself within her in divers manners; in Scripture, in Tradition, and in Works; for the Church, which does the works of God, is the same Church which preserves tradition and which has written the Scriptures. Neither individuals, nor a multitude of individuals within the Church, preserve tradition or write the Scriptures; but the Spirit of God, which lives in the whole body of the Church. Therefore it is neither right nor possible to look for the grounds of tradition in the Scripture, nor for the proof of Scripture in tradition, nor for the warrant of Scripture or tradition in works. To a man living outside the Church neither her scripture nor her tradition nor her works are comprehensible. But to the man who lives within the Church and is united to the spirit of the Church, their unity is manifest by the grace which lives within her.

Do not works precede Scripture and tradition? Does not tradition precede Scripture? Where not the works of Noah, Abraham, the forefathers and representatives of the Church of the Old Testament, pleasing to God? And did not tradition exist amongst the patriarchs, beginning with Adam, the forefathers of all? Did not Christ give liberty to men and teaching by word of mouth, before the Apostles by their writings bore witness to the work of redemption and the law of liberty? Wherefore, between tradition, works, and scripture there is no contradiction, but, on the contrary, complete agreement. A man understands the Scriptures, so far as he preserves tradition, and does works agreeable to the wisdom that lives within him. But the wisdom that lives within him is not given to him individually, but as a member of the Church, and it is given to him in part, without altogether annulling his individual error; but to the Church it is given in the fulness of truth and without any admixture of error. Wherefore he must not judge the Church, but submit to her, that wisdom be not taken from him.

Every one that seeks for proof of the truth of the Church, by that very act either shows his doubt, and excludes himself from the Church, or assumes the appearance of one who doubts and at the same time preserves a hope of proving the truth, and arriving at it by his own power of reason: but the powers of reason do not attain to the truth of God, and the weakness of man is made manifest by the weakness of his proofs. The man who takes Scripture only, and founds the Church on it alone, is in reality rejecting the Church, and is hoping to found her afresh by his own powers: the man who takes tradition and works only, and depreciates the importance of Scripture, is likewise in reality rejecting the Church, and constituting himself a judge of the Spirit of God, who spake by the Scripture. For Christian knowledge is a matter, not of intellectual investigation, but of a living faith, which is a gift of grace. Scripture is external, an outward thing, and tradition is external, and works are external: that which is inward in them is the one Spirit of God. From tradition taken alone, or from scripture or from works, a man can but derive an external and incomplete knowledge, which may indeed in itself contain truth, for it starts from truth, but at the same time must of necessity be erroneous, inasmuch as it is incomplete. A believer knows the Truth, but an unbeliever does not know it, or at least only knows it with an external and imperfect knowledge.(2) The Church does not prove herself either as Scripture or as tradition or as works, but bears witness to herself, just as the Spirit of God, dwelling in her, bears witness to Himself in the Scriptures. The Church does not ask: Which Scripture is true, which tradition is true, which Council is true, or what works are pleasing to God: for Christ knows His own inheritance, and the Church in which He lives knows by inward knowledge, and cannot help knowing, her own manifestations. The collection of Old and New Testament books, which the Church acknowledges as hers, are called by the name of Holy Scripture. But there are no limits to Scripture; for every writing which the Church acknowledges as hers is Holy Scripture. Such pre-eminently are the Creeds of the General Councils, and especially the Niceno- Constantinopolitan Creed. Wherefore, the writing of Holy Scripture has gone on up to our day, and, if God pleases, yet more will be written. But in the Church there has not been, nor ever will be, any contradictions, either in Scripture, or in tradition, or in works; for in all three is Christ, one and unchangeable.

(2) For this reason, even he who is not sanctified by the spirit of grace may know the truth even as we hope that we know it: but this knowledge is in itself nothing but an hypothesis, more or less sound as an opinion, logical conviction, or external knowledge, which has nothing in common with inward and true knowledge, with faith which sees the invisible. And whether we have faith or no is known to God alone.

VI - Confession, Prayer and Deeds

Every action of the Church, directed by the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of life and truth, sets forth the full completeness of all His gifts - of faith, hope, and love: or in Scripture not faith only, but also the hope of the Church, is made manifest, and the love of God; and in works well pleasing to God there is made manifest not only love, but likewise faith and hope and grace; and in the living tradition of the Church which awaits from God her crown and consummation in Christ, not hope only, but also faith and love are manifested. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are inseparably united in one holy and living unity; but as works well pleasing to God belong more especially to love, and prayer well pleasing to God belongs more especially to hope, so a Creed well pleasing to God belongs more especially to faith, and the Church's creed is rightly called the Confession or Symbol of the Faith.

Wherefore it must be understood that Creeds and prayers and works are nothing of themselves, but are only an external manifestation of the inward spirit. Whereupon it also follows that neither he who prays nor he who does works nor he who confesses the Creed of the Church is pleasing to God, but only he who acts, confesses, and prays according to the spirit of Christ living within him. All men have not the same faith or the same hope or the same love; for a man may love the flesh, fix his hope on the world, and confess his belief in a lie; he may also love and hope and believe not fully, but only in part; and the Church calls his faith, faith, and his hope, hope, and his love, love; for he calls them so, and she will not dispute with him concerning words; but what she herself calls faith, hope, and love are the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and she knows that they are true and perfect.

VII - The Creed

Holy Church confesses her faith by her whole life; by her doctrine, which is inspired by the Holy Ghost; by her Sacraments in which the Holy Ghost works; and by her rites, which He directs. And the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Symbol is pre-eminently called her Confession of Faith.

In the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Symbol is comprised the confession of the Church's doctrine; but, in order that it might be known that the hope of the Church is inseparable from her doctrine, it likewise confesses her hope; for it is said: 'we look for' and not merely, 'we believe in,' that which is to come.

The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Symbol, the full and complete Confession of the Church, from which she allows nothing to be omitted and to which she permits nothing to be added, is as follows: "I believe in one God, Father, Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible: And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages; Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten, not made; of essence with the Father, through Whom all things were made: Who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from Heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became Man: and was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried: And He rose on the third day according to the Scriptures: And ascended into Heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father: And He is coming again with glory to judge the living and the dead: And His Kingdom will have no end: And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, Who proceeds from the Father, Who with the Father and the Son is equally worshipped and glorified, Who spoke by the Prophets: And in One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. I confess one Baptism for the remission of sins. I look for the Resurrection of the Dead: And the Life of the Age to come. Amen."

This confession, just as also the whole life of the Spirit, is comprehensible only to one who believes and is a member of the Church. It contains within itself mysteries inaccessible to the inquiring intellect, and manifest only to God Himself, and to those to whom He makes them manifest for an inward and living, not a dead and outward, knowledge. It contains within itself the mystery of the existence of God not only in relation to His outward action upon creation, but also to His inward eternal being. Therefore the pride of reason and of illegal domination, which appropriated to itself, in opposition to the decree of the whole Church (pronounced at the Council of Ephesus), the right to add its private explanations and human hypotheses to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Symbol is in itself in infection of the sanctity and inviolability of the Church. Just as the very pride of the separate Churches, which dared to change the Symbol of the whole Church without the consent of their brethren, was inspired by a spirit not of love, and was a crime against God and the Church, so also their blind wisdom, which did not comprehend the mysteries of God, was a distortion of the faith; for faith is not preserved where love has grown weak. Wherefore the addition of the words filioque [and the Son] contains a sort of imaginary dogma, unknown to any one of the writers well pleasing to God, or of the Bishops or successors of the Apostles in the first ages of the Church, and not spoken by Christ our Savior. As Christ spoke clearly, so did and does the Church clearly confess that the Holy Ghost proceedeth from the Father; for not only the outward, but also the inward, mysteries of God were revealed by Christ, and by the Spirit of Faith, to the holy Apostles and to the holy Church. When Theodoret called all who confessed the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son blasphemers, the Church, while detecting his many errors, in this case approved his judgment by an eloquent silence.(3) The Church does not deny that the Holy Spirit is sent not only by the Father, but also by the Son; the Church does not deny that the Holy Ghost is communicated to all rational creatures not only from the Father but also through the Son; but what she does reject is that the Holy Ghost had the principle of His procession in the God-head itself, not merely from the Father, but also from the Son. He who has renounced the spirit of love and divested himself of the gifts of grace cannot any longer possess inward knowledge - that is, faith - but limits himself to mere outward knowledge; wherefore he can only know what is external, and not the inner mysteries of God. Communities of Christians which had broken away from the Holy Church could no longer confess (inasmuch as they could not comprehend with the Spirit) the procession of the Holy Ghost, in the Godhead itself, from the Father only; but from that time they were obliged to confess only the external mission of the Spirit into all creation, a mission which comes to pass, not only from the Father, but also through the Son. They preserved the external form of the faith, but they lost the inner meaning and the grace of God; as in their confession, so also in their life.

(3) Silence on the part of the Church in not rejecting a writer is of great significance; but this silence becomes a decisive sentence when the Church does not reject a decision brought against a doctrine of any sort; for in not rejecting the decision she maintains it with all her authority.

VIII - The Church and Its Mysteries

Having confessed her faith in the Tri-hypostatic Deity, the Church confesses her faith in herself, because she acknowledges herself to be the instrument and vessel of divine grace, and acknowledges her works as the works of God, not as the works of the individuals of whom, in her visible manifestation [upon earth], she is composed. In this confession she shows that knowledge concerning her essence and being is likewise a gift of grace, granted from above, and accessible to faith alone and not to reason.

For what would be the need for me to say, "I believe," if I already knew? Is not faith the evidence of things not seen? But the visible Church is not the visible society of Christians, but the Spirit of God and the grace of the Sacraments living in this society. Wherefore even the visible Church is visible only to the believer; for to the unbeliever a sacrament is only a rite, and the Church merely a Society. The believer, while with the eyes of the body and of reason he sees the Church in her outward manifestations only, by the Spirit takes knowledge of her in her sacraments and prayers and works well pleasing to God. Wherefore he does not confuse her with the society which bears the name of Christians, for not every one that saith, "Lord, Lord," really belongs to the chosen race and to the seed of Abraham. But the true Christian knows by faith that the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church will never disappear from the face of the earth until the last judgement of all creation, that she will remain on earth invisible to fleshly eyes, or to the understanding which is wise according to the flesh, among the visible society of Christians, exactly in the same way as she remains visible to the eye of faith in the Church beyond the grave, but invisible to the bodily eyes. But the Christian also knows, by means of the faith, that the Church upon earth, although it is invisible, is always clothed in a visible form; that there neither was, or could have been, nor ever will be a time in which the sacraments will be mutilated, holiness will be dried up, or doctrine will be corrupted; and that he is no Christian who cannot say where, from the time of the Apostles themselves, the holy Sacraments have been and are being administered, where doctrine was and is preserved, where prayers were and are being sent up to the throne of grace. The Holy Church confesses and believes that the sheep have never been deprived of their Divine Pastor, and that the Church never could either err for want of understanding - for the understanding of God dwells within her - or submit to false doctrines for want of courage - for within her dwells the might of the Spirit of God.

Believing in the word of God's promise, which has named all the followers of Christ's doctrine the friends of Christ and His brethren, and in Him the adopted sons of God, the Holy Church confesses the paths by which it pleases God to lead fallen and dead humanity to reunion in the spirit of grace and life. Wherefore, having made mention of the prophets, the representatives of the age of the Old Testament, she confesses Sacraments, through which, in the Church of the New Testament, God sends down His grace upon men, and more especially she confesses the Sacrament of Baptism for the remission of sins, as containing within itself the principle of all the others; for through Baptism alone does a man enter into the unity of the Church, which is the custodian of all the rest of the Sacraments.

Confessing one Baptism for the remission of sins, as a Sacrament ordained by Christ Himself for entrance into the Church of the New Testament, the Church does not judge those who have not entered into communion with her through Baptism, for she knows and judges herself only. God alone knows the hardness of heart, and He judges the weakness of reason according to truth and mercy. Many have been saved and have received inheritance without having received the Sacrament of Baptism with water; for it was instituted only for the Church of the New Testament. He who rejects it rejects the whole Church and the Spirit of God which lives within her; but it was not ordained for man from the beginning, neither was it prescribed to the Church of the Old Testament. For if any one should say that circumcision was the Baptism of the Old Testament, he rejects Baptism for women, for whom there was no circumcision; and what will he say about the Patriarchs from Adam to Abraham, who did not receive the seal of circumcision? And in any case does not he acknowledge that outside the Church of the New Testament the Sacrament of Baptism was not of obligation? If he will say that it was on behalf of the Church of the Old Testament that Christ received Baptism, who will place a limit to the loving-kindness of God, who took upon Himself the sins of the world? Baptism is indeed of obligation; for it alone is the door into the Church of the New Testament, and in Baptism alone does man testify his assent to the redeeming action of grace. Wherefore also in Baptism alone is he saved.

Moreover, we know that in confessing one Baptism, as the beginning of all Sacraments, we do not reject the others; for, believing in the Church, we, together with her, confess Seven Sacraments, namely, Baptism, the Eucharist, Laying on of Hands [Holy Orders (Ordination)], Confirmation with Chrism, Marriage, Penance, and Unction of the Sick. There are also many other Sacraments; for every work which is done in faith, love, and hope, is suggested to man by the Spirit of God, and invokes the unseen Grace of God. But the Seven Sacraments are in reality not accomplished by any single individual who is worthy of the mercy of God, but by the whole Church in the person of an individual, even though he be unworthy.

Concerning the Sacrament of the Eucharist the Holy Church teaches that in it the change of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ is verily accomplished. She does not reject the word 'Transubstantiation'; but she does not assign to it that material meaning which is assigned to it by the teachers of the Churches which have fallen away. The change of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ is accomplished in the Church and for the Church. If a man receive the consecrated Gifts, or worship them, or think on them with faith, he verily receives, adores, and thinks on the Body and Blood of Christ. If he receive unworthily he verily rejects the Body and Blood of Christ; in any case, in faith or in unbelief, he is sanctified or condemned by the Body and Blood of Christ. But this Sacrament is in the Church and not for the outside world, not for fire, not for irrational creatures, not for corruption, and not for the man who has not heard the law of Christ. In the Church itself (we are speaking of the visible Church), to the elect and to the reprobate the Holy Eucharist is not a mere commemoration concerning the mystery of redemption, it is not a presence of spiritual gifts within the bread and wine, it it not merely a spiritual reception of the Body and Blood of Christ, but is His true Body and Blood. Not in spirit alone was Christ pleased to unite Himself with the faithful, but also in Body and in Blood; in order that that union might be complete, and not only spiritual but also corporal. Both nonsensical explanations concerning the relations of the holy Sacrament to elements and irrational creatures (when the Sacrament was instituted for the Church alone), and that spiritual pride which despises body and blood and rejects the corporal union with Christ, are equally opposed to the Church. We shall not rise again without the body, and no spirit, except the Spirit of God, can be said to be entirely incorporeal. He that despises the body sins through pride of spirit.

Of the Sacrament of Ordination the Holy Church teaches that through it the grace which brings the Sacraments into effect is handed on in succession from the Apostles and from Christ Himself: not as if no Sacrament could be brought to effect otherwise than through Ordination (for every Christian is able through Baptism to open the door of the Church to an infant or a Jew or a heathen), but that Ordination contains within itself all the fulness of grace given by Christ to His Church. And the Church herself, in communicating to her members the fulness of spiritual gifts, in the strength of the freedom given her by God, has appointed differences in the grades of Ordination. The Presbyter who performs all the Sacraments except Ordination has one gift, the Bishop who performs Ordination has another; and higher than the gift of the Episcopate there is nothing. The Sacrament gives to him who receives it this great significance that, even if he be unworthy, yet in performing his Sacramental service his action necessarily proceeds not from himself, but from the whole Church, that is, from Christ living within her. If Ordination ceased, all the Sacraments except Baptism would also cease; and the human race would be torn away from grace: for the Church herself would then bear witness that Christ had departed from her.

Concerning the Sacrament of Confirmation with Chrism the Church teaches that in it the gifts of the Holy Ghost are conferred upon the Christian, confirming his faith and inward holiness: and this Sacrament is by the will of the Holy Church performed not by Bishops only, but also by Presbyters, although the Chrism itself can only be blessed by a Bishop.

Of the Sacrament of Marriage the Holy Church teaches that the grace of God, which blesses the succession of generations in the temporal existence of the human race and the holy union of man and woman for the organization of the family, is a sacramental gift imposing upon those who receive it a high obligation of mutual love and spiritual holiness, through which that which otherwise is sinful and material is endued with righteousness and purity. Wherefore the great teachers of the Church, the Apostles, recognize the Sacrament of marriage even amongst the heathen: for while they forbid concubinage, they confirm marriage between Christians and heathens; saying that the man is sanctified by the believing wife, and the wife by the believing husband (1 Cor. 7:14). These words of the Apostle do not mean that an unbeliever could be saved by his or her union with a believer, but that the marriage is sanctified: for it is not the person, but the husband or wife, who is sanctified. One person is not saved through another, but the husband or the wife is sanctified in relation to the marriage itself. And thus marriage is not unclean, even amongst idolaters; but they themselves know not of the grace of God given unto them. The Holy Church through her ordained ministers acknowledges and blesses the union, blessed by God, of husband and wife. Wherefore marriage is not a mere rite but a true Sacrament. And it receives its accomplishment in the Holy Church, for in her alone is every holy thing accomplished in its fulness.

Concerning the Sacrament of Penance the Holy Church teaches that without it the spirit of man cannot be cleansed from the bondage of sin and of sinful pride: that he himself cannot remit his own sins (for we have only the power to condemn, not to justify ourselves), and that the Church alone has the power of justifying, for within her lives the fulness of the Spirit of Christ. We know that the first-fruits of the Kingdom of heaven, after the Savior, entered into the sanctuary of God by the judging of himself [the spirit of man], that is to say, by the Sacrament of Penance; for he said, "for we receive the due reward of our deeds;" and he received absolution from Him who alone can absolve, and does absolve by the mouth of His Church.

Of the Sacrament of Anointing with consecrated oil [i.e., Unction of the Sick] the Holy Church teaches, that in it is perfected the blessing of the whole fight (2 Tim. 4:7) which has been endured by a man in his life upon earth, of all the journey which has been gone through by him in faith and humility, and that in Unction of the Sick the divine verdict itself is pronounced upon man's earthly frame, healing it, when all medicinal means are of no avail, or else permitting death to destroy the corruptible body, which is no longer required for the Church on earth or the mysterious ways of God.

IX - Faith and Life in Church Unity

The Church, even upon earth, lives, not an earthly human life, but a life of grace which is divine. Wherefore not only each of her members, but she herself as a whole, solemnly calls herself "Holy." Her visible manifestation is contained in the Sacraments; but her inward life in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, in faith, hope, and love. Oppressed and persecuted by enemies without, at times agitated and lacerated within by evil passions of her children, she has been and ever will be preserved without wavering or change wherever the Sacraments and spiritual holiness are preserved. Never is she either disfigured or in need of reformation. She lives not under a law of bondage, but under a law of liberty. She neither acknowledges any authority over her, except her own, nor any tribunal, but the tribunal of faith (for reason does not comprehend her), and she expresses her love, her faith, and her hope in her prayers and rites, suggested to her by the Spirit of truth and by the grace of Christ. Wherefore her rites themselves, even if they are not unchangeable (for they are composed by the spirit of liberty and may be changed according to the judgement of the Church) can never, in any case, contain any, even the smallest, admixture of error or false doctrine. And the rites (of the Church) while they are unchanged are of obligation to the members of the Church; for in their observance is the joy of holy unity.

External unity is the unity manifested in the communion of Sacraments; while internal unity is unity of spirit. Many (as for instance some of the martyrs) have been saved without having been made partakers of so much as one of the Sacraments of the Church (not even of Baptism) but no one is saved without partaking of the inward holiness of the Church, of her faith, hope, and love: for it is not works which save, but faith. And faith, that is to say, true and living faith, is not twofold, but single. Wherefore both those who say that faith alone does not save, but that works also are necessary, and those who say that faith saves without works, are void of understanding; for if there are no works, then faith is shown to be dead; and, if it be dead, it is also untrue; for in true faith there is Christ the truth and the life; but if it be not true, then it is false, that is to say, mere external knowledge. But can that which is false save a man? But if it be true, then it is also a living faith, that is to say, one which does works; but if it does works, what works are still required?

The divinely inspired Apostle saith: "Show me the faith of which thou boastest thyself by thy works, even as I show my faith by my works." Does he acknowledge two faiths? No, but exposes a senseless boast. "Thou believest in God, but the devils also believe." Does he acknowledge that there is faith in devils? No, but he detects the falsehood which boasts itself of a quality which even devils possess. "As the body," saith he, "without the soul is dead, so faith without works is dead also." Does he compare faith to the body and works to the Spirit? No, for such a simile would be untrue; but the meaning of his words is clear. Just as a body without a soul is no longer a man, and cannot properly be called a man, but a corpse, so faith also that does no works cannot be called true faith, but false; that is to say, an external knowledge, fruitless, and attainable even by devils. That which is written simply ought also to be read simply. Wherefore those who rely upon the Apostle James for a proof that there is a dead faith and a living faith, and as it were two faiths, do not comprehend the words of the Apostle; for the Apostle bears witness not for them, but against them. Likewise when the Great Apostle of the Gentiles says, "What is the use of faith without love, even of such a faith as would remove mountains?" (Cp. 1 Cor. 13:2) he does not maintain the possibility of such faith without love: but assuming its possibility he shows that it would be useless. Holy Scripture ought not to be read in the spirit of worldly wisdom, which wrangles over words, but in the spirit of the wisdom of God, and of spiritual simplicity. The Apostle, in defining faith, says, "it is the evidence of things unseen, and the confidence of things hoped for" (not merely of things awaited, or things to come), but if we hope, we also desire, and if we desire, we also love; for it is impossible to desire that which a man loves not. Or have the devils also hope? Wherefore there is but one faith, and when we ask, "Can true faith save without works?" we ask a senseless question; or rather no question at all: for true faith is a living faith which does works; it is faith in Christ, and Christ in faith.

Those who have mistaken a dead faith, that is to say, a false faith, or mere external knowledge, for true faith, have gone so far in their delusion that, without knowing it themselves, they have made of it an eighth Sacrament. The Church has faith, but it is a living faith; for she has also sanctity. But if one man or one bishop is necessarily to have the faith, what are we to say? Has he sanctity? No, for it may be he is notorious for crime and immorality. But the faith is to abide in him even though he be a sinner. So the faith within him is an eighth Sacrament; inasmuch as every Sacrament is the action of the Church in an individual, even though he be unworthy. But through this Sacrament what sort of faith abides in him? A living faith? No, for he is a sinner. But a dead faith, that is to say, external knowledge, is attainable, even by devils. And is this to be an eighth Sacrament? Thus does departure from the truth bring about its own punishment.(4)

We must understand that neither faith nor hope nor love saves of itself (for will faith in reason, or hope in the world, or love for the flesh save us?). No, it is the object of faith which saves. If a man believes in Christ, he is saved in his faith by Christ; if he believes in the Church, he is saved by the Church; if he believes in Christ's Sacraments, he is saved by them; for Christ our God is in the Church and the Sacraments. The Church of the Old Testament was saved by faith in a Redeemer to come. Abraham was saved by the same Christ as we. He possessed Christ in hope, while we possess Him in joy. Wherefore he who desires Baptism is baptized in will; while he who has received Baptism possesses it in joy. An identical faith in Baptism saves both of them. But a man may say, "if faith in Baptism saves, what is the use of being actually baptized?" If he does not receive Baptism, what did he wish for? It is evident that the faith which desires Baptism must be perfected by the reception of Baptism itself, which is its joy. Therefore also the house of Cornelius received the Holy Ghost before he received Baptism, while the eunuch was filled with the same Spirit immediately after Baptism (Acts 10:44-47, 8:38, cf. 2:38). For God can glorify the Sacrament of Baptism just as well before, as after, its administration. Thus the difference between the opus operans and opus operatum disappears. We know that there are many persons who have not christened their children, and many who have not admitted them to Communion in the Holy Mysteries, and many who have not confirmed them: but the Holy Church understands things otherwise, christening infants and confirming them and admitting them to Communion. She has not ordained these things in order to condemn unbaptized children, whose angels do always behold the face of God (Matt. 18:10); but she has ordained this, according to the spirit of love which lives within her, in order that the first thought of a child arriving at years of discretion should be, not only a desire, but also a joy for sacraments which have been already received. And can one know the joy of a child who to all appearances has not yet arrived at discretion? Did not the prophet, even before His birth, exult for joy concerning Christ (St. Luke 1:41)? Those who have deprived children of Baptism and Confirmation and Communion are they who, having inherited the blind wisdom of blind heathendom, have not comprehended the majesty of God's Sacraments, but have required reasons and uses for everything and, having subjected the doctrine of the Church to scholastic explications, will not even pray unless they see in the prayer some direct goal or advantage. But our law is not a law of bondage or of hireling service, laboring for wages, but a law of the adoption of sons, and of love which is free.

We know that when any one of us falls he falls alone; but no one is saved alone. He who is saved is saved in the Church, as a member of her, and in unity with all her other members. If any one believes, he is in the communion of faith; if he loves, he is in the communion of love; if he prays, he is in the communion of prayer. Wherefore no one can rest his hope on his own prayers, and every one who prays asks the whole Church for intercession, not as if he had doubts of the intercession of Christ, the one Advocate, but in the assurance that the whole Church ever prays for all her members. All the angels pray for us, the apostles, martyrs, and patriarchs, and above them all, the Mother of our Lord, and this holy unity is the true life of the Church. But if the Church, visible and invisible, prays without ceasing, why do we ask her for her prayers? Do we not entreat mercy of God and Christ, although His mercy preventeth our prayer? The very reason that we ask the Church for her prayers is that we know that she gives the assistance of her intercession even to him that does not ask for it, and to him that asks she gives it in far greater measure than he asks: for in her is the fulness of the Spirit of God. Thus we glorify all whom God has glorified and is glorifying; for how should we say that Christ is living within us, if we do not make ourselves like unto Christ? Wherefore we glorify the Saints, the Angels, and the Prophets, and more than all the most pure Mother of the Lord Jesus, not acknowledging her either to have been conceived without sin, or to have been perfect (for Christ alone is without sin and perfect), but remembering that the pre-eminence, passing all understanding, which she has above all God's creatures was borne witness to by the Angel and by Elizabeth and, above all, by the Savior Himself when He appointed John, His great Apostle and seer of mysteries, to fulfil the duties of a son and serve her.

Just as each of us requires prayers from all, so each person owes his prayers on behalf of all, the living and the dead, and even those who are as yet unborn; for in praying, as we do with all the Church, that the world may come to the knowledge of God, we pray not only for the present generation, but for those whom God will hereafter call into life. We pray for the living that the grace of God may be upon them, and for the dead that they may become worthy of the vision of God's face. We know nothing of an intermediate state of souls, which have neither been received into the kingdom of God, nor condemned to torture, for of such a state we have received no teaching either from the Apostles or from Christ; we do not acknowledge Purgatory, that is, the purification of souls by sufferings from which they may be redeemed by their own works or those of others: for the Church knows nothing of salvation by outward means, not any sufferings whatever they may be, except those of Christ; nor of bargaining with God, as in the case of a man buying himself off by good works.

All such heathenism as this remains with the inheritors of the wisdom of the heathen, with those who pride themselves in place, or name, or in territorial dominion, and who have instituted an eighth Sacrament of dead faith. But we pray in the spirit of love, knowing that no one will be saved otherwise than by the prayer of all the Church, in which Christ lives, knowing and trusting that so long as the end of time has not come, all the members of the Church, both living and departed, are being perfected incessantly by mutual prayer. The Saints whom God has glorified are much higher than we, but higher than all is the Holy Church, which comprises within herself all the Saints, and prays for all, as may be seen in the divinely inspired Liturgy. In her prayer our prayer is also heard, however unworthy we may be to be called sons of the Church. If, while worshipping and glorifying the Saints, we pray that God may glorify them, we do not lay ourselves open to the charge of pride; for to us who have received permission to call God "Our Father" leave has also been granted to pray, "Hallowed be Thy Name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done." And if we are permitted to pray of God that He will glorify His Name, and accomplish His Will, who will forbid us to pray Him to glorify His Saints, and to give repose to His elect? For those indeed who are not of the elect we do not pray, just as Christ prayed not for the whole world, but for those whom the Lord had given unto Him (St. John 17). Let no one say: "What prayer shall I apportion for the living or the departed, when my prayers are insufficient even for myself?" For if he is not able to pray, of what use would it be to pray even for himself? But in truth the spirit of love prays in him. Likewise let him not say: "What is the good of my prayer for another, when he prays for himself, and Christ Himself intercedes for him?" When a man prays, it is the spirit of love which prays within him. Let him not say: "It is even now impossible to change the judgement of God," for his prayer itself is included in the ways of God, and God foresaw it. If he be a member of the Church his prayer is necessary for all her members. If the hand should say that it did not require blood from the rest of the body, and that it would not give its own blood to it, the hand would wither. So a man is also necessary to the Church, as long as he is in her; and, if he withdraws himself from communion with her, he perishes himself and will cease to be any longer a member of the Church. The Church prays for all, and we pray together for all; but our prayer must be true, and a true expression of love, and not a mere form of words. Not being able to love all men, we pray for those whom we love, and our prayer is not hypocritical; but we pray God that we may be able to love all and pray for all without hypocrisy. Mutual prayer is the blood of the Church, and the glorification of God her breath. We pray in a spirit of love, not of interest, in the spirit of filial freedom, not of the law of the hireling demanding his pay. Every man who asks: "What use is there in prayer?" acknowledges himself to be in bondage. True prayer is true love.

Love and unity are above everything, but love expresses itself in many ways: by works, by prayer, and by spiritual songs. The Church bestows her blessing upon all these expressions of love. If a man cannot express his love for God by word, but expresses it by a visible representation, that is to say an image (icon), will the Church condemn him? No, but she will condemn the man who condemns him, for he is condemning another's love. We know that without the use of an image men may also be saved and have been saved, and if a man's love does not require an image he will be saved without one; but if the love of his brother requires an image, he, in condemning this brother's love, condemneth himself; if a man being a Christian dare not listen without a feeling of reverence to a prayer or spiritual song composed by his brother, how dare he look without reverence upon the image which his love, and not his art, has produced? The Lord Himself, who knows the secrets of the heart, has designed more than once to glorify a prayer or psalm; will a man forbid Him to glorify an image or the graves of the Saints? One may say: "The Old Testament has forbidden the representation of God;" but does he, who thus thinks he understands better than Holy Church the words which she herself wrote (that is, the Scriptures), not see that it was not a representation of God which the Old Testament forbade (for it allowed the Cherubim, and the brazen serpent, and the writing of the Name of God), but that it forbade a man to make unto himself a god in the similitude of any object in earth or in heaven, visible or even imaginary?

If a man paints an image to remind him of the invisible and inconceivable God, he is not making to himself an idol. If he imagines God to himself and thinks that He is like to his imagination, he maketh to himself an idol - that is the meaning of the prohibition in the Old Testament. But an image [icon] (that is to say, the Name of God painted in colors), or a representation of His Saints, made by love, is not forbidden by the spirit of truth. Let none say, "Christians are going over to idolatry;" for the spirit of Christ which preserves the Church is wiser than a man's calculating wisdom. Wherefore a man may indeed be saved without images, but he must not reject images.

The Church accepts every rite which expresses spiritual aspiration towards God, just as she accepts prayer and images [icons], but she recognizes as higher than all rites the holy Liturgy, in which is expressed all the fulness of the doctrine and spirit of the Church; and this, not only by conventional signs or symbols of some kind, but by the word of life and truth inspired from above. He alone knows the Church who knows the Liturgy. Above all is the unity of holiness and love.

(4) An infallibility in a dead faith is an error in itself, so its deadness is expressed in the fact that this infallibility is bound up with objects of inanimate nature, with a place of residence, or with dead walls, or with diocesan succession, or with a chair. But we know who it was that in the time of Christ's sufferings sat in the chair of Moses.

X - Salvation

The Holy Church, in confessing that she looks for the Resurrection of the dead and the final judgement of all mankind, acknowledges that the perfecting of all her members will be fulfilled together with her own, and that the future life pertains, not only to the spirit, but also to the spiritual body; for God alone is a perfectly incorporeal Spirit. Wherefore she rejects the pride of those who preach a doctrine of an incorporeal state beyond the grave, and consequently despise the body, in which Christ rose from the dead. This body will not be a fleshly body, but will be like unto the corporeal state of the Angels, inasmuch as Christ Himself said that we shall be like unto the Angels.

In the last Judgement our justification in Christ will be revealed in its fulness; not our sanctification only, but also our justification, for no man has been or is as yet completely sanctified, but there is still need of justification. Christ worketh all that is good in us, whether it be in faith or in hope or in love; while we only submit ourselves to His working, but no man submits himself wholly. Therefore there is still need of justification by the sufferings and blood of Christ. Who, then, can continue to speak of the merits of his own works, or of a treasury of merits and prayers? Only those who are still living under a law of bondage. Christ works all good in us, but we never wholly submit ourselves, none, not even the Saints, as the Savior Himself has said. Grace works all, and grace is given freely and to all, that none shall be able to murmur, but not equally to all, not according to predestination, but according to foreknowledge, as the Apostle says. A smaller talent indeed is given to the man in whom the Lord has foreseen negligence, in order that the rejection of a greater gift should not serve to greater condemnation. And we do not increase the talents which have been intrusted to us ourselves, but they are put out to the exchangers, in order that even here there should not be any merit of ours, but only non- resistance to the grace which causes the increase. Thus the distinction between "sufficient" and "effectual" grace disappears. Grace worketh all. If a man submits to it the Lord is perfected in him, and perfects him; but let not a man boast himself in his obedience, for his obedience itself is of grace. But we never submit ourselves wholly: wherefore besides sanctification we ask also for justification.

All is accomplished in the consummation of the general judgement, and the Spirit of God, that is, the Spirit of faith, hope, and love, will reveal Himself in all His fulness, and every gift will attain its utmost perfection; but above them all will be love. Not that it is to be thought that faith and hope, which are the gifts of God, will perish (for they are not separable from love), but love alone will preserve its name, while faith, arriving at its consummation, will then have become full inward knowledge and sight; and hope will have become joy; for even on earth we know that the stronger it is, the more joyful it is.

XI - Unity of Orthodoxy

By the will of God the Holy Church, after the falling away of many schisms, and of the Roman Patriarchate, was preserved in the Greek Dioceses and Patriarchates, and only those communities can acknowledge one another as fully Christian which preserve their unity with the Eastern Patriarchates, or enter into this unity 1. For there is one God, and one Church, and within her there is neither dissension nor disagreement.

And therefore the Church is called Orthodox, or Eastern, or Greco-Russian; but all these are only temporary designations. The Church ought not to be accused of pride for calling herself Orthodox, inasmuch as she also calls herself Holy. When false doctrines shall have disappeared, there will be no further need for the name Orthodox, for then there will be no erroneous Christianity. When the Church shall have extended herself, or the fulness of the nations shall have entered into her, then all local appellations will cease; for the Church is not bound up with any locality; she neither boasts herself of any particular see or territory, nor preserves the inheritance of pagan pride; but she calls herself One Holy Catholic and Apostolic; knowing that the whole world belongs to her, and that no locality therein possesses any special significance, but only temporarily can and does serve for the glorification of the name of God, according to His unsearchable will.

+ + +
Note by Ep. Maelruain, Cele De:
1-- It was true during A. S. Khomiakov's lifetime that intercommunion with the Eastern communities was a guarantee of the fidelity of the communicants to Truth Christianity. Sadly during the 1920s the Eastern Patriachates became more wordly in their concerns and began to accept ideas that are alien to the Christian Faith. Khomiakov counld not have forseen the restoration of Western Orthodox churches, but that is a necessary step toward the dissolution of falsehood he describes in the last paragraph. We share the optimism of the last paragraph: God will not let the devil's error stand.
(ASCII typed by Matushka Elizabeth Dowling)

For an Orthodox criticism of this theology of the Church, please CLICK HERE.

THE ORDINARIATE PORTAL, BRIDGE ACROSS THE TIBER

2011-06-04T12:54:00.000-07:00

Crisis Magazine: A new bridge across the Tiber

3062011

Fr Dwight Longenecker writes at Crisis Magazine:

The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham has now been established in England. By Easter this year, three bishops, sixty priests, and nearly one thousand lay people had left the Church of England to be received into the Catholic Church. Archbishop Donald Wuerl is working with interested parties to establish the ordinariate in the United States, and progress is being made in Canada and Australia for ordinariates to be erected there later this year.

What will be the future of this new ordinariate? It could be that it will simply bring into full communion with the Catholic Church a small number of conservative Anglo-Catholics. They were an eccentric church within a church in the Anglican Communion, and some predict that they will continue to be an eccentric church within the Catholic Church. Around the world, there will be small groups of traditionalist Anglicans who will differ from all the other tiny Anglican schismatic churches, in that they will actually be in full communion with Rome. They will keep to themselves and be viewed by mainstream Catholics as an eccentric rump of dissident Anglicans who like incense and lace, old-fashioned language and splendid old hymns, who somehow managed to worm their way into the Catholic Church. They will be regarded with bemusement and some bewilderment. Anglicans will shake their heads and wish them well and wonder why they didn’t become “proper Catholics” if they wanted to swim the Tiber. Eventually, the theory goes, they will die out. Their descendants will be absorbed into the mainstream of the Catholic Church, and the whole thing will be a footnote in the history of ecumenism.

A second possibility is that the Anglican Church herself will eventually disintegrate or morph into something unrecognizably Anglican, and the ordinariate will be all that is left of historic Anglicanism. In this scenario, an increasing number of Anglicans worldwide will see that, if they want to be historic Christians within the Anglican tradition, the only place to do that will be within the ordinariate, and they will flee the sinking ship of Anglicanism to join it.

This is almost certainly not going to happen, for several reasons: First of all, the Evangelical Anglicans are Protestants. After they have made the polite ecumenical noises, they do not really understand or appreciate the Catholic Faith. Secondly, many Anglo-Catholics also do not really want to be Catholic: They want to be Anglican. They honestly do not see the importance of being in full visible communion with the Catholic Church. They have serious misgivings about some of the Catholic dogmas, and they continue to believe that they are “Catholic within the Anglican Church.” Thirdly, the liberal wing of the Anglican church certainly has no wish to be in full communion with Rome. They dislike Roman authority, dogma, and moral teachings and are increasingly anti-Catholic.

However, there is a third way. The ordinariate could develop in a very different and exciting direction. The way to understand this more dynamic possibility is to see the ordinariate as a new bridge across the Tiber for a whole range of Protestant Christians. Already, conservative, liturgically minded Lutherans are asking why there isn’t a Lutheran ordinariate, while some of them point to the formal intercommunion that already exists between Lutherans and Anglicans and argue that the Anglican ordinariate should naturally be open to Lutherans as well.

And if Lutherans may come across the ordinariate bridge, why not Methodists? After all, Methodism was founded as a schism from Anglicanism. Could not conservative, liturgically minded Methodists also find their way “home to Rome” through the Anglican ordinariate?

For this to happen, the Anglican ordinariate will have to be flexible, and the members will have to see their mission not simply as one of conservation of a venerable patrimony but one of evangelization and outreach. The signs that this is the spirit of the ordinariate are already very positive. First of all, those who have joined the ordinariate have truly left everything to become Catholics. The Anglican bishops, priests, and people have turned their back on their parsonages, palaces, parish churches, and pension plans. They have set out with a true missionary spirit, and the sort of men and women who are willing to take such a step of faith will bring that same enthusiasm to the task of helping the ordinariate be the structure for ecumenical evangelization that it should be.

The way things might develop is best explained with a few examples of how Anglican Use Catholicism has already grown. The Church of the Atonement in San Antonio, Texas, was founded in the early 1980s by a group of disenchanted Episcopalians who felt called to the Catholic Faith. They discovered Rev. Christopher Phillips, a bright young Episcopal priest who was a convert from Methodism who also felt called to the Catholic Faith. They invited him to be their pastor, so he and his young family moved to Texas and they got started: Just a few families with a pastor, meeting in a borrowed room at the local Catholic parish on a Sunday afternoon. As part of the pastoral provision, which allowed former married Anglican priests to be ordained, personal Anglican Use parishes were established within existing Latin rite dioceses. Now, some 30 years later, the Church of the Atonement is a thriving parish with a beautiful church, school, and thousands in attendance.

In Springfield, Kansas, Shane Schaetzel, a former Evangelical who was an Episcopalian and eventually came into full communion with the Catholic Faith, has started a prayer group with fellow Catholics, a few Anglicans, and Evangelicals who are interested in Catholicism. The group meets for prayer and uses the Vatican-approved, Anglican-style Book of Divine Worship. They hope to found a new Anglican Use parish. In Scranton, Pennsylvania, Rev. Eric Bergman led members of his Episcopal congregation into full communion with the Catholic Church and, with the encouragement of the diocese and local clergy, has established a small but thriving Anglican Use congregation. In Houston, the parish of Our Lady of Walsingham has grown from similar small beginnings to a beautiful parish and thriving congregation of Catholics worshipping within the Anglican tradition.

What do these small pioneering efforts indicate? They show not only what can be done, but also the spirit in which it will be accomplished. The way to a very exciting future for the Anglican ordinariate is for the new Anglican-style Catholics to set out with missionary fervor. They might begin with American Evangelicals. Those who observe American Evangelicalism only through the mainstream media might assume that all Evangelicals are devotees of big, Baptist mega-churches, or are followers of fire-breathing fundamentalist televangelists. They do not understand the breadth and complexity of American Evangelicalism, and therefore do not realize that there are many Evangelicals who are not extremists.

There are many well-educated and thoughtful Christians who are very interested in the historic Faith. Many are disenchanted with mainstream Evangelicalism and are searching for a church rooted in history. They long for a church that is liturgical, that has a deep spirituality. When they leave their Evangelical churches and search for something more, their first stop is usually the Episcopal or Lutheran churches. They soon find that these churches are chest-deep in the whole liberal and radical agenda, so they sadly depart.

If these Evangelical pilgrims summon the courage to overcome their deeply ingrained anti-Catholic prejudice and go to their local Catholic parish, they find that it is either as liberal and trendy as the Episcopalians, or that there are cultural and devotional obstacles that they find difficult to overcome. Even if they come to agree with Catholic doctrine and are received into the Church, they are still aware of the large cultural gap between the Protestantism they were brought up on and the Catholic Church they have joined.

What they are looking for is a church that holds to the fullness of Catholic doctrine and practice but has some of the practical strengths of Evangelical congregations. If these sincerely searching Evangelical Christians could find a church that was fully Catholic and yet offered a liturgy and structure that felt traditionally Anglican, they would immediately feel at home.

If they found a home in parishes of the Anglican ordinariate, what would these converts bring to the whole Catholic Church? We only have to look at the contributions made to modern American Catholicism by those Evangelicals who have already made the journey: Steve Ray, Marcus Grodi, Scott Hahn, Tom Howard, Mark Shea, Carl Olson, and Francis Beckwith are just a few well-known names, but there are many more. The converts from Evangelicalism bring to the Catholic Church a sincere love of Christ, a profound faith, deep knowledge of the Sacred Scriptures, a heart ready to learn, and a love for the fullness of the Faith and a desire to bring more of their Protestant brothers and sisters into the full embrace of Mother Church.

For the Anglican ordinariate to open up in this way, those involved will have to have an old-fashioned missionary spirit. They will need to walk away from Anglican buildings and property. They will need to study how to plant and grow churches. They will need to make the financial sacrifices necessary for church growth. The Evangelicals are the Christians who know just how to do this. And if they succeed, the Anglican ordinariate could become a new bridge across the Tiber and the way for many Protestants to find their way into full communion with the Church

The Atonement Academy Commencement Address

2011-06-04T12:49:00.000-07:00

The Atonement Academy Commencement Address

Joan Lewis (EWTN) Interviews Cardinal Wuerl On The Anglican Ordinariates in the USA

2011-05-27T15:22:00.000-07:00

PLEASE CLICK HERE

2011-05-25T08:17:00.000-07:00

Bishop Lancelot Andrewes

Ecclesia Anglicana | Father Allan R. G. Hawkins | Introduction to Anglicans and the Roman Catholic Church: Reflections on Recent Developments, edited by Stephen Cavanaugh | Ignatius Insight

http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2011/hawkins_introanglicansrcc_may2011.asp

Ecclesia Anglicana had flourished for perhaps thirteen hundred years before the events of the Reformation created what we now call Anglicanism—a phenomenon that cannot be understood without reference to its ancient spiritual and cultural heritage, even though the separation of the Church of England from the rest of Western Christendom inevitably introduced a schismatic quality to even the best of Anglican thought.

The English Reformation, unlike the parallel movements elsewhere in Europe, was not a single, cataclysmic event, but rather a process that unfolded over more than a century—from Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy of 1534 to the reestablishment of the Church of England with the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in the person of King Charles II in 1660.

A striking feature of this process is the frequency with which the phrase "until further order to be taken", or similar terminology, is to be found in the parliamentary enactments, legal documents, and Orders in Council of the period. In other words, each step of the reform was understood to be provisional, of temporary application, until further developments unfolded, until some ultimate denouement be attained.

In every subsequent century, that longed-for denouement has been seen—by at least some—to be the restoration of Catholic unity and peace for the Church. Thus Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, in his Preces Privatae, would pray each Sunday: "O let the heart and soul of all believers again become one", and, each Monday, "For the Universal Church, its confirmation and growth. For the Eastern Church, its deliverance and unity. For the Western Church, its restoration and pacification."

On the day of his appointment to Canterbury in 1633, Rome was ready to offer a cardinal's hat to Archbishop William Laud. At the time of the restoration of the monarchy twenty-seven years later, Charles II appears to have sought the formation of a Uniate status for the Church of England. In the eighteenth century, there were some reunion activities—notably the correspondence between Archbishop Wake and certain doctors at the Sorbonne in Paris with regard to the possibility of union between the Anglican and Gallican churches. The nineteenth century brought the Oxford Movement, and all that stemmed from it. The twentieth century saw the Malines Conversations and then the inauguration, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, and Pope Paul VI in 1967 of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC).

Notwithstanding the early achievement of understanding in the long-controversial areas of Eucharist, ministry, and authority, the bright hope that the inauguration of ARCIC originally inspired quickly gave way to the bleak reality of the implications of the pressure for the ordination of women—first to the priesthood and then to the episcopate—in the Church of England and elsewhere in the Anglican Communion. Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Jan Willebrands, then-president of the Council for Promoting Christian Unity, expressed to Archbishop Robert Runcie their profound concern that the course on which Anglicanism was embarked-destroying, as it would, the integrity of its sacramental system-would effectively put an end to the hope of reconciliation. Sometime later, Cardinal Walter Kasper said that the ordination of women to the episcopate "signified a breaking away from apostolic tradition and a further obstacle for reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the Church of England". Sadly, indeed, Anglicanism chose to proceed on what has proved to be a self-destructive path, and to ignore the imperative of that unity which the Lord wills for his Church "so that the world may believe".

Many Anglicans, however, were unable to abandon that vision and the obedience it demanded. Thus, in 1977, Father James Parker, on behalf of some members of the American Province of the Society of the Holy Cross (Societas Sanctae Crucis) presented to the Holy See their petition to be allowed to be ordained to the Catholic priesthood with a dispensation from the law of celibacy, following entry into full communion.

The Society of the Holy Cross had been founded in London in 1855. Its membership is comprised of Anglican bishops and priests who live under a Rule and who desire to bear witness to the Cross of Christ in their vocation and ministry within the Church and their whole lives. The achievement of Catholic unity has long been among its principal objectives.

In the same year, in a parallel initiative, Canon Albert J. duBois, accompanied by two other Episcopal priests, Father W T. St. John Brown and Father John Barker, traveled to Rome where, with the help of the late Monsignor Richard Schuler, they met with Cardinal Franjo Seper, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (whose English secretary at the time was Monsignor William Levada). They asked for ordination as Catholic priests and the establishment of their parishes with special liturgical customs deriving from the Anglican tradition.

The eventual outcome of these initiatives was the establishment by Pope John Paul II, in the summer of 1980, of a special "Pastoral Provision" which—although rejecting the idea of any kind of "ritual diocese"—made possible the erection, within existing dioceses in the United States, of "personal parishes" for former Episcopalians and Anglicans, who, in full communion with the Holy See, could pray, worship, and celebrate the sacraments within the Anglican-derived ethos of the Book of Divine Worship. William Oddie noted in his book The Roman Option that what had been accomplished "was a small step towards the dream of an Anglicanism" which the Malines Conversations ofsixty years earlier had foreseen as " 'united not absorbed'; but it was real enough for those who became involved in it." [1]

As Henry Brandreth noted in his Ecumenical Ideals of the Oxford Movement, there is scarcely a generation from the time of the Reformation to our own day which has not caught, whether perfectly or imperfectly, the vision of a reunited Christendom. [2]

So it was that a further, very important initiative was undertaken in 1993. In October of that year, Bishop Clarence Pope, then-Episcopal Bishop of Fort Worth, went to Rome with Cardinal Bernard Law, then-Archbishop of Boston and ecclesiastical delegate for the Pastoral Provision, to meet with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. They took with them a preparatory document, drawn up by two noted Anglican theologians, Doctor Wayne Hankey and Father Jeffrey Steenson. This stated, in part, that

we believe that a truly historic opportunity now presents itself, namely, for the healing of the great Western schism, in a way which few envisioned. The Anglican Church is not the only church of the Reformation to be breaking up, foundering on the rocks of post-modern secularism it has no power to avoid. We now believe there is little hope that the Anglican Communion as presently constituted, will ever be able to move toward corporate reunion with the Catholic Church. The hopes we had placed in the official conversations of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission must now find their fulfilment in some other form. [3]

In the light of subsequent developments, it is of the greatest interest to note that the immediate response was one of generous and full agreement. It was, very evidently, providential moment; and it was recognized that solutIons to the concrete theological, liturgical, and juridical problems must be sought and found. In the light of the underlying agreement in faith this could not be impossible. It was essential to move forward with patience, courage, and tolerance, to define the appropriate juridical structure and to define its details.

And now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we welcome the bright promise of the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, the fruit of the patience and courage of Pope Benedict XVI, who has now provided the most generous and pastoral welcome to those who come from the Anglican patrimony. As Bishop Peter Elliott, Auxiliary Bishop of Melbourne, has recently said: "Anglicans can longer speak of 'swimming the Tiber'. Pope Benedict XVI has built a noble bridge.... The Tiber crossings of those Anglicans who have gone before us were often difficult and dangerous—and, in any event, it has proven difficult to organize a group swim. Not only is the Holy Father's bridge a noble construction that lifts us high above the perilous waters, it allows us to pass over the deep without breaking ranks." [4]

The word "provisional" can be misleading. As used above, in reference to the stages of the Reformation process in England, it implies a temporary and insubstantial quality. But in the title of the Pastoral Provision of Pope John Paul II for the Anglican Usage of the Roman Rite, it has a very different meaning: it is that which is "provided"—a provision now enlarged and enhanced in the Apostolic Constitution of Benedict XVI. Its purpose is not limited to the perpetuation of a particular liturgy and liturgical style, important though that element of it is. More important, perhaps, is the preservation of a uniquely beautiful spirituality—gentle and pastoral—which, with the lovely cultural tradition that comes with it, is our heritage from Ecclesia Anglicana and which we bring home with joy to the Catholic Church. It is this story, this blessed inheritance, that is examined and celebrated in the essays in this book. So, in the words of one of the figures of the Oxford Movement, Isaac Williams, in his 1842 poem The Baptistery:

This union in His Church is God's own gift, Not to be seiz'd by man's rude sinful hands, But the bright crown of mutual holiness.

-------

The Reverend Allan R. G. Hawkins was ordained as a priest in the Church of England. In 1980, he was named rector of the Episcopal parish of Saint Bartholomew (later renamed Saint Mary the Virgin) in Arlington, Texas. In 1991, the parish decided to leave the Episcopal Church and to seek full communion in the Roman Catholic Church as a personal parish for the Anglican Use, under terms of the Pastoral Provision of 1980. Members were all received and Saint Mary the Virgin was formally erected as a parish of the Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth on June 12, 1994. Bishop Delaney ordained Father Hawkins to the Catholic priesthood on June 29, 1994, and he has continued as pastor to this day. Father Hawkins is married to Jose and they have two grown children.

ADAM, EVE, AND SETH: PNEUMATOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON AN UNUSUAL IMAGE IN GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS'S

2011-05-09T07:42:00.000-07:00

Alexander Golitzin

ADAM, EVE, AND SETH: PNEUMATOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON AN UNUSUAL IMAGE IN GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS'S
Published in: Anglican Theological Review, 00033286, Summer2001, Vol. 83, Issue 3

I have been asked to contribute to this volume primarily, I suspect, in order to serve as the voice of the Christian East. While it is perhaps a little odd for a California boy, and coming thus from the uttermost West, to present himself as an "Oriental," I nonetheless welcome this opportunity to speak on behalf of an entire Christian universe of theological discourse which, up until recent centuries at least, took shape independently of the Western (Roman Catholic and Protestant) traditions, and, in particular, with no input whatsoever from the great Father of Western theology, Augustine of Hippo. It is, of course, St. Augustine's elaboration and defense of the double procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son which, long after the saint's death (his writings were not translated into Greek until the end of the thirteenth century), provoked heated controversy between medieval Greek and Latin theologians. No single issue between Christian East and West, including the debate over the nature of papal primacy, has led to such an outpouring of polemic as the Western filioque. Indeed, it continues to the present day.
I have no particular wish to dive into this sea of ink, and have so far in my life happily avoided even wading on its shores. Few things so depress the spirit (and occlude the Spirit!) as this seemingly endless controversial literature which, beginning with the Carolingian divines of the late eighth century, now boasts a history of over 1200 years--with no end to it in sight. What I do want to do, however, is offer a very modest suggestion as to why, aside from the more abstruse realms of divine causation, such as the quarrel over one or two sources of origin in the Trinity, or over the more rarified heights of Augustine's analogy of the intellect (mens) for the mutual relations of the Three, Eastern Christians reacted so viscerally, almost instinctively, against the Spirit as proceeding from the Father and Son. To be sure, there were and are lots of other factors in play: the ancient linkage between the filioque and the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the Carolingian and Byzantine empires, or of papal primacy once the popes had committed themselves to the credal addition, or simply the very human reality of an underdog East asserting itself against the ever more massive material, intellectual, and institutional might of the West. None of these interests me, at least for the purposes of this essay. What does, though, is the very long, indeed unbroken tradition of Eastern Christian spirituality, and especially the great role played in it by the thought and practice of early Christian Syria, whose Jewish roots are well known and are lately coming under increasing scholarly investigation. One instance of this influence, only now beginning to be perceived, is that of the Cappadocian Fathers--Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa--whose own influence on Eastern pneumatology and triadology is universally admitted and standard fare in the manuals.
This is a vast subject, so for the purposes of one necessarily brief essay allow me to focus on a single passage from the writings of the middle Cappadocian, Gregory Nazianzus, called "the Theologian" in the East out of gratitude for his enormously influential and successful Five Theological Orations, given in defense of Trinitarian doctrine in Constantinople just prior to the Ecumenical Council of 381. The passage in question comes about a third of the way through Gregory's fifth oration, "On the Spirit." He is struggling to explain the difference between the procession (ekporeusis) of the Spirit and the generation (gennesis) of the Son, in order to avoid the twin absurdities of the Son and Spirit as brothers, on the one hand, or the Father as "grandfather" on the other. This is, of course, the point where Augustine's analogies in De trinitate came into play: the Spirit as "love" and "gift" linking "Lover" (Father) and "Beloved" (the Son), or the analogy of the intellect, with will (Spirit) as flowing from memory (Father) and intelligence (Son). Gregory does something quite different and even a little shocking:

    What was Adam? A creature of God. What, then, was Eve? A
    fragment of the creature. And what was Seth? The begotten of
    both. Does it, then, seem to you that creature and fragment
    and begotten are the same thing? Of course not. But were not
    these persons consubstantial? Of course they were.

He interjects the caution that his scriptural image is not intended to "attribute creation or fraction or any property of the body to the God-head," but then goes on to explain

    the meaning of all this. For is not the one an offspring,
    and the other a something else of the One? Did not Eve and
    Seth come from the one Adam? And were they both begotten by
    him? No ... yet the two were one and the same thing ... both
    were human beings.

"Will you then," he addresses his opponents, "give up your contention against the Spirit, that He must be altogether begotten, or else cannot be consubstantial, or God?"[1] He has demonstrated, through the illustration of Eve's beginning, a mode of origin that is not begetting, but a "something else of the One."
Gregory does not pursue this analogy beyond what I have quoted here, and as far as I know it appears in Greek patristic literature only this once. Perhaps this is why it has not been taken up and examined in detail by the scholarly literature, though I claim no encyclopedic knowledge of the latter. This neglect may be understandable, in that the mental picture which rises unbidden and unwelcome, yet inescapably, from Gregory's image is weird, to say the least, if not positively blasphemous--thus, doubtless, his caution against attributing "any property of the body to the Godhead." On the one hand, he has certainly come up with a very concrete mode of origin that is not begetting, but that very concreteness, on the other hand, cannot avoid giving rise to a certain theological queasiness. I am reminded of nothing so much as my first-grade primer featuring the adventures of Daddy and Mommy, Dick and Jane, and their dog Spot. True, Jane and Spot are missing from Gregory's picture, but the Trinity as nuclear family is otherwise quite complete, and even, we might say, in its limitation to only three ecologically a la mode as well: Adam (the Father), Eve (the Spirit), and their child, Seth (the Son). The now uneasy reader might also recall at this point Mormon teaching about Mr. and Mrs. God, though I seem to recall that the Mormons do not particularly identify the Spirit with Herself, Whom in any case they generally keep pretty much under wraps.
St. Gregory is certainly not a Mormon, but he is, I submit, drawing here on ancient traditions which were especially lively in early Syriac-speaking Christianity and which continue to run--not so openly, but still very deeply--in the wider Christian world east of the Adriatic. These derive first of all from the simple, grammatical fact that spirit or breath, ruach, is a feminine noun in both Hebrew and Aramaic/Syriac. To this we may add, second, the Synoptic accounts of Christ's baptism at the Jordan and, third, St. Luke's narrative of the Lord's nativity, in particular the words of Gabriel addressed to the Virgin: "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the Power of the Most High will overshadow [episkiasei] you; therefore the child to be born of you will be called holy, the Son of God" (Luke 1:35), words which are reflected indeed in the Niceno-Constantinopolitanum: "made flesh of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary." As Susan Harvey has recently pointed out with great thoroughness and theological restraint, the grammatical use of the feminine for the Spirit remains normative in Syriac Christian literature through the fourth century.[2] The Gospel story of Christ's baptism and the resting of the Spirit upon Him appears to have been not only central to the earliest Syrian baptismal ordinals, but as well their primary source for the theology of baptism and the Christian life--to the exclusion, for example, of the Pauline notion of sharing in Christ's death (Rom. 6), which only later, sometime in the late fourth century, finds its way into the rite. Likewise, the feast of Epiphany in the East celebrates the baptism at the Jordan and continues to enjoy a more notable prestige (at least judging from the texts and hymns assigned to it) than Christmas, which only later, in imitation of the West, came to be commemorated on its own separate date (save in the case of the Armenians, who have never adopted the Western practice).[3] To this list I would add the well-known matter of the Eastern epiklesis, itself a source of considerable medieval debate between Greek and Latin theologians over the moment of the eucharistic consecration, i.e., whether the latter takes place at the recitation of the dominical words, hoc est corpus meum, or at the conclusion of the prayer for the Spirit to "make this bread the body of Your Christ." The great Syriac poet and preacher, Jacob of Serug (+521), catches nearly all of these echoes in a few lines from his verse homily "On the Chariot that Ezekiel the Prophet Saw," commenting here on Ezek. 10:6-7 as an image of the eucharist:

    It is not the priest [typified by the prophet's "angel in
    white linen"] who is sent to sacrifice the Only[-Begotten],

    And lift Him up, Who is the sacrifice for sins, before His
    Father.

    Rather, the Holy Spirit comes down from the Father,

    And descending overshadows [sr] and dwells [skn] within the
    bread and makes it the body.

    And it is He Who makes it kindled pearls of flame,

    And Who will clothe those who are betrothed to Him with
    riches.[4]

True, Jacob is no longer saying "she" for the Spirit, but nearly everything else--the baptismal narratives and theology, together with Luke 1:35's echo of Exodus 40:34, and the note of transfiguration in the clothing "with riches"--is fully present and accounted for in this image of the eucharistic consecration.
St. Gregory's use of Adam, Eve, and Seth--the "nuclear family"-has even more specific echoes in earlier and even contemporary fourth-century literature. The Holy Spirit as "Mother" of Christ appears, for example, in the fragments we possess of the Semitic Gospel to the Hebrews,[5] while the "family" shows up complete in the strange and beautiful "Hymn of the Pearl," thought by an earlier generation of scholars to be wholly Gnostic in character, but recognized more recently as an essentially Semitic-Christian composition.[6] Placed in the mouth of the Apostle in the mid-third-century Acts of Thomas, a work advocating typically fierce--even heretically encratite (though not Gnostic)--Syrian asceticism, the "Hymn" describes the descent and return of the soul. It concludes with the speaker's being clothed with the "robe of light," an ancient Jewish and Christian motif (and recall Jacob just above),[7] which in context is clearly intended to signify both transfiguration and the mystical ascent to the heavenly throne, two more themes with roots in ancient Jewish literature and Eastern Christian spiritual writings.[8] What particularly catches my eye for our purposes here are a few lines from midway through the poem. The speaker tells of a letter sent to him in "Egypt" (the fallen world) from his "parents" in heaven, and then quotes it:

    From thy Father, the king of kings,

    And thy Mother, the mistress of the East,

    And from thy brother, our other Son,

    To thee, our son in Egypt, greeting!

    Awake, and rise up from sleep![9]

Here we have the by now familiar Trinitarian formula: the Father, the Mother (the Holy Spirit, as appears elsewhere in the Acts of Thomas), and the Son, Christ our "brother." Neither is this formula a one-time-only business, nor is it confined to a text of an admittedly still debated nature and provenance. We find exactly the same formulation in the enormously influential early monastic homilies and correspondence which have come down to us under the name of St. Macarius the Great of Egypt, but which were in fact the product of an unknown Syro-Mesopotamian ascetic. In the well-known collection of The Fifty Spiritual Homilies, "Macarius" links the plague of darkness in Egypt with the fall of Adam:

    The veil of darkness came upon his [Adam's] soul. And from
    his time until the last Adam, our Lord, man did not see the
    true heavenly Father and the good and kind Mother, the grace
    of the Spirit, and the sweet and desired Brother, the Lord,
    and the friends and relatives, the holy angels, with whom he
    [Adam] had been playing and rejoicing.[10]

"Macarius" was not writing in Syriac, but in Greek. He also appears to have directly influenced the third great Cappadocian, Gregory of Nyssa, in at least one of the latter's ascetical and mystical works. Together with one of Gregory Nazianzus's disciples, Evagrius of Pontus (+399), "Macarius" indeed ranks as one of the two most important fourth-century monastic sources for later Eastern Christian spirituality and mysticism. He was not, in short and in spite of the controversy (both ancient and modern) attaching to his works, a marginal character, but was right in the midst of those figures and currents that would determine the later shape of Christian orthodoxy. Gilles Quispel and Columba Stewart have clearly demonstrated "Macarius's" other debts as well, notably to the originally Jewish-based traditions of Christian Syro-Mesopotamia, and in fact to the Syriac language itself.[11] The extent to which these same influences may have been at work in the great Cappadocians is, as I noted briefly above, only just beginning to come to light.
If my much abbreviated sampling from the early and fourth-century Syrian East has successfully demonstrated that Gregory Nazianzus was not pulling his Adam-Eve-Seth analogy out of thin air, but was rather reflecting ancient formulations of the Christian Trinity current in the surrounding region, we are still left with a couple of obvious questions. First, what if anything does this archaic and to the modern Christian ear unquestionably bizarre image have to do with contemporary theological reflection on the Trinity? Second, and more specifically, what does it have to do with the issue I raised at the beginning of this little essay, the almost equally ancient but still very lively question of the filioque and the matter of the ecumenical dialogue between Christian East and West? I think it says quite a lot, not all of which I have time to expand on here. Suffice it to say that St. Gregory's recourse to the first human family as an illustration of the Trinity is, first of all, explicitly related to the question of the Spirit's origin, and to the difference between the latter and the generation of the Son--Eve from the side of Adam as opposed to the begetting of Seth. This is, indeed, quite as far as Gregory wants to take this or any other analogy.[12] The Spirit's procession is different from the Son's begetting, both are from the Father, and both processes are finally hidden and ineffable:

    You tell me what is the unbegottenness of the Father, and I
    will explain the physiology of the generation of the Son and
    the procession of the Spirit, and we shall both of us be
    stricken with madness for prying into the mystery of God.
    And who are we to do these things, we who cannot even see
    what lies at our feet ... much less enter into the depths of
    God?[13]

These were the conclusions and the attitude which we find enshrined in the original form of the Niceno-Constantinopolitanum, which goes no further than a simple paraphrase of John 15:26.
The fact, however, that Western Christians have taken the matter further, beginning chiefly (though not exclusively) with Augustine, and have raised--legitimately, I think--the question of the Second Person's part in the Spirit's origin, brings us to what I, and several other Orthodox theologians before me, feel that the ancient Semitic-Christian tradition sketched above and presupposed by Gregory can contribute to the discussion. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is the so-far-unaddressed question of the Spirit's role in the generation of the Son. What the old image of the Trinity as "family" reveals, together with the Synoptic baptismal narratives and Luke's account of the Incarnation, is a different Trinitarian taxis or model than the one we are all used to: not Father-Son-Spirit, but Father-Spirit-Son, or, and to borrow a phrase from Leonardo Boff, precisely an implied spirituque.[14] It is this other taxis which I take to be effectively presupposed both by the Eastern epicleseis over the baptismal font and the eucharistic elements, and by the witness of the Eastern ascetico-mystical tradition, which is to say, that it has its roots in the very deepest and, I would argue, most primordial levels of Christian faith and practice as the latter have been known in the East since--well, since the beginnings of Christianity itself. Here, I think, we arrive at the real reasons--beneath and aside from the abstractions of divine monarchia, relations of origin, and of the properties of ousia and hypostasis, or of the purely canonical question of proper or improper additions to the ecumenical creed--for that visceral, almost instinctively negative Eastern reaction to the filioque which I mentioned at the beginning of this essay. In a nutshell, the filioque as it stands, tout court, offends as it were the "inner ear" of Eastern Christian faith and practice, almost exactly in the way in which we would speak of the vertigo and nausea resulting from an injury to the fluids of the body's inner ear. Put more briefly still, the filioque strikes us Easterns as unacceptably lopsided. If it answers to a real need to explain in intra-Trinitarian terms the Son's sending of the Spirit, it does so at the expense of the Spirit's own active role and Person. The Latter becomes entirely passive and, in our eyes, this does not in consequence account adequately for the scriptural, liturgical, and--yes--mystical data of the Tradition which witness to His (or, if the reader prefers my ancient Syrians, Her) creative and generative power.
Fr. Boris Bobrinskoy has written very recently, and Fr. Dumitru Staniloae some time ago, of the need to restore a sense of the reciprocity in the relations between the Son and Holy Spirit.[15] I would like to second that motion. As to the precise theological shape that reciprocity might take, or what formula might be found to express it adequately, I will not venture either to propose or to guess. Allow me instead to close not with my own words, but with those of a great Byzantine saint and mystic who wrote on the very eve of our millennial schism. St. Symeon the New Theologian (+ 1022) testifies here, as so often in his works, to personal transfiguration in the visio dei. It seems to me that his words might be taken as summing up and encapsulating the legitimate insights of both halves of the now sundered Christian ecumene:

    What is the "image of the heavenly man" (1 Cor. 15:49)?
    Listen to the divine Paul: "He is the reflection of the
    Glory and very stamp of the nature" and the "exact image" of
    God the Father (Heb. 1:3). The Son is then the icon of the
    Father, and the Holy Spirit the icon of the Son. Whoever,
    then, has seen the Son, has seen the Father, and whoever has
    seen the Holy Spirit, has seen the Son. As the Apostle says,
    "The Lord is the Spirit" (2 Cor. 3:7); and again: "The
    Spirit Himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for
    words ... crying `Abba, Father!' (Rom. 8:26 and 15). He says
    rightly that the Lord is the Spirit when He cries "Abba,
    Father!", not that the Son is the Spirit--away with the
    thought!--but that the Son is seen and beheld in the Holy
    Spirit, and that never is the Son revealed without the
    Spirit, nor the Spirit without the Son. Instead, it is in
    and through the Spirit that the Son Himself cries "Abba,
    Father!"[16]

"On the Spirit" 11, from Christology of the Later Fathers, trans. E. R. Hardy (London: SCM Press; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), p. 200.
S. A. Harvey, "Feminine Imagery for the Divine: The Holy Spirit, the Odes of Solomon, and Early Syriac Tradition," St Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 37.2-3 (1993), pp. 111-139.
See, e.g., J. A. Jungman, The Early Liturgy to the Time of Gregory the Great, trans. F. A. Brunner (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1959), pp. 266-277. On the Holy Spirit in Syrian liturgy more intensively, see Sebastian P. Brock, The Holy Spirit in the Syrian Baptismal Tradition (Poona, India: 1979).
Homiliae selectae Mar Jacobi Sarugensis, ed. P. Bedjan (Paris: 1908), Vol. 4: 597, lines 8-13. I find it interesting that Jacob uses the verb skn here for the action of the Spirit, but the same root as noun, sekinto (equivalent to the Rabbinic Sekinah), appears exclusively elsewhere in reference to the Son--see 569:21, 570:13, and 602:20. Thus the Spirit in "abiding" or "dwelling" in the bread of the eucharist makes present the "Abiding" or "Dwelling" of God among us which is Christ, the Immanuel. Here thus I would myself discern an echo of the Nativity narratives in both Luke and Matthew--and perhaps of John 1:14 as well.
See W. Schneemelcher, ed., New Testament Apocrypha, 2nd ed., trans. R. McL. Wilson (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press; Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991), Vol. 1: 177, and relatedly, A. F. J. Klijn, Jewish-Christian Gospel Tradition (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), pp. 39-40, 52-55.
In Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, Vol. II: 380-385. Note that H. Drijvers's introduction to the "Hymn," pp. 330-333, barely breathes the word "Gnostic," whereas G. Bornkam's introduction in the first edition thirty years before can speak of nothing else. The scholarship has shifted one hundred eighty degrees in the space of a generation, and for once it is for the better.
See S. P. Brock, "Clothing Metaphors as a Means of Theological Expression in Syriac Tradition," in Typus, Symbol, Allegorie bei den ostlichen Vatern und ihren Parallelen im Mittelalter, ed. M. Schmidt and C. F. Geyer (Regensburg: Pustet, 1982), pp. 11-38.
On these in Jewish tradition, see C. R. A. Morray-Jones, "Transformational Mysticism in the Apocalyptic-Merkabah Tradition," Journal of Jewish Studies 43 (1992), pp. 1-31, and I. Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1980); and in Christian literature, A. DeConick, Seek to See Him: Ascent and Vision Mysticism in the Gospel of Thomas (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996); J. A. McGuckin, The Transfiguration of Christ in Scripture and Tradition (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986); and A. Golitzin, "Temple and Throne of the Divine Glory: Purity of Heart in the Macarian Homilies," in Purity of Heart in Early Ascetic and Monastic Literature: Essays in Honor of Juana Raasch, O.S.B., H. Luckman and L. Kunzler, editors (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1999), pp. 107-129.
Acts of Thomas 110:41-43, in Schneemelcher, Vol. 2: 382.
Homily 28.4, in Pseudo-Macarius: The Fifty Spiritual Homilies and the Great Letter, trans. G. Maloney (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), p. 185.
G. Quispel, Makarios, das Thomasevangelium, und das Lied von der Perle (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967); C. Stewart, "Working the Earth of the Heart": The Messalian Controversy in History, Texts, and Language to A.D. 431 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
See him against all analogies in "On the Spirit" 31-33, Christology of the Later Fathers, pp. 213-214.
"On the Spirit" 8, Christology of the Later Fathers, pp. 198-199.
L. Boff, Trinity and Society, trans. P. Burns (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1988), p. 205; cited in R. Del Colle, "Reflections on the Filioque," Journal of Ecumenical Studies 34.2 (1997), p. 211 and n. 24.
D. Staniloae, Theology and the Church, trans. R. Barringer (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1980), pp. 92-108; and B. Bobrinskoy, The Mystery of the Trinity: Trinitarian Experience and Vision in the Biblical and Patristic Tradition, trans. A. P. Gythiel (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1999), pp. 63-77, 279-316.
St. Symeon the New Theologian on the Mystical Life: The Ethical Discourses, trans. A. Golitzin, here Discourse III, in Vol. I: The Church and the Last Things (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1995), pp. 128-129.

EASTERN CATHOLICS. ARE THEY ORTHODOX? (Ancient Faith Radio)

2011-05-05T19:46:00.000-07:00

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HISTORIC VISIT OF THE CHURCH OF ANTIOCH
TO
THE CHURCH OF ROME
FEBRUARY 9-15, 2001

An Eyewitness Report By Bishop John A. Elya

In a historic gesture of communion and solidarity, over 700 Melkite clergy and laity joined their new Patriarch Gregorios III, Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, in his first visit to the Holy see of Rome. That was a triumphal celebration of the full Ecclesial communion of the Melkite Catholic Church of Antioch with the Church of Rome, which “holds the preeminence of charity,” according to the expression of St. Ignatius, the second Bishop of Antioch after St. Peter, the Prince of the Apostles. The escort of His Beatitude in this historical event included the following bishops/Archbishops or Metropolitans: (in the order of their Episcopal ordination)

Hilarion Capucci, Emeritus of Jerusalem
Francois Abou-Mokh (Retired Patriarchal Vicar in Damascus)
Boulos Borkhoch (Houran)
John Adel Elya (the United States of America)
Ibrahim Nehmeh (Yabroud, Homs & Hama, Syria)
Georges Kouaiter (Saida and Deir-el-Kamar)
Jean Haddad (Tyre)
Antoine Hayek (Paneas and Gedeidet Marjeyooun)
Peter Mouallem, Haifa, Nazareth and Galilee)
Fares Macarone, Brazil
Jean Janbart (Aleppo)
Sleiman Hajjar (Canada)
Nicola Sawwaf, Lataquieh
Joseph Kallas (Beirut & Byblos/Gibeil)

The following religious superiors were representing their respective religious orders, accompanied by members of their religious communities:

Archimandrite Salim Ghazal, BSO, Superior General of the Basilian Salvatorian Order

Archimandrite Nicola Hakim, BCO, Superior General of the Basilian Choueirite Order

Archimandrite Seraphim Kasabgi, BAO, Superior General of the Basilian Alepian Order

Father Raymond Bakar, MSP, representing the Very Rev. Father Joseph Absy, MSP, Superior General of the Paulist Missionary Society

Archimandrite Jacob, Hegumen of the Monastery of St. John of the Desert, Ain Karem,Palestine

Mother Jeanne Saidi, Superior General of the Salvatorian Sisters of the Annunciation, Lebanoon,

Mother Eugenie Arida, Superior General of the Religious of Good Service (Jabbouleh, Baalbeck, (Lebanon)

Mother Assunta, Hegumen of the Monastery of the Visitation, Sidi Rahal Region of Marakech (Morocco)

The Right Reverend Archimandrite Andre Karame, Patriarchal Vicar in Buenes Aires, Argentina, represented the Melkites of Argentina, Chili and Paraguay.

His Beatitude was accompanied in this “peaceful invasion” of the Eternal City by over 700 Melkite faithful including 13 bishops, over 70 priests and about 30 religious sisters. Faithful Melkites and friends came from Lebanon (about 200) and Syria (about 50). The group from the Holy Land (Israel, Palestine and Jordan) counted over 300 people with a good number of clergy. More faithful had planned to come from the Palestinian territory (Bethlehem, Jerusalem & Ramallah), but were not able to obtain visas, because of the tense security situation. His Beatitude served 26 years as Patriarchal Vicar in Jerusalem since 1974 until his election as Patriarch on November 22, 2000. Other areas represented, besides the good number of Melkites in Rome, included Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, Morocco, Soudan & Venezuela. This impressive number came joyfully from all over the world, despite the very short notice about the visit, only few weeks in advance.

Our group from the United States counted about 70 people led by their Eparch (yours truly). Clergy from USA included Archimandrite Gabriel Ghannoum bso, Pastor of St. Jude Melkite Church in Miami, FL, and Archimandrite Jack Ahern; Pastor of St. Mary of the Assumption in Brookline, MA; Patriarchal Economos Romanos Russo, of St. Demetrios Melkite Mission in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, and Prelate of the Patriarchal Order of the Holy Cross of Jerusalem; Father Ibrahim Ibrahim bso of St. Elias Church, Cleveland, OH, Fr. George Said Bisharat of San Diego, CA, Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy of St. Gregory Eparchial Seminary, Fr. Naim Khalil bso, from St. Basil Seminary, and Deacon John Moses of the Annunciation Cathedral in Boston. Archimandrite Jack Ahern has been the host of the Eparch and the Chancery Office in the old St. Aidan Rectory in Brookline, MA, since October 1, 1999 and until the completed construction of the new Chancery near the Annunciation Cathedral in West Roxbury, MA. Diocesan institutions of the Eparchy of Newton were represented by Edmund Nahom, Director of the Diocesan Office of Development, Raymond Kayal, General Director of the Order of St. Nicholas and Saideh Dagher, Eparchial Secretary. Sir Craig Kirkpatrick and Dame Anne Helen Traina of Medford, MA represented the Hospitaler and Military Order of St. Lazarus of Jerusalem, whose Grand Patron is the Melkite Patriarch of Antioch.

A great number of Maronite clergy and faithful were present at the various functions, including Archbishop Emile Eid, Patriarchal Vicar in Rome.

Nehmeh Tohmeh, Deputy of the Shouf in the Lebanese Parliament, lent his private jet to transport the Patriarch and his escort group of over 30 bishops, priests, sisters and civilian personalities from Beirut to Rome on Friday, February 9.

Traditionally, the Patriarch is the “chief father” of his religious community. The impressive number of high personalities shows the great respect and love of the Melkite people to their father and “chief.” Among the personalities who came from near and far for this memorable series of events, there were Ministers, former Ministers, Deputies of the Parliament of Lebanon and Egypt, Ambassadors and Consuls. Here are some personalities I could distinguish, but the list is in no way exhaustive; however, it gives an idea of the importance that the Melkite Community in the Middle East and throughout the world gave to this historic moment: Ministers Dr. Michel Moussa and Michel Pharaon; former Ministers, Elias Hanna, Nicola Khoury and Sleiman Traboulsi; Deputies of the Parliament of Lebanon Elias Skaff, Dr. Antoine Haddad and Atty. Marwan Faris. Other personalities included Rami Lakah, Deputy of the People’s Assembly (Parliament) of Egypt, Michel Elian, President of the Union of Lawyers in Lebanon; Roger Nasnas, President of the National Economic Council in Lebanon, Samir Khoury, Ambassador of Lebanon to Italy and Henry Kastoun, Consul General of Lebanon at Vatican.

An Interfaith representation from Lebanon included:

Mohammad Sammak, member of the National Committee for Christiain and Moslem Dialogue, representing Rafik Al Hariri, Prime Minnister of Lebanon and Mouhammad Kabbani, Grand Moufti of the Republic of Lebanon.

Mahmoud Abou Hamdan, Deputy in the Lebanese Parliament from the Beqaa, representing Sheikh Abdel Amir Kabalan, Grand Mufti, Vice-President of the High Shihite Council of Lebanon.

Abbas Al Halaby, representing the National Druze Council of Lebanon

Highlights of this memorable visit of Patriarch Gregorios III to Pope John Paul II and to the Eternal City for the first time included -- Business and/or courtesy visits and receptions:
Visit to His Eminence Cardinal Francis Arinze, President of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue (Saturday, February 10)

A solemn Vesper Service followed by dinner at the Pontifical College of St. Athanasius (my alma Mater) on Saturday, February 10, at 7:00 PM, followed by Dinner.

On Sunday, February 11, His Beatitude celebrated the Divine Liturgy at the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. Twelve Bishops and over 60 priests concelebrated this great event with His Beatitude. His Eminence Cardinal Moussa Daoud, Prefect of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches, represented His Holiness Pope John Paul. Among those attending were His Eminence Cardinal Carlo Furno, Protector of the Basilica, and several other Cardinals. Bishop Franco Gualdrini, Camerlengo of the Basilica, was one of the concelebrants with the Melkite Bishops and Clergy around the altar.

Archimandrites Gabriel Ghannoum of Miami and Jacques Abed of Jerusalem served as Deacons at this Liturgy. Three parishioners of our Cathedral of the Annunciation in Boston were among the members of the choir: Salim Absi, Director of the Choir of the Cathedral and Genevieve Absi and Iqbal Haddad Kurkur members of the Annunciation choir. That magnificent choir was conducted by Father Naim Khalil of St. Basil Seminary (Methuen, MA) The Divine Liturgy was followed by a luncheon at the Holiday Inn of St. Peter, hosted by Michel Pharaon, Minister of State and Member of Parliament of Lebanon.

On the evening of that same Sunday, February 11, His Beatitude tended a reception to all the groups at the Palazzo Ferraioli (Piazza Colonna).

On Monday morning, February 12, at 7:30 AM, the Patriarch and the Bishops concelebrated the Mass with His Holiness at his private chapel. At the end of the Mass, a collective picture was taken and everyone was saluted personally by His Holiness. A private Audience of the Pope and the Patriarch was followed by a public Audience to all the Melkite groups at the Paul VI Hall.
Discourses were exchanged in French by the Holy Father and Patriarch Gregorios III at the Papal Mass on the morning of Monday and at the Public Audience on the same morning. Here is an excerpt of the address of His Holiness during the public Audience:

“It is with joy that the arms of the Successor of Peter open to welcome the Patriarch of the Greek Melkite Catholic who came to celebrate our full Ecclesial communion. With this hug, I embrace spiritually the bishops, priests, religious men and women and the faithful of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church here present, as well as all the members who, today, proclaim their commitment and their attachment to Christ, and sometimes at the price of great difficulties…

“The union to the See of Rome does not diminish your specificity nor your proper richness. But, on the contrary, it strengthens them and makes of them a precious gift, which enriches the whole Catholicity. The Pope appreciates your attachment and your fidelity to the traditions of the Christian East of which you are rightly proud. He wishes that they will be always kept jealously and re-discovered fully, so that hey become accessible to the men and women of today and thus nourish their Christian life. You are a Church strong, coherent, rooted in its identity … Your ecumenical engagement is also particularly appreciated …”

On Monday evening, February 12, His Excellency Fouad Aoun, Ambassador of Lebanon to the Holy See, tended a reception in honor of the Patriarch at the Lebanese Embassy.

Tuesday morning, the Patriarch and the Bishops concelebrated the Divine Liturgy near the Tomb of St. Peter in the Crypt of St. Peter’s Basilica. In the afternoon, a lunch was offered to the Patriarch and the Bishops and many guests by Patriarchal Exarch Don Pierino Gelmini.

A meeting with His Eminence Cardinal Moussa Daoud, Prefect of the Congregation of the Oriental Churches took place on Tuesday morning; and a reception in honor of His Beatitude was offered in the evening. The following dignitaries were among those attending the reception: Archbishop Miroslav Stefan Marusyn, Secretary, with the personnel of the Congregation; Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, past Prefect of the Sacred Congregation; Cardinals Pio Laghi and Agostino Cacciavillan, former Pontifical Nuncios to the United States, His Beatitude Nerses Pedros, Armenian Catholic Patriarch; Cardinal Francis Cassidy, outgoing President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity; and Cardinal Walter Kaspar, newly appointed President of the Council.

On Wednesday, February 14, His Beatitude and several bishops paid a visit to the 11th century Byzantine Monastery of Grotta Ferrata where we celebrated with the monks the service of the Hours. After lunch, we had a very interesting tour of the ten century old Monastery with the famous library and laboratory for repair of ancient manuscripts.

At 5:30 PM, on Wednesday evening, His Beatitude celebrated the Vesper Service at Santa Maria in Cosmedin and took possession of his See at the Basilica in Rome. He conferred the title of Archimandrite on Father Mtanios Haddad bso, and appointed him as his Apocrisarios (representative) to the Vatican. Archimandrite Haddad, Procurator also of the Basilian Salvatorian Order in Rome has been of great help in our memorable pilgrimage for transportation and for hotel reservations. The many and complicated details of this historical visit were well organized and kept under control by Archimandrite Nicola Antiba bao, well known and loved by our Melkite people in the United States. We fondly remember his service for over 11 years (1978-89) at St. Ann Church in West Paterson, NJ, as well as in other communities. He returned to Lebanon in 1989 to be the Superior General of his Basilian Alepian Order. He has been recently appointed by the new Patriarch as Chancellor and Moderator of the Curia.

On Thursday morning, few hours before he took the plane back to Lebanon, His Beatitude held a meeting with His Eminence Cardinal Edward Cassidy, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.

In his address to the Holy Father at the Public Audience on Monday, His Beatitude Gregorios III addressed the Holy Father:

Holy Father:

“It is with a very great joy that we come to Rome, I and a great number of Bishops of our Holy Synod, to meet with your Holiness and to venerate the tombs of our saintly Compatriots, the Princes of the Apostles Peter and Paul.

Here is the Church of the Apostle Peter in Antioch visiting, with a very great affection, the Church of the Apostle Peter in Rome. Here is the Church of Damascus, a Holy City where St. Paul received the grace of illumination through water and the Holy Spirit, visiting the Eternal City, which guards the tomb of the Apostle of the Nations.

Meeting with Your Holiness, we are making a holy Pilgrimage following the great Jubilee of the Second Millennium and at the dawn of the third. This is a pilgrimage of the Church of the East to the Church of Christ in the West…

Our name tells a lot about about our identity: An apostolic, patriarchal, Eastern Church, with an orthodox traditions, living in Arab and Moslem surroundings, and in full communion with the Church of Rome, which presides in Charity…

Concluding his talk, the Patriarch said: “We exchange with Your Holiness the liturgical kiss of peace, sign of our communion and our unity with Your Holiness who is very much loved in the Lord, saying: “The Lord is among us! He is and He will always be! This Christ Risen, Alive will stay among us and, through the Spirit of the Father, will guide us on His good earth in the service of His Church and of the Kingdom.”

Return to Eparchy Documents

ECUMENISM WITHOUT COMPROMISE: Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Protestantism (with Peter Kreeft and Metropolitan Kallistos Ware) mp3.

2011-05-01T04:27:00.000-07:00

Listen to this excellent talk on ecumenism, please click here
to hear Peter Kreeft on ecumenism between Catholicism and Protestantism.

Listen to this equally brilliant talk by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware on Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism. Please click here.

Protestantism is such that, once a Protestant understands Catholicism or Orthodoxy and comes to see that his deepest convictions as a Protestant have their true home in Catholic Tradition, then he becomes either a Catholic or an Orthodox. Both the speakers are converts, one from Calvinism to Catholicism, the other from Anglicanism to Orthodoxy. The relationship between Catholicism and Orthodoxy is more complicated. Each tradition enjoys the fullness of Catholicism in the Eucharist but we are not united with each other. To use the vocabulary of C.S. Lewis, we are joined at the centre, but not at the edges. We celebrate the identical Eucharist, but we celebrated it apart. When we go to the edge and look across the ecclesiastical fence at the other church, what we see is a bit strange, and we cannot fully agree with what we see. So we leave the edge and go back to the centre where we participate in the same sacrifice and become the same body of Christ as they do. The problem is that both our identity in the Eucharist and the differences we see from across the fence must be accepted as real, even when they pull us in different directions. That is our tragedy; that is our sickness which only Christ can heal.

THE ORDINARIATES, THE POPE AND THE LITURGY - I

2011-04-14T10:09:00.000-07:00

(taken from THE ORDINARIATES PORTAL)
The Ordinariate Portal is grateful to Fr Aidan Nichols OP for the opportunity to publish these transcripts of his address to the Anglicanorum Coetibus conference in Canada.

Introduction

When Archbishop Thomas Collins of Toronto invited me to come to Canada in March 2011, so as to speak at a conference he had organized on Anglicanorum coetibus for prospective members of the proposed Canadian Ordinariate, he asked me to address three questions: the theological context of the document, its place in the wider vision of Pope Benedict, and the topic of the Liturgy. This 3-part article revisits the substance of what I said on that occasion, and reworks it into a fuller whole.[1]

Part One: The theological context of the Ordinariates

In connexion with Anglicanorum coetibus, what, to my mind, the term ‘theological context’ principally means is its historical-theological context. To be sure, a formal ecclesiological account of the Apostolic Constitution could no doubt be provided, taking its inspiration from the document’s preamble with its doctrinal meditation on the nature of the Church (and notably the Church’s unity) and making particular reference to the case of ‘those Anglican faithful who desire to enter into the full communion of the Catholic Church in a corporate manner’ (Anglicanorum coetibus, Introduction). But to put living flesh on the skeletal canonico-ecclesiological structure the text lays out, it is necessary, I believe, to think through theologically the issues raised by the historical background.

Dr Sheridan Gilley, formerly Reader in Church History in the University of Durham, somewhere describes the Anglican Church as a Noah’s Ark where all kinds of weird and wonderful species of Christian belief have come on board. The point could perhaps be made more gently than a comparison with an ocean-going menagerie. Certainly there is a variety of currents in the theological history of Anglicanism and it is necessary to discern among them. That was the aim of my 1992 study The Panther and the Hind. A Theological History of Anglicanism, in whose conclusion I floated the notion of an Anglican ‘Uniate’ Church drawn from particular elements within the wider Anglican patrimony.[2] In the interpretation of the history of Anglican theology which is there laid out – and, as in the present essay, I confined myself almost entirely to the Church of England, which is not only more familiar to me but crucial for Anglicanism at large – I distinguished between three basic currents. There is a Catholic stream; there is a Protestant stream; and there is a stream which is enthusiastic for neither Catholicism nor Protestantism as such and which I generally labelled ‘Latitudinarian’.

The Catholic element has its origin in the early history of the Henrician Reformation, and what it proposes is, fundamentally, Catholicism without the Pope. When Henry VIII died, the Sarum Liturgy and much of the doctrinal and devotional structure of Catholicism remained intact. But at the same time it is impossible not to notice the diminutions that structure had suffered: the suppression of the monasteries and the other Religious houses, the dismantling of the great Marian shrines, such as Walsingham, and the destruction of their images; and a certain opening to Lutheran ideas, notably in the later 1530s. In a moment we shall look at the subsequent history of the Catholic element in Anglican origins, since for obvious reasons that is the ‘stream’ which most interests candidates for an Ordinariate.

The Protestant current begins similarly in the early history of the Henrician Reform, since, even apart from the factors just mentioned, already indicative of Protestant influence as they are, Thomas Cranmer, Henry’s choice as archbishop of Canterbury, was personally a convinced and thorough Protestant in doctrine. Essentially, Cranmer looked to Strasbourg but even when he became archbishop (with the pope’s sanction) he concealed both his views and his wife. After the short reign of a minor, Edward VI, when Cranmer was given his head and a full-blown Protestantism introduced, and the even briefer Catholic counter-reaction under Mary I, the same inclination to the Continental Reformers would continue in the strongly Calvinist theology of the Elizabethan church and in the challenge of the Puritans to what the latter considered its as yet insufficiently reformed polity and worship. Under Elizabeth, ecclesiastical sympathies went out to the Continental Reformed churches, just as the political sympathies of the governing elite were given to the Protestant powers. If the seventeenth century tells, for the Church of England, a significantly different story, the Protestant stream re-emerges in powerful form in its later eighteenth successor, when the Evangelical Revival rediscovers a full-blooded doctrine of the Atonement as the basis of a pacified God’s free grace to sinners. Today, that strand is represented by the current tendency of the Church of England to give ecumenical priority to relations with the North European Lutheran and Lutheran-Evangelical churches (hence the Porvoo and Meissen Agreements), the influence of Neo-Calvinist theology, and the way in which Evangelicals are now at parish level the strongest party in the Church. Where Evangelical Anglicans are manifestly indebted to the chief theological masters of the sixteenth century European Reformation, they are often described as exemplifying ‘magisterial Protestantism’. Anglicanism has had many classically Protestant Churchmen (one need only look to the Anglican Church of Australia archdiocese of Sydney today), and they are to be differentiated from the liberal Protestants who will (eventually) come into view in the section that follows in this essay, which has as its subject the Latitudinarians.

The Latitudinarian element in Anglicanism took its rise chiefly from the internal disputes of the Reformers. Such disagreements led to their putting a high value on the useful notion – useful, that is, for the purposes of peaceful co-existence – of adiaphora or ‘things indifferent’. The wearing or non-wearing of liturgical vestments, for example, often figured in this category which proved in time remarkably elastic, and could extend to doctrines as well as practices. It is more important, argued Latitudinarians, to concentrate on Christian essentials, especially in the light of the rational evaluation of religion. Here a great deal depends on what the word ‘rational’ is held to mean: a topic to which I will return when speaking of Pope Benedict’s own theological vision in Part Two of this article. The seventeenth century Cambridge Platonists described reason as ‘the candle of the Lord’, and defined it in terms of openness to divine truth (and such a definition is, of course, theologically speaking, very encouraging). In the eighteenth century, by contrast, deistically inclined Latitudinarians were rationalistic, with a closed concept of reason which was defined over against that understanding of the world made available in cultural tradition (and for such a concept of reason it is difficult indeed for the kind of thinking that belongs to divine revelation, transmitted via tradition, to get underway). As the nineteenth century merged into the twentieth, the Latitudinarian stream changed its character yet again. From being ‘Broad Church’ – hot on neither Catholicism nor Protestantism – it morphed into becoming, via Anglican Modernism, the mind-set of what we now call ‘theological liberalism’, currently the greatest enemy (within the Church) of Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholics alike. In terms of theological method, what was seen in the seventeenth century as the Anglican ‘threefold cord’ of Scripture, Tradition and reason (sometimes called the ‘three-legged stool’), now mutated into something rather different, a trio of Scripture, Tradition and contemporary experience. I shall return to this mutation in connexion with Pope Benedict’s own thought but can at least note here how it is the source of many of the problems of the Anglican Communion today owing to the claim that contemporary experience mandates us, requires us, to alter the reading of Scripture found in Tradition in such matters as the ordination of women and sexual ethics. Here, appeal to experience not only displaces reason but trumps Scripture and Tradition.

I cannot claim that distinguishing thus between the three streams represents some sort of highly original work of analysis on my part. It is a fairly obvious kind of grid to place over the data. Sorting out the various movements in Anglican theological history is, indeed, relatively easy in principle though in practice it may not always be easy to place squarely this or that figure: for example, the late Elizabethan Richard Hooker whose Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity has often been hailed as the quintessentially Anglican theological treatise has been claimed as their own by all three of Catholics, Protestants and Latitudinarians.[3] Still, this sort of broad categorization remains serviceable, not least in the perspective of Anglicanorum coetibus.

So conceived, the ‘Noah’s Ark’ quality of Anglicanism makes it difficult to give a blanket endorsement to the Anglican tradition in a comprehensive way, since too many internal contradictions lie within. That is not just a problem for the Pope of Rome. Anyone with even a mildly developed sense of logic would feel the same. So when the 1981 Final Report of the first Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC I) declared in its twenty-second paragraph, ‘Anglicans are entitled to assurance that acknowledgement of the universal primacy would not involve the suppression of theological, liturgical and other traditions which they value or the imposition of wholly alien traditions’, we have to ask, Well, which Anglican traditions, specifically, do you have in mind? This is one important sense in which we need to focus our lens when seeking to understand what is involved in Anglicanorum coetibus III which speaks of the maintenance of ‘the liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions of the Anglican Communion within the Catholic Church’. With which of the theological sub-traditions of Anglicanism are we supposed to be working when we consider that same liturgical, spiritual and pastoral inheritance?

In practice, however, in the context of the Ordinariates, this problem is somewhat more malleable than at first it might seem. Almost exclusively, those who are seeking communion with the Holy See are what we can call the heirs of the Oxford Movement, rather than a cross-section of Anglicanism as a whole. This makes things easier, though not altogether plain sailing. After all, the Oxford fathers (I mean Keble, Pusey, Newman, and their epigones), did not see themselves as initiating something entirely new. Rather, they saw themselves as building on the Catholic element in Anglicanism from the beginning of its continuous life under Elizabeth I. And this is where we have to revert to the history of that element, which initially I cut off with the death of Henry VIII. Looking back at the Elizabethan settlement, such Anglicans could find signs of Catholicity in features of the Prayer Book, notably its calendar, lectionary, and collects, so often taken (with adaptations) from the Sarum Missal, and the Ordinal with its important preface which committed the Church to continuing the three orders of bishop, priest and deacon.

It is arguable that a clearly defined Catholic party first emerges with James I and William Laud, who became an influential bishop in James’s reign. There is a famous conversation with James’s minister the Duke of Buckingham where Laud was asked to run his finger down a list of prominent clerics and write by the side of their names either the letter ‘P’ or the letter ‘O’ – ‘Puritan’ or ‘Orthodox’.[4] In the succeeding reign, that of James’s son, Charles I, amid an emerging emphasis on the importance of a ceremonial appropriate to a sacramental religion, the ‘Orthodox’ or Catholicising party embarked on daring measures: notably the 1637 imposition on Scotland of a more Catholic edition of Cranmer’s Prayer Book and the marginalization of Puritanism by invoking the juridical powers of episcopal courts. The once popular Calvinist doctrine of grace was edged out in favour of a theology that looked towards the Fathers not simply for apologetic reasons – to argue that the Fathers took the same view of Scriptural teaching as had the Reformers (this was the position of such Elizabethan apologists for Anglicanism as John Jewel[5]) – but for their own sake, as expressions of Tradition valuable in and of themselves. Here lie the seeds of the notion of Anglicanism as a reformed Catholicism, equidistant between radical Protestantism and Rome.[6]

As history shows, all this grossly underestimated the influence of Puritans – who were radical Protestants – in the Church, in Parliament and in the country at large. The succeeding Puritan reaction led to the Civil War, and if, with the Restoration of the monarchy, the High Church party recovered its confidence, it was soon to be rudely shaken by the 1688 Revolution, which entailed loss of its most principled members, the Non-Jurors, and the coming of kings who, so far from being Catholicising, were initially Calvinist (William III) and subsequently Lutheran (George I and George II). Recent scholarship, however, has stressed the continued existence of an active High Church element in the Church of England during the ‘long eighteenth century’ which separates 1688 from the breakdown of the Anglican Church-State in the course of the Whig reforms of the 1820s.[7]

What, then, made the Oxford Movement special and allows us to date Anglo-Catholicism in the proper sense of the word from the time of Keble, Pusey, and Newman? Tractarianism was a new sort of animal, which aroused nervousness in the old High Church school, and the reason is, I believe, its concern to work out the idea of the Church of England as a Catholic Church or the Catholic Church in England in a principled, systematic way. It used the seventeenth century divines and the old High-and-Dry Churchmen wherever they were serviceable but it was not willing to be confined by their limits. Unlike them it started to manifest a distinct hostility to the Reformation as such. The early Tractarian Hurrell Froude declared, ‘The Reformation was a limb badly set; it must be broken again in order to be righted’.[8] Typical of the willingness of the Tractarians to speak the hitherto unspeakable was William George Ward’s book The Ideal of a Christian Church which argued that the Church-type represented by the Church of Rome should be the norm for Anglicans, and Newman’s Tract XC which argued there was nothing in the Thirty Nine Articles that could not be rendered compatible with the teaching of the Council of Trent. The Tractarians – and this links them to the Anglo-Catholics of the next and succeeding generations up to, but excluding, recent times – aimed not to be merely a party contributing something to the richness of Anglican comprehensiveness. Rather, they sought to take over the Church as a whole, to render it consistently Catholic albeit in an English way. Listen to how revolutionary the programme of the 1923 Anglo-Catholic Congress sounds. ‘We cannot be content to be for ever a mere section of a Church, part of which, with equal recognition from authority, contradicts our teaching and decries our claim.’[9] The same conviction was voiced by an Anglo-Catholic spokesman writing in 1933 in preparation for the centenary of the start of the Oxford Movement which fell that year. Herbert Scott, author of a landmark study of the Eastern churches and the Papacy, declared that the Catholic movement in the Church of England ‘can never be content until “Tractarianism” and “Tractarianism” only has the recognition from authority’.[10] And Scott cited as expressing the exact opposite of Anglo-Catholic aims some words of Bishop A. C. Headlam of Gloucester, who had written in the Church Times the year previous to the 1923 congress: ‘I always hold that both for Modernists and for Anglo-Catholics there should be reasonable freedom of interpretation of the formulas of the Church, and just as I think that with a little Christian charity we can find room for the Modernists in the Church of England, so I think that probably we can find room in exactly the same way for the people who call themselves at present Anglo-Catholics’.[11] What Headlam was proposing – the status of a tolerated minority – was precisely the contrary of how Anglo-Catholics themselves intended to proceed.

Newman had predicted that the adoption of a non-negotiable imperative to catholicize the Church of England would turn out to be the Achilles’ heel of those heirs of the Oxford fathers who remained in the Church of England. It would never be possible to gain the National Church as a whole for the Catholic cause. Accordingly, that cause – as understood by Tractarians and Anglo-Catholics, though not by the old High Churchmen, was doomed to ultimate frustration. What Newman did not see was that the seal on that frustration would come with the abandonment of the apostolic shape of the ministry: that is, with the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate. But he divined correctly that, as he put it in his lectures on the ‘difficulties felt by Anglicans’, the natural outcome, or, in his words, the ‘legitimate issue’, of the movement of 1833 would be union with the Holy See.[12]

This brings me conveniently enough to the topic of such union. Interest in unionism, it may be said, does not begin with the Traditional Anglican Communion or with Forward in Faith or indeed with the twentieth century ecumenical movement. Although the evidence comes mainly from private papers, such as reports sent back to Paris by French ambassadors or the correspondence of James I with his son, there can be little doubt that some sort of feelers were put out by the Stuart kings about possible terms of reunion, and by the court of Rome to them. As two modern Anglican commentators, a husband and wife team, put it, writing in the 1970s, ‘The Stuart monarchs never completely lost sight of the ideal of the one Church, whose unity should be restored, nor did the popes resign hope that the English, through their sovereign, should be drawn back into the papal fold’.[13] As to the early Stuarts: in a rare public expression, James I, in his initial speech before Parliament in 1603 declared, ‘I acknowledge the church of Rome to be our mother church although defiled with some infirmities and corruptions’.[14] Even apart from the disaster of the Gunpowder Plot which naturally enough further hardened attitudes to Catholics, James would soon realize that the political realities of being king of England could never allow what we today would call organic reunion. Though the Act of Supremacy had in theory placed the monarchy in a position of dominance over the Church (it was by virtue of the Act of Supremacy that Mary Tudor had restored the Sarum Liturgy and communion with Rome), the growing confidence and accelerating Protestantism of Parliament under Elizabeth set clear limits to the royal power. So when in 1623 James confided in his son on the issue, he made it plain he was only expressing a personal and (by implication) impracticable wish. ‘As for myself, if that were the question, I would with all my heart give my consent that the Bishop of Rome should have the first seat. I being a Western king, would go with the patriarch of the West. And for his temporal principality over the Signiory of Rome, I do not quarrel with it neither; let him, in God’s name, be primus episcopus inter omnes episcopos et princeps episcoporum, so it be no otherwise but as St Peter was princeps apostolorum.’[15] After Prince Charles became king, envoys were exchanged with the court of Rome. Some of Charles’s ministers appear to have presented an improbably rosy view of future prospects. In 1635 the queen’s chaplain reported to Rome with greater realism: ‘That the king and several of his ministry were far from being adverse to an union; that it was an undertaking of the most dangerous consequence, on account of the many and severe edicts that were in force against the Roman Catholic religion: that those who were most favourably inclined to the Catholic cause were frequently obliged to give proofs of their zeal to the contrary for fear of notice: in which case it was difficult to form a just idea of their real sentiments seeing they found themselves under a necessity of varying from themselves and acting incoherently. For instance , when there was any pressing occasion for money, the King was obliged, contrary to his inclination, to let the laws loose against the Roman Catholics, otherwise the puritanical House of Commons would make no progress in the money bills, for the government not being arbitrary, but extraordinary, levies would not be granted without the people’s consent. That the Bishops in like manner (though several of them were disposed to enter into a correspondence with Rome) when their temporalities were threatened by the puritanical members (as they had been frequently of late) went into the same persecuting method: that such a conduct as this had so much of contradiction in it, that it was altogether unintelligible to those who were not perfectly acquainted with the infirmities of human nature, and particularly with the irresolution of these islanders.’[16] The discretion of Charles I’s bishops was prudent. So much is shown by the terms of impeachment of the martyred archbishop, William Laud, ‘England’s Cyprian’. Charges against him included ‘wishing to establish a new religion’, ‘corresponding with Rome’ and ‘treating with the Pope’s men in England’.[17]

After the Restoration, secret clauses in the Treaty of Dover, made between Charles II and Louis XIV, spoke of the king’s possible reconciliation with Rome; a memoir of 1672 from Louis’s chief minister Colbert suggests this would have involved a settlement conceding quasi-patriarchal status to the archbishop of Canterbury, along with a vernacular liturgy, communion under both kinds, and a married clergy. Had this plan become publicly known, the scale of resistance mounted by popular nationalistic Protestantism can only be imagined. Some idea of it is offered by the 1678 ‘Popish Plot’ which took so many innocent people to their deaths. ‘[T]he unfortunate House of Stuart’, commented the Anglo-Papalist L. F. Simmonds in his The Church of England and the Holy See. What do English Divines Say?, ‘had always to pay the price of the iniquities of the House of Tudor’.[18] Still, these initiatives, or perhaps one should say, aspirations, managed to express, despite or because of their politically unfeasible character, a tendency, an instinct, an impetus, among more Catholic-minded Anglicans towards the universal centre of unity in Peter’s see.

A full account of unionism would have to include the foundation in the 1850s of the Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom by the Leicestershire squire and Anglican convert to Rome, Ambrose Phillips de Lisle,[19] and the 1920s Malines Conversations, held between various High Churchmen and Belgian and French Roman Catholics.[20] More telling for the future we are facing now, I think, was the way in which in the 1930s the peak of Anglo-Catholicism coincided so dramatically with the peak of Anglo-Papalism and, furthermore, the nature of Anglo-Papalist attitudes at that heady time.[21] It is generally agreed that the 1933 Congress forms the high-water mark of the Anglo-Catholic movement in England; it is less well known that 350 priests signed in 1932 a manifesto identifying as the inevitable end of the Catholic Revival the corporate return of the English Church to communion with the Holy See which they held to be the aim for which all Anglo-Catholics ought to strive. Then in 1933 The Committee for Promoting the Church Unity Octave, an Anglo-Papalist body, stated the same objective in even more uncompromising language and received the signed support of over 760 priests. The 1932 manifesto gave as the principal reason for the urgency of reunion the fragility of Catholic orthodoxy in the Anglo-Catholic movement under the influence of Modernism – thus ‘Liberal Catholicism’, the forerunner of present-day ‘Affirming Catholicism’, liturgically decorous but doctrinally debilitated. In the view of its drafters, the idea of a non-papal ‘Northern Catholicism’ had proved inherently unstable, owing to the lack of any clear doctrinal authority for such a Northern Catholic body.[22] In The Church of England and the Holy See. What are we to Say?, two Anglo-Papalist co-authors, Henry Fynes-Clinton and Robert Corbould, asked accordingly, ‘Is the Catholic Movement to regenerate the Church in England, to unify and restore her, or to end in a welter of confusion and be destroyed by a final acceptance of protestant negation or of modernist rationalism undermining the historic faith of Christianity? Do not these tendencies to disruption all point to the need of a controlling authority?’ And they went on, ‘A purely national episcopate or an elected Assembly are exposed to the influences of those very vagaries for which control is needed. Nationalist interests and the pressure of other powerful religious bodies within the country are apt, as our experience teaches, to deflect a national church from the straight path of loyalty to the mind and discipline of the Church Universal.’ And they concluded, ‘It becomes increasingly evident that for health in the body ecclesiastic the fresher air and wider intercourse of a supra-national organisation is essential’.[23] These writers foresaw only two eventual possibilities: in their words, ‘on the one hand a group of “historic churches” with perhaps a federation of Protestant sects or a multitude of heterogeneous bodies [compare the Porvoo and Meissen Agreements of the 1990s, already mentioned]; and on the other hand standing apart the great Church owing obedience to Rome’.[24] And in his 1935 book, Catholic Reunion. An Anglican Plea for a Uniate Patriarchate of Canterbury and for an Anglican Ultramontanism, ‘Father Clement’, alias the barrister-clergyman James Tait Plowden-Wardlaw argued to the same end, proposing to drop from the Church of England Protestants and Modernists and, moreover, to recognize the Latin church in England as the other bearer, along with Anglo-Catholicism, of the Catholic tradition. Plowden-Wardlaw wrote, ‘[W]e must abandon wholly and utterly the High-Church denial of the continuity of the present Latin Church in England with the pre-Reformation Church of England. With the facts of history before us it is astounding impertinence to look upon the Roman Church in England as schismatic. Continuity is not a simple idea. It is an exceedingly complex idea, for there is a legal continuity which may or may not coincide with spiritual continuity. No competent lawyer could be found to deny the legal continuity of the present State Church of England with the pre-Reformation Church. But this legal continuity is discounted by the fact that it is in the power of Crown and Parliament to give legal continuity to whom they will. It was to the Calvinists in Scotland that the dominant party eventually gave this coveted legal continuity; and to-morrow a disgruntled Parliament might give it to the Modern Churchmen’s Union and their adherents, a case by no means impossible… [And he concluded: ] Let us then abandon any approach to the subject which looks upon those faithful Catholics of the Latin rite as schismatics in this country. Let us rather thank them from the bottom of our hearts for their noble stand for 400 years, and salute them as brothers of the Latin rite, and faithful sons of the Apostolic See’.[25] Mgr Andrew Burnham, the former bishop of Ebbsfleet, calls this the broken jar theory. In the English Reformation the beautiful jar of the Catholic Church was shattered in our native island. Two shards of Catholicity remained, the recusants and the Catholicising party in the Church of England. (It seems a reasonable conjecture that in Elizabeth’s reign, ‘Church papists’, among whom Shakespeare can probably be counted, would have provided nourishing soil for Catholic shoots to reappear in the Established Church under the Stuart dynasty.)

I am nearing my conclusion on the historical-theological background of Anglicanorum coetibus, and you may see where it is heading. Anglicanorum coetibus represents the logical outcome when the High Church party reinvents itself in Tractarianism as a Catholic movement which of its nature, cannot consent to be a mere tolerated minority, but essentially aims to take over the entire Church. The rupturing of the apostolic succession by the ordination of women rendered that outcome impossible. From that moment onwards, classical Anglo-Catholics had to decide, Would they be an ecclesiola, a ‘little church’, within a body now theologically alien to them though culturally familiar, or would they become an ecclesiola within a body that was culturally unfamiliar to them but theologically congruent? Let us call the latter sort of ecclesiola an ‘Ordinariate’. As we have seen, the difficulty of maintaining firm doctrinal standards, even within the Catholic movement itself, made Anglo-Catholics who were open to union with the Holy See look to that quarter for, so to speak, ecclesial salvation. Let us call then the resultant ecclesiola an Ordinariate whose members will profess in the words of Anglicanorum coetibus I, 5 that the (1992) ‘Catechism of the Catholic Church is the authoritative expression of the Catholic faith’. The notion that the post-Reformation Roman Catholic community in England constitutes with Catholic Anglicans of an orthodox outlook the two shards of a broken jar completes the picture: this will be an Ordinariate, whose members not only profess the Catholic faith as understood at Rome, but do so in canonical unity with the dioceses of Latin Catholics maintaining, however, as their shard-character qualifies them to do, those ‘liturgical, spiritual and pastoral traditions proper to the Anglican Communion’ (Anglicanorum coetibus III) – that is, those traditions seen in an Anglo-Catholic perspective, in the perspective, namely, that was set by the Oxford Movement.

[1] I take this opportunity to thank Archbishop Collins for the wonderfully hospitable welcome he gave me in Toronto, and the kindness shown by the clergy, seminarians, and people of the archdiocese, as well as by visiting Anglicans of the Anglican Church of Canada and the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada.

[2] A. Nichols, O. P., The Panther and the Hind. A Theological History of Anglicanism (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1992), pp. 177-180. I echoed this suggestion in some subsequent articles: ‘Canterbury and Rome’, The Month (August 1992), pp. 306-310; (more allusively) ‘Homeless Anglicans’, The Tablet for 7 August 1999, and (more fully) ‘Anglican Uniatism: a Personal View’ originally published in Anglican Embers. Quarterly Journal of the Anglican Use Society I. 7 (2005), pp. 171-195; reprinted, with modifications, in New Blackfriars 87. 1010 (2006), pp. 337-356, which version was in turn re-printed, unchanged, in The Messenger of the Catholic League 292 (2010), pp. 55-76. Extracts were published in New Directions 8. 124 (August 2005), p. 17, and 8. 125 (September 2005), pp. 13-14.

[3] K. Hylson-Smith, High Churchmanship in the Church of England. From the Sixteenth to the Late Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1993), p. 10.

[4] Treated as the key-moment in the construction of a Catholic identity for the Church of England in D. MacCulloch, ‘The Myth of the English Reformation’, Journal of British Studies 30 (1991), pp. 1-19.

[5] In his Apologie of the Church of England, on which see G. Jenkins, John Jewel and the English National Church: the Dilemmas of an Erastian Reformer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).

[6] See J. Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church. Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism, 1625-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

[7] P. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760-1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

[8] J. Keble and J. H. Newman (ed.), The Remains of the late Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude, I (London: Rivington, 1838), p. 433.

[9] Cited in S. Herbert Scott, Modernism in Anglo-Catholicism (London: Council for Promoting Catholic Unity, 1933), p. 15.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Church Times, for 14 July 1922, cited ibid.

[12] J. H. Newman, Lectures on Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching. Considered in Twelve Lectures addressed in 1850 to the Party of the Movement of 1833 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), p. 1.

[13] B. Pawley and M. Pawley, Rome and Canterbury through Four Centuries. A Study of the relations between the Church of Rome and the Anglican Churches, 1530-1973 (London: Mowbray: 1974), p. 29.

[14] Cited ibid., p. 25.

[15] Ibid.

[16] J. Berington (ed.), Memoirs of Gregorio Panzani, giving an account of his agency in England in the Years 1634, 1635, 1636 (Farnborough: Gregg, 1970 [London: Robinson and Faulder, 1793]), pp. 186-187.

[17] B. Pawley and M. Pawley, Rome and Canterbury through Four Centuries, op. cit., p. 38.

[18] L. F. Simmonds, The Church of England and the Holy See. What do English Divines Say? (London: Council for Promoting Christian Unity, 1933), p. 22.

[19] M. Pawley, Faith and Family. The Life and Circle of Ambrose Phillips de Lisle (Norwich: Canterbury Press, pp. 291-302, 311-318.

[20] J. A. Dick, The Malines Conversations (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1989).

[21] See, for a survey, M. Yelton, Anglican Papalism. An Illustrated History, 1900-1960 (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2005), pp. 20-64.

[22] Compare N. P. Williams and C. Harris (eds.), Northern Catholicism. Centenary Studies in the Oxford and Parallel Movements (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1933).

[23] H. Fynes-Clinton and R. Corbould, The Church of England and the Holy See. What are we to Say? (London: Council for Promoting Catholic Unity, 1933), p. 5

[24] Ibid.

[25] J. T. Plowden-Wardlaw, Catholic Reunion. An Anglican Plea for a Uniate Patriarchate of Canterbury and for an Anglican Ultramontanism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1935), pp. 44-45.

2011-04-03T14:38:00.000-07:00

http://risu.org.ua/en/index/expert_thought/authors_columns/vyelenskyi_column/41574/

March: The election and the role of personality in history

Viktor YELENSKY

During the enthronement of the newly elected head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church it is likely that the same thing occurred to many of the guests. When Bishop Sviatoslav reaches the age at which his predecessor asked the pope to accept his resignation, the 21st century will be at its zenith and the world will be different. We have no idea what the world will be like, but we do know it will be very different from today’s world. To understand just how different it will be, we must calculate the number of years until the newly enthroned patriarch reaches his seventy-fifth birthday and subtract it from the year 2011. And so we must look back thirty-four years to 1977.

In 1977 the Soviet Union prepares to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution, China is entirely closed off from the world, dictators rule Latin American, in Teharan women wear miniskirts. Margaret Thatcher is not yet prime minister, Ronald Reagan not yet president, Deng Xiaoping not yet a leader. Karol Wojtyla is the archbishop of Krakow, Mikhail Gorbachev is the first party secretary of the Stavropol territory, Helmut Kohl is the opposition leader in the Bundesrat. Osama bin Laden teaches economics and management in the King Abdulaziz University, Lech Walesa is an electrician at a Gdansk shipyard, the future inventor of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee works at his first job after graduating from Oxford.

Leonid Kravchuk is in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma is at Yuzhmash, Viktor Yushchenko works at a local branch of the State Bank of the USSR, Viktor Yanukovych works as a director of a motor depot. And in the western region of a now defunct country Sviatoslav Shevchuk is about to sit at a school desk for the first time.

This is a world without Internet and cell phones, without the euro, al-Qaida, and Hezbollah, a world where the Yalta agreement seems intact and where progress in technology has reached its apogee. This world has not heard Pope John Paul II’s “Be not afraid!” message, Reagan’s Evil Empire Speech, the theocratic guidelines of Ruhollah Khomeini, nor Gorbachev’s “We can no longer live like this!” proclamation.

We do not know what the world would have become like without these people. But we know it would have had to have been different. And so the assertion that the church always remains the same no matter who is chosen is not entirely true.

What would have happened to the church had Pope John Paul II not awakened Poland and Chile, the Philippines and El Salvador with his pilgrimages? Had he not proven to be stronger than Pinochet, Trujillo, Marcos, Brezhnev, and Andropov? Undoubtedly, the church would have continued to save souls. But its message would have been different, and heard differently by millions, and this means, again, that the world would have been different. History does not have a detailed libretto; people make history with their interests, feelings, and ideas about good and evil.

The guests of the enthronement had something else on their minds as well: why did the bishops elect the person they did? Some may point to the influence of Patriarch Lubomyr; to the desire to have patriarch that could be accepted by both the bishops from Ukraine and the diaspora, for these bishops often have different opinions on the development of the church; to the mainstream trends and undercurrents in the episcopate and the Roman Curia… Others may talk about the enlightenment of the newly elected head, his theological maturity and dynamism.

But, in fact, far more interesting will be what people will say in ten, twenty, or thirty years about what prompted the Synod of Bishops to elect whom they did. After the October 1978 conclave, at which Cardinal Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II, Soviet propagandists talked about the trace of the CIA; conspirologists talked about the conspiracy against Roman wastrels of American and German “princes of the Church,” dissatisfaction with the deplorable state of Vatican finances; experts-Vaticanists talked about the inability of Italian cardinals to jointly nominate a candidate…

Ten years later these very experts will say that the choice was the only correct one, that no one else would have been able to bring down the Iron Curtain, give hope to millions, affirm human dignity, that none of the hierarchs they knew would have been able to stop Marxism from absorbing the Latin American church, warn of the military clash between Argentina and Chile, reconcile Dutch bishops with Rome, and return Poland to Europe. Only then did the world start to look for certain merits in a candidate, compelling the cardinals to elect the first Slavic pope in the history of the church: these merits being experience resisting Nazi and Communist totalitarianism; extremely insightful understanding of our present; strong personal charisma; unyielding, to the verge of obsession, dedication and impressive performance.

We cannot overlook the fact that the bishop’s choice resulted from weighing various expectations, convictions, and interests. But we must also not overlook the fact that they saw qualities in Bishop Sviatoslav that would help him tackle both near and distance future challenges. We do not know what exactly the Ukrainian hierarchs foresee for the future: global atheism or, conversely, planetary spiritual awakening; cataclysms that force people to leave Earth, or shocking scientific breakthroughs that are bigger than the invention of the wheel, the printing press, or nuclear energy. Or maybe they foresee problems that are less global but very worrisome for the church. But we do hope they foresaw something.

Furthermore, we do not know what exactly they looked for in Bishop Sviatoslav, what special gifts he has that will be needed in the future. Maybe it is only one gift, but one that determined their decision. But we want to believe that they found it.

This is how Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, taking into consideration the future of the church, chose not a bishop but Father Mitrat Slipyj. Cardinal Myroslav Ivan Lubachivsky said in an interview that when the metropolitan was asked why Slipyj should be his successor, he said: “He will persevere.” Then Bishop Andrey realized that he indeed will be the head. And, as we know, he was right.
http://risu.org.ua">Джерело публікації: risu.org.ua

2011-03-31T08:30:00.001-07:00

New Ukrainian Catholic leader seeks restoration of patriarchal status

By Benjamin Mann

Rome, Italy, Mar 30, 2011 / 10:00 am (EWTN News/CNA)

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Major Archbiship Sviatoslav Shevchuk.

Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, newly enthroned as the head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church on March 29, will discuss the possible restoration of his church's historic status as a patriarchate with Pope Benedict XVI during his upcoming visit to the Vatican.
“A patriarchate is a period in the completion of the development of a church,” he explained to reporters in Kyiv before his departure for the Vatican. He said that the delegation would discuss the development of the Ukrainian Catholic Church that has taken place since its 1989 re-emergence into public life. “I will give the evidence of our maturity to the Pope,” he stated.
The Ukrainian Catholic Church's Synod of Bishop chose the 40-year-old Archbishop Shevchuk as their new leader on March 27. His predecessor, 77-year-old Cardinal Archbishop Lubomyr Husar, retired for health reasons on Feb. 10.
Archbishop Shevchuk's youth, and his prior position as a bishop of a Ukrainian Catholic eparchy in Argentina from 2009 until 2011, made him an unusual choice to succeed Cardinal Husar. His previous appointments included positions at Lviv's Holy Spirit Theological Seminary as well as the Ukrainian Catholic University. He also served as Cardinal Husar's personal secretary from 2002 to 2005.
“Our Church in the twentieth century has walked with our Savior to the end,” Major Archbishop Shevchuk observed in his enthronement homily, referring to the persecution of Ukrainian Catholics that took place under Communism from 1946 until 1989. “The death of hundreds of thousands of our laity, priests, monks and nuns, led by our bishops, was death on a cross – and therefore the giver of life!”
“In its slavery, humiliation and self-giving, our church was brought to this place – the place of resurrection, where the Father glorified it and raised up its imperishable glory,” he proclaimed.
Today, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church – whose existence was denied by Soviet authorities for decades – has approximately 4.3 million adherents.
“Today we are experiencing a new spring of our Church – which in its resurrection by the Holy Spirit begins to get younger and smile anew to the world with the light of Christ's Gospel,” he said.
“Let us boldly carry out our Christian vocation in the world, and together we can renew the face of our nation and its state.”
Major Archbishop Shevchuk's enthronement took place in Kyiv at the Patriarchal Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ – whose name reflects Ukrainian Catholics' own view of their church as the authentic heir to the tradition of Slavic Christianity.
Kyiv was historically the center of this tradition, although the Eastern Orthodox Churches transferred the patriarchate to Moscow in 1589. Ukrainian Catholics, whose church reunited with the Roman Catholic Church in 1596, have generally continued to regard their leader as a legitimate patriarch – particularly since 2005, when the church moved its leadership back to the national capital in Kyiv.
Political and theological disputes have left a lasting mark on Ukraine, where two rival Eastern Orthodox churches – both entirely separate from the Ukrainian Catholic Church – are also not in communion with one another. One of the Ukrainian Orthodox churches is affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, while the other claims to represent Ukraine independently of Russia.
Amid these disputes, the faithful of the Ukrainian Catholic Church regarded Cardinal Husar as the Patriarch of Kyiv prior to his retirement, and applied the title to him in liturgical settings. Although the Vatican did not officially recognize him under this title, the announcement of his retirement significantly made reference to the portion of canon law that describes the retirement of Eastern patriarchs.
In his installation homily, Major Archbishop Shevchuk referred to himself as the “leader and father” of the Ukrainian Catholic Church. He also made reference to Cardinal Archbishop Joseph Slipyj, who led the church from 1944 to 1984, as “Patriarch Joseph.”
At the March 30 general audience in St. Peter's Square, Pope Benedict greeted Archbishop Shevchuk and his delegation, assuring them of his "constant prayer that the Holy Trinity may bring abundance, and confirm in peace and harmony the beloved Ukrainian nation."

[Irenikon] An alliance of faith

2011-03-25T17:15:00.000-07:00

An alliance of faith

Published: 23 March, 2011, 01:36
Edited: 23 March, 2011, 07:58
http://rt.com/politics/press/rossijskaya-gazeta/orthodox-church-catholic-alliance/en/print/
Moscow Patriarchate calls for strategic alliance with Catholic Church Elena Yakovleva
The Russian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church should accept each other not as rivals, but first and foremost as allies, working to protect the rights of Christians, said “the Lavrov of the Church”, head of the ROC’s Department for External Church Relations, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, while speaking at the International Christian Congress in Wurzburg, Germany.

This year Easter celebrations coincide for the Orthodox and Catholic faiths. Bishop Hilarion told Rossiiskaya Gazeta how the two Churches could develop an allied position without damaging their integrity, dogmas, and principles.

“Today, the Orthodox and Catholic Christians should accept each other not as rivals, but as allies working to protect the rights of Christians. We share a common field of missionary work.” said Metropolitan Hilarion, while speaking at the fourth international congress in Wurzburg, stressing that “the future of Christianity in the third millennium depends on the joint efforts of the Orthodox believers and Catholics.’’

Bishop Hilarion commented on his statement to RG as follows. A

“The idea of a strategic alliance with the Catholics– is an old idea of mine. It came to me when the Catholics were electing the new Pope. Although I would like to point out that what I am suggesting is, in essence, the direct opposite of Uniatism, which is a way toward a rapprochement based on doctrinal compromises. In our point of view, the policy of Uniatism had suffered complete failure. Not only did it not bring the Orthodox Christians and Catholics closer together, it actually distanced them. And Uniatism, as is currently recognized by both Orthodox believers and Catholics, is not the path toward unity.

‘‘I, on the other hand, am asking to – without any doctrinal compromises and without attempts to artificially level our dogmatic differences, the teachings about the Church and about the superiority of the Universal Church, without the claims to resolve all of the existing problems between us – act as allies, at the same time, without being a single Church, without having a single administrative system or common liturgy, and while maintaining the differences on the points in which we differ.

‘’This is especially important in light of the common challenges that face both Orthodox and Catholic Christians. They are first and foremost the challenges of a godless world, which is equally hostile today to Orthodox believers and Catholics, the challenge of the aggressive Islamic movement, the challenge of moral corruption, family decay, the abandonment by many people in traditionally Christian countries of the traditional family structure, liberalism in theology and morals, which is eroding the Christian community from within. We can respond to these, and a number of other challenges, together.

‘’I would like to stress, once more, that there are well-known doctrinal differences between the Orthodox and Catholic faiths, but there are also common positions in regard to morality and social issues which, today, are not shared by many of the representatives of liberal Protestantism. Therefore, cooperation is first and foremost necessary between the Orthodox and Catholic Christians – and that is what I call a strategic alliance.

‘’The Church is not ready to make any compromises. And I am not calling for compromise, but on the contrary, to uncompromisingly defend our positions. Within the framework of the Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, my position is often the toughest. Meanwhile, the documents that are drafted there, are the most often contested by the ROC delegations. There have been instances when we were forced to walk out of sessions as a sign of disagreement with what was happening. We always very firmly oppose attempts to erode the differences that exist between us.

‘’We don’t need any compromises. We need cooperation and collaboration. And within the framework of the theological commission, we could discuss the differences that exist between us not in order to find a compromise, but in order to clarify our differences and the things we have in common. It could so happen that in the course of discussion we realize that in some doctrinal aspects we are actually closer than seemed to be before – and this will be a rapprochement. But just the opposite could happen: we may see the differences that we have never noticed before.

‘’The theological dialogue should be allowed to take its course; it may or may not lead to some results. Meanwhile, cooperation that is built on a systematic basis and that is founded on the fact that we share many of the same tasks and challenges should be developed at the same time.”

2011-03-22T08:40:00.000-07:00

A Holy Alliance between Rome and Moscow Is Born

Correctly Fr Hans Jacobse writing on AOI observes, that the joint Catholic/Orthodox commitment to the “new evangelization” of Europe was “almost incomprehensible just a few short years ago.” And yet, as the summary from Chiesa Espresso has it we now are seeing these two Churches united in a “common objective: the ‘new evangelization’ of Europe. A delegation of the Russian Orthodox Church visits the Vatican, which publishes an anthology of the patriarch’s writings. A meeting between Kirill and Benedict XVI keeps getting closer.”
While there are those on both sides who would disagree, I have to say having lived almost half my adult life in each Church, I think we need each other. I also think that out of the discover of our mutual, if different, need for each other will come reconciliation.
So take a moment and read the article by by Sandro Magister and let me know what you thiik.
In Christ,
+Fr Gregory
ROME, May 24, 2010 – Benedict XVI will soon create a new “pontifical council” expressly dedicated to the “new evangelization.” Not for mission countries where the congregation “de propaganda fide” is already at work. But for the countries of ancient Christian tradition that are today in danger of losing the faith.
Pope Joseph Ratzinger wants to link his pontificate to this initiative. And this was the main topic that he discussed one morning in the spring of 2009, at Castel Gandolfo, with four prominent cardinals he had called for consultation: Camillo Ruini, Angelo Bagnasco, Christoph Schönborn, and Angelo Scola, the last being the most resolute in promoting the institution of the new office.
Meanwhile, one great ally has already united with the pope from outside of the Catholic Church, in this enterprise of a new evangelization.
This great ally is the Russian Orthodox Church.
On the afternoon of Thursday, May 20, immediately before the concert given for Benedict XVI by the patriarchate of Moscow began in the audience hall, the president of the department of external relations for the patriarchate, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk (in the photo), said exactly this to the pope: that the Catholic Church will not be alone in the new evangelization of dechristianized Europe, because it will have at its side the Russian Orthodox Church, “no longer a competitor, but an ally.”
The positive relationship that has been established between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Church of Rome is one of the most stunning achievements of Benedict XVI’s pontificate. It is also stunning for its rapidity. In fact, it’s enough to look back just one decade to note the chill that dominated between the two Churches.
To a question from www.chiesa on the factors that led to this extraordinary change, Metropolitan Hilarion responded by indicating three of these.
The first factor, he said, is the person of the new pope. A pope who receives “the positive regard of the whole of the Russian Orthodox world,” even though this is pervaded by age-old anti-Roman sentiments.
The second factor is the common view of the challenge posed to both Churches by the dechristianization of countries that in the past were the heart of Christendom.
And the third reason is their mutual embrace of the grand Christian tradition, as the great highway of the new evangelization.
To the question about a meeting – the first in history – between the heads of the two Churches of Rome and Moscow, Hilarion replied that “this is a desire, a hope, and we must work to make it happen.” He added that a few obstacles will have to be smoothed over first, above all the disagreements between the two Churches in Ukraine, but he said that he is confident that the meeting will take place soon: “not between just any patriarch and pope, but between Patriarch Kirill and Pope Benedict.”
One proof of how much closer the positions of the heads of the two Churches have become is given by two books published just a few months apart, and without precedent in history.
The first was published last December by the patriarchate of Moscow, and presents in Russian and Italian the main writings by Ratzinger on Europe, before and after his election as pope, with an extensive introduction written by Metropolitan Hilarion.
The second, released a few days ago, is published by the Libreria Editrice Vaticana and collects writings by Kirill before and after his nomination as patriarch, on the dignity of man and the rights of the person, with an introduction by Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the pontifical council for culture.
A selection from Hilarion’s introduction to the first volume was presented by www.chiesa back when it was published. And an extract of a text by Kirill from the second volume is reproduced below.
Both the publications were promoted by an international association based in Rome: “Sofia: Idea Russa, Idea d’Europa.” The association has produced an Italian-Russian academy, “Sapientia et Scientia,” inaugurated last May 20 in the context of the “Days of Russian culture and spirituality” held in Rome by a delegation of the patriarchate of Moscow guided by Metropolitan Hilarion.
The Days had two culminating moments. The first on May 19, on the premises of the new Russian Orthodox church of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, built a few years ago in Rome, a short distance from the Vatican. There Metropolitan Hilarion, Archbishop Ravasi, and Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the pontifical council for Christian unity, discussed the issue “Orthodox and Catholics in Europe today. The Christian roots and common cultural patrimony of East and West.”
The second important moment was the concert given for the pope on May 20 by Patriarch Kirill I. Compositions by great Russian musicians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, like Mussorgskij and Rimski-Korsakov, ?ajkovskij andRachmaninov, were performed. Commenting on them at the end of the concert, Benedict XVI emphasized “the close, original connection between Russian music and liturgical singing.” A connection that is also fully visible in the evocative “Canto dell’Ascensione,” a symphony for choir and orchestra in five parts composed by Metropolitan Hilarion, performed at the same concert and highly appreciated by the public and the pope.
In his message, Patriarch Kirill recalled that in Russia, “during the years of persecution, when the majority of the population had no access to sacred music, these works, together with the masterpieces of Russian literature and the figurative arts, contributed to bringing the proclamation of the Gospel, proposing to the secular world ideals of the highest moral and spiritual caliber.”
And Benedict XVI, in his final speech, remarked on how in the musical compositions performed, “there is already realized the encounter, the dialogue, the synergy between East and West, as also between tradition and modernity.” A dialogue that is all the more urgent in order to let Europe breathe again with “two lungs” and restore to it the awareness of its Christian roots.
Both Benedict XVI and Metropolitan Hilarion are utterly convinced that Christian art is also a vehicle of evangelization and a leaven of unity between the Churches.
Before arriving in Rome to meet with the pope, Hilarion stopped in Ravenna, Milan, Turin, and Bologna. The first of these cities was the capital of the Eastern Christian empire in Italy, and its basilicas are a marvelous testimony to this. In his conference on May 19, Hilarion said that he had admired in the mosaics of Ravenna “the splendor of a Church in harmony, not yet wounded by the division between East and West.” And he added: “If this harmony was real for our ancestors, it can be real for us as well. If we are not able to recreate the harmony evoked by the mosaics of Ravenna, the blame will be ours alone.”
The following is an extract from the first of the texts by Patriarch Kirill collected in the volume published in recent days by the Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
Another part of this text was published in the May 17-18, 2010 issue of “L’Osservatore Romano.”
The original, in Russian, was published in the February 16-17, 2000 issue of the “Nezavisimaja Gazeta”
________________
NORM OF FAITH AS NORM OF LIFE
by Kirill I, patriarch of Moscow and all Russia
A religious way of life – in our case, a Christian-Orthodox way of life – is distinguished by its foundation in the tradition of the Church. Tradition presents itself to us as a collection of truths that by means of the witness of the holy apostles were accepted by the Church, are preserved by her, and are developed in relation to the challenged posed to the Church in the various historical periods. In short, tradition is the vital flow of the grace of faith in the life of the Church. Tradition is a normative phenomenon, it is nothing other than the norm of faith. [...] Only a life that corresponds to tradition as norm of faith can be considered a truly Christian-Orthodox life. [...]
Preserving this norm and affirming it in society as a fundamental ontological value is a task of every member of the Church. [...] This norm is stable and fragile at the same time. The experience of contact with other cultural and social models tells us that from that contact, this norm can emerge damaged or even destroyed, or unharmed and even strengthened. [...] When the models of life different from our own are also based on their respective traditions, then most of the time they do not constitute a threat to the values on which the Christian-Orthodox way of life is founded. Historically, the Orthodox have coexisted, coexist and interact in Russia with Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and other Christian confessions. They have always lived peacefully beside the members of other confessions and religions; except for the cases in which a faith or a way of life seen as foreign has been imposed on our people by force or by means of proselytism. Then the people have risen up in defense of their own faith and their own norm of life. As a rule, these are cases that have taken place following aggression on the part of foreign powers. [...]
The problem is that today there are no defenses capable of protecting the spiritual health of the people, their historical-religious uniqueness, from the expansion of foreign and destructive socio-cultural factors, from a new way of life that has emerged outside of any tradition and has been formed under the influence of the postindustrial reality.
At the foundation of this model of life are the ideas of neoliberalism, which combine pagan anthropocentrism, established in European culture at the time of the Renaissance, with features of Protestant theology and elements of philosophical thought of Jewish origin. These ideas were definitively formed at the end of the age of Enlightenment. The French Revolution is the conclusive act of this philosophical and spiritual revolution, which is the basis for the rejection of the normative significance of tradition.
It is by no means a coincidence that this revolution began with the Protestant Reformation, because it was precisely the Reformation that rejected the normative principle of tradition in the realm of Christian doctrine. Tradition, in Protestantism, ceased being a criterion of truth. It was replaced by the application of reason to the Sacred Scriptures, and by personal religious experience. From this point of view, Protestantism essentially presents itself as a liberal interpretation of Christianity.
*
I would like to say a few words about ecumenism in this regard. When there is a slowing or a crisis in ecumenical dialogue, this is to be attributed in the first place to an insufficiency of a methodological nature: instead of agreeing immediately on the most important things, meaning on the understanding of sacred tradition as norm of faith and criterion of theological truth, Christians undertake to discuss individual questions, which are certainly relevant, but particular. Even if there were success on some of these individual points, this would have no great repercussions: what permanent significance could there be, in fact, to a specific doctrinal agreement when one of the parties – I am thinking, for example, of a significant proportion of the Protestant theologians – does not recognize the very concept of norm of faith? So new ideas and new arguments can always revise or annul what has been established previously, leading constantly to new disagreements and divisions.
If we look at the question of female priesthood or that of the admission of homosexuality, is not this perhaps precisely what happens today? Both of the questions confirm, among other things, the thesis about the liberal nature of Protestantism, as previously defined. It is absolutely evident that the introduction of female priesthood and the admission of homosexuality have taken place under the influence of a certain liberal vision of human rights: a vision in which these rights are radically opposed to sacred tradition. And a part of Protestantism has resolved the question in favor of this conception of human rights, ignoring the clear norm of faith in the tradition.
*
The new way of life in the postindustrial age is based on the exercise of individual freedom at any cost and without limits, except those imposed by the law. How can this vision be defined from a theological point of view? The conception of neoliberalism is based on the idea of the liberation of the human person from everything that he believes could limit the exercise of his will and his rights. This model presumes that the purpose of human existence is the affirmation of individual freedom; and it affirms that from this, the person derives his absolute value.
I would like to observe that theologians, including Orthodox theologians, do not deny the freedom of the individual. Affirming this does not betray the doctrine of the Church of Christ. The Lord himself, who created man in his image and likeness, has infused in him the gift of free will. [...] But when the apostle Paul calls us to freedom, he is talking about the predestination of man to be free in Christ, meaning free from the burden of sin. Because true freedom is acquired by man to the extent to which he is free from sin, from the obscure power of instinct and from the evil that weighs upon him. [...]
But the liberal ideal – as previously described – makes no appeal to liberation from sin, because it is the very concept of sin that is absent in this liberalism. There is no room for the concept of sin; an action is illicit when, with a given behavior, the individual violates the law or compromises someone else’s freedom. We could say that the neoliberal postindustrial doctrine revolves around the idea of the emancipation of the individual sinner, meaning the unleashing of the full potential of sin that exists in man. Man emancipated in this sense has the right to free himself from everything that obstructs him in the affirmation of his “ego” wounded by sin. This is – the claim goes – a private affair, of the sovereign, autonomous individual, who is not dependent on anyone else but himself. In this sense, neoliberalism is diametrically opposed to Christianity. It can be defined as anti-Christian, without fear of sinning against the truth.
As for the gravity of the challenge, a qualitative leap is presented by the fact that the modern conception of liberalism [...] has penetrated and has spread in all the spheres of human activity: economic, political, legal, religious. The neoliberal idea determines the structure of society, it determines the common significance of civil liberties, of the democratic institutions, of the market economy, of the freedom of speech, of the freedom of conscience, of everything that is included in the concept of “contemporary civilization.”
Whenever any objections to the neoliberal doctrine are advanced, some are struck with an almost sacred terror, they see these criticisms as an attack on the “sacred principles” of freedom and human rights. One commentator said that in one of my articles published in 1999 in the “”Nezavisimaja Gazeta,” entitled “The conditions of modernity,” I was proposing nothing less than the foundation of a society similar to the one envisioned by the Ayatollah Khomeini, and that I wanted to light up the skies of Russia with the bonfires of the Holy Inquisition. Society today must understand that neoliberal ideas can be criticized on the basis of different conceptions of political economy. The plurality of opinion, moreover, takes its place quite naturally in the system of values that liberal doctrine itself defends. [...]
*
But let’s return to the initial question: what is, what should be the response of the individual person, of society, and finally of theology to the fundamental challenge of our time, the one issued by neoliberalism?
It is in the first place appropriate to emphasize how today there are at least two widespread points of view on this subject. [...] The first is the one that we could call the isolationist model. [...] It is a point of view that is present both in some political circles and in a certain part of our ecclesial reality. And nonetheless a question arises: is isolation vital and creative, is it truly effective, all the more in an open world, in an age characterized by the integration of science, economics, information, communication, and even politics? Such a defense against the outside world is perhaps possible for a small group of persons in the desert or in the dense forests of Siberia; although even those “old believers” in Siberia who for many decades defended themselves from “this world” were not able in the long run to preserve their cherished solitude or their form of existence. But is it possible to isolate, to cloister a Church and a great nation? Would this not mean rejecting the mission given to the Church by the Savior Jesus Christ himself, that of witnessing to the truth before the entire world?
The second model consists in accepting en bloc the idea of neoliberal civilization – as it has been developed in the West up until our time – in order to transplant it artificially to Russian Orthodox soil, to impose it on the people by force, if necessary. Unlike similar attempts made in the past, today the power of the state and its institutions is no longer necessary to attain this goal. It is sufficient to use the mass media, to use the overwhelming power of publicity, to exploit the possibilities offered by the educational system, and so on. This model asserts that the religious and historical-cultural tradition of our country has been exhausted, that only “common human values” have the right to exist, that the axiological unification of the world is the indispensable condition for integration. There is no doubt: if this point of view wins, the Orthodox will be confined to a sort of spiritual reservation. [...] Not unlike the first model, this model also has its followers: both in the political world, and, to a certain extent, in the ecclesial camp.
It is clear that the two models are mutually exclusive. It is also evident that both enjoy strong support. The opposition between these two points of view is to a great extent at the basis of the climate of tension and confrontation in social life; a tension that also impacts the life of the Church.
Is it possible to face and to resolve this challenge peacefully, meaning without sinning against the truth? Is it possible to offer an effective model that would lead to cooperation between the values of tradition and liberal ideas? [...] Christian and Orthodox theology must expose the heart of the matter: it must forcefully assert that the existence of liberal institutions in economic, political, and social life and in international relations is reasonable and morally justified only on the condition that the neoliberal vision of man and society is not imposed along with them. [...] The main task for theology is the elaboration of a Christian social doctrine of the Russian Orthodox Church, a doctrine rooted in tradition and responding to the questions facing contemporary society, a doctrine that could serve as guide for the action of priests and laity, and that correctly reflects the position of the Church on the most important problems of modernity. [...]
Thinking of the tasks of theology in regard to the relationship between Church and world, I would like to conclude by saying this: the norm of faith, engraved in the apostolic tradition and preserved by the Church, will reveal itself to us in its fullness as norm of human life when man himself is full of the desire to realize that what he has learned. Attaining this is not a task for theology alone, but for the entire Church in its fullness, guided by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
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Prudence True 09/16/2010 08:47 AM

"Thinking of the tasks of theology in regard to the relationship between Church and world, I would like to conclude by saying this: the norm of faith, engraved in the apostolic tradition and preserved by the Church, will reveal itself to us in its fullness as norm of human life when man himself is full of the desire to realize that what he has learned. Attaining this is not a task for theology alone, but for the entire Church in its fullness, guided by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Thank you for posting this . . . and the emphasis must be on the fullness of the Orthodox Church, not on its individual branches. So this applies to more than the Russian Orthodox Church on its own.

We will see great things within The Church in the coming years if we allow it to happen and not squelch their brilliance with pettiness.

Just my simple non-theologian thoughts . . .

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Paulartw 07/07/2010 08:45 PM

This is so exciting. I will continue to pray for God to heal the schism of the Church!

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Michael Bauman 05/25/2010 07:36 PM

I guess we will see how 'holy' the alliance is.

Mr. Gates, I guess we might as well just proclaim that all those who call themselves Christians are one body and go about our business with the knowledge that any theological difference is just a matter of pride, sinfulness and lust of power?

Morman, Calvinist, Baptist, Papalist, Orthodox or Kumbaya univeralist is just dosen't matter?

While all divorces involve both parties to some degree there is a difference between those who are faithful and those who are not. Of course if both parties are adulterers, we are in serious trouble because it would appear that despite Jesus promise that that gates of hell would not prevail against the Church, they have.

I find your thinking flawed no matter from which perspective I evaluate it--west or east.

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timothyrgates 05/25/2010 04:20 PM

Yes! It is a divorce without true justification other than after the fact fabrication that there has been the perpetuation of the separation of the 'East' from the 'West' in Christianity. It has been the same justification used by group after group that have been otherwise Christian save for their self-serving need to separate in order to be the 'true Church' in action. Of course it's always the group that you're part of that is the 'true Church.' I've seen the same thing among the SCOBA Orthodox Churches as well as those on the other 'sides' who say that they're the 'true Orthodox Church' in expression. Just as when people get divorced because they're merely tired of working things out, people and groups do the same thing. It's easy to point out the shortcomings of the 'other.' The question is, are we as honest about our own shortcomings. Nearly every 'defense' of the separation from each other, the 'East' from the 'West' forgets that it's origin is in both personal as well as historical self-indulgent pride.
Jesus made clear that the unbelieving world will believe that He has come out from the Father only as we as believers love one another as the Father loves Him. The unbelieving world has every reason to not believe our 'message(s)' as long as we choose to take sides at the exclusion of the other.

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Dana Ames 05/25/2010 12:55 AM

Fr Gregory,

I don't know very much. I think it would please the Lord for the schism to be healed, and it's a good thing for the RC and EO to work together. I get nervous when I read that fault lies "outside" somewhere. Surely we need to aware of, guard against, and turn from whatever is external that the devil would use to divert us from following the Lord and growing into his likeness in Love. But I don't think "culture" or "liberalism" per se is the fundamental issue, and mounting a highly defensive posture usually makes things more problematic. I'm not sure such a posture would lay the groundwork for evangelism, the announcing of good news (the best news!) to take place. I would wonder if simply appealing to Tradition without definitions, explanations and above all demonstrations of love and concern, would make Jesus and life in Him appealing to Europeans. As in relationships between persons, the less defensiveness there is, the more likely something positive and healthy will come forth.

Have you read the little book "Church, Papacy and Schism" by Philip Sherrard (presently in third edition)? If you have, I would be interested in your thoughts.

Dana

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annika533 05/24/2010 11:39 PM

First, what is the “old evangelism” that we need to make it “new”?
What is the purpose of this "new evangelization"? Same as the Old?
Or more of a political flavor? or spiritual? and if spiritual, what or whose theology is going to inform this "new evangelization" and who controls it...is there something about the "old", I mean "traditional” evangelization, (which I assume is the Gospel, Christ), that makes it no longer sufficient?
It seems we need to be wary of “relativism” trying sink it's teeth sunk into to Gospel these days...

I think this little nugget tucked away in the www.chiesa article says much about the timeless power of Truth:

'...Patriarch Kirill recalled that in Russia, "during the years of persecution, when the majority of the population had no access to sacred music, these works, together with the masterpieces of Russian literature and the figurative arts, contributed to bringing the proclamation of the Gospel, proposing to the secular world ideals of the highest moral and spiritual caliber."....'

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James the Lesser 05/25/2010 07:24 PM in reply to annika533

annika,
the "new" evangelism begins with each and every baptized Catholic or Orthodox believer (in the West) striving for his or her own Holiness, first transforming themselves and then transforming the society around us with our love of God and neighbor.

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Monday, March 14, 2011

Notes from ecclesiology conference in Cyprus

(WCC) - “Without any doubt, ecclesiology remains in our times the crucial issue for Christian theology in ecumenical perspective.” This was one of the conclusions drawn by a week-long consultation in Cyprus at which forty Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox representatives provided a common response to The Nature and Mission of the Church, a 2005 ecumenical text published by the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches (WCC).

Ecclesiology, or the theological self-understanding of the church, sets out to define the role of the church, its nature and mission, and in the ecumenical setting to explain issues and difficulties that divide churches from one another.

The inter-Orthodox consultation took place from 2 to 9 March and produced an eleven-page report (see below) as well as a communiqué detailing highlights of the discussion. It was held at the invitation of the WCC to facilitate the Orthodox churches’ discussion of The Nature and Mission of the Church.

Orthodox participants were joined by several members of the Faith and Order Commission and the WCC staff including general secretary Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit.

The consultation noted that the Faith and Order document draws on a variety of ecclesial traditions and is organized in accordance with western philosophical methods. This approach makes the text “difficult to recognize as characteristically Orthodox” and in the end “it fails to reach the level of a ‘convergence text’”, cautioned the final report.

The communiqué from Cyprus recognizes the 2005 text as a step in the long journey toward the visible unity of the One Church, adding, “We are grateful for the efforts of the Faith and Order Commission and acknowledge all those who worked under difficult circumstances to draft this ecumenical document.”

The consultation stressed the urgency of overcoming separation among churches, quoting St Basil the Great (330-379 A.D.): “I think then that the one goal of all who are really and truly serving the Lord ought to be to bring back to union the churches who have at different times and in diverse manners divided from one another.”

The report of the consultation will be presented to the commission with a compilation of suggestions for re-drafting the study document as the quest continues for ecumenical consensus in matters of ecclesiology.
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Monday, March 14, 2011

Notes from ecclesiology conference in Cyprus