Robin Darling Young
Associate Professor of Patristics
Catholic University
Washington, D.C.
The pope's trip to Greece sparked controversy surprising and puzzling to many Americans in the New World.
But any Catholic who has ventured to Christian communities of the East -- Greek, Syrian, Armenian, Coptic -- has heard the long-held grievances of Orthodox Christians against the Catholic Church. Long memories of the division between the churches under Rome and those of the East focus around Western insults and are intensified by strong ethnic and religious feelings. These have grown stronger in light of uncomfortable social and economic changes associated with the increasingly powerful European Union.
Because he is a Western leader, the pope is often associated personally as well as officially with the recent NATO bombings of Serbia, an Orthodox country, on Orthodox Good Friday, and with the colonialism and missionary incursions of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He is also regarded as the enemy because of the fourth Crusade, when in 1204 Latin soldiers sacked Constantinople, the leading patriarchate of the entire Eastern church, and later tortured monks on Mount Athos, sometimes regarded as the spiritual center of the Greek church.
Papal claims to universal jurisdiction over Christians seem to have been illustrated in the continued existence of "Uniate" churches, Eastern-rite churches that retain their traditional liturgies but are governed by the Vatican. The continuing dispute over these churches derailed the international Orthodox-Catholic dialogue last summer. Along with doctrinal and administrative differences that have developed between the two ecclesiastical cultures, East and West, some Orthodox leaders have been led to refer to the pope as a heretic and to organize demonstrations against his presence in Greece, with one metropolitan bishop referring to the Vatican as "the house of deception and criminal activity."
The pope's speech to Greek political leaders and, more importantly, to Christodoulos, Archbishop of Athens, may well soften some of this opposition. Christodoulos's spokesman said that the Orthodox "expect the pope to make a humble, bold gesture [of reconciliation]. This could end nearly one thousand years of mistrust."
The pope expressed contrition for times when Catholics "sinned by action or omission against their Orthodox brothers and sisters," and asked God's forgiveness; he pointed to the common theological and liturgical heritage of the Greek and the Catholic churches; he admitted that "certain models of reunion of the past no longer correspond to the impulse toward unity." In other words, he renounced the methods used to create the Uniate church without admitting, as some Orthodox leaders want, that the Eastern Catholic churches should cease to exist. Finally, the pope claimed the example of Greek saints in whom "we see the ecumenism of holiness which, with God's help, will eventually draw us into full communion, which is neither absorption nor fusion but a meeting in truth and love."
These words may suggest to the Orthodox that a return to full communion might entail not the jurisdiction but the cooperation of Rome in a reunified church. Such a conclusion might well give new life to the dialogue between the two churches.
