Dear Mr. Weigel,

George Weigel

Today I read your views on the stance taken by Mount Athos with regard to Pope Benedict’s visit to the Ecumenical Patriarch in November. You wrote in an edition of The Tidings (http://www.the-tidings.com/2007/041307/difference.htm):

“...this Athonite intransigence reflects a hard truth about Catholic-Orthodox relations after a millennium of division: namely, that, for many Orthodox Christians, the statement “I am not in communion with the Bishop of Rome” has become an integral part of the statement, ‘I am an Orthodox Christian.’”

Your reasoning reflects a mindset that is decidedly Rome-centered and reminds me of the knee-jerk reactions of devout Roman Catholic friends of mine to nearly every critique leveled against contemporary Roman Catholicism: “that is just anti-catholicism” or “they are anti-catholics” or “they are “Rome-bashing.” This response, like your own understanding of the Athonite stance, reveals an egotism and pride unfortunately quite characteristic of Roman Catholic apologists and zealots of the papacy.

Orthodox Christians do not define themselves against anyone; they do not see themselves as existing in opposition to anyone. They do not say I am ... not this or that. Like Christ and the Church, Orthodox Christians live in the enternal now and knowing their Redeemer they in turn know what it means to be alienated from Him.

Orthodox Christians, and especially those who live the Faith to fullest, such as the Fathers on Athos, believe and confess The “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.” This is “the Faith of the Fathers, the Faith of the Orthodox”, as the Synodicon of the 7th Oecumenical Council states. Consequently, it is quite obvious to them that the Pope of Rome, who has for hundreds and hundreds of years confessed another faith, who has confessed the Orthodox Church to be schismatic, heretical, etc., and who has confessed Saints like Gregory Palamas (who has now been “rehabilitated” by Roman Catholic scholars) to be heretics, has become alienated from the life and faith of the Orthodox and cannot be the canonical Bishop of Rome.

But here, in particular, is where you get it wrong: Stating, as the Fathers did, that the Patriarch wrongly accepted the Pope as the canonical Bishop Rome has less to do with the Pope than it does with the Patriarch, insomuch as the issue at hand is the Patriarch’s confession of faith in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, for by accepting the Pope as a bishop he likewise accepts the Roman Catholic church as a church - as either a Local church of the Church of Christ, which would mean there is heresy within the Church, which is impossible, or as the Church of Christ, which would deny the Orthodox Church as the Una Sancta. Orthodoxy rejects both the branch theory of the Protestants and the “Theory of the Primordial Unity of a common baptism” of the Papacy.

All of this is to say that the Orthodox still believe and confess as of old, as once did Roman Catholics. The Orthodox have not “graduated” into the age of ecumenism or bought into the (mainly) Post-Vatican II nuances (for us they are yet more distortions) which divide jurisdictional (administrative) authority from the mysteries or accept baptism and other mysteries outside of the Church (the canonical, that is, right believing and living Church). As Bishop Kallistos Ware has said many times: the Orthodox again and again are saying to the West, and to Roman Catholics in particular, “we are your past”, that is, we hold the faith you once held, to which you must return.

Your comments once again point out the obsession of those who are adherents of the papacy: everything revolves around Rome. But your comments also point out not only the ignorance of Roman Catholics vis-a-vis the Orthodox Church or the Patriarchate of Constantinople (which, by the way, is decidedly not an eastern version of the papacy toned-down), but of your own ignorance, as well. You are far, far away from understanding the Orthodox, let alone the Garden of the All-Holy One, that is, the Holy Mountain of Athos.

Sincerely,

Fr. Peter Alban Heers
Thessaloniki, Greece

Posted on 04/13/07. Filed under: • Email This Entry