CHURCH UNITY union or uniatism ? CATHOLIC - ORTHODOX ECUMENICAL PERSPECTIVES by ERNST C. SUTTNER Published by Centre for Indian and Inter-religious Studies (CIS), Rome and Dharmaram Publications, Bangalore 1991PLACID LECTURE SERIES No. 13 Emst C. Suttner CHURCH UNITY union or uniatism? CATHOLIC-ORTHODOX ECUMENICAL PERSPECTIVES ‘Translated by Brian MeNell C.R.V. Copyright: Centre for Indion and Anter-religious Studies (C1IS) Corso Vittorio Emanuele-294/10 00186 Rome, Italy Tel. 06/68 64 414 Copies ~ 1000 Printed al : St Joseph's Press, Mannanam, Kottayam ~ 685 361 Kerala, India, PREFACE ‘The Centre for Indian and Later-religious Studies (C1IS) in Rome has been, as far as 1 understand, organizing an annual series of lectures entitled the ‘PLACID LECTURES’ for the past thirteen years. The ‘Placid Lectures’ are instituted in honour of the late Dr. Placid Potipara, em! [1899-1985], an eminent son of the Syro-Malabar Church of the St. Thomas Christians of Kerala, India, Many a distinguished scholars and illustrious professors have proffered these lectures in the past on fascinating topics related to the history, theology, liturgy etc. of the Christian Orient. By organizing these lectures and by publishing the text in book form, the CIIS is undoubtedly rendering very valuable and truly ‘menningful serviee to the promotion and propagation of scholarship on Oriental Churches. One year back when Fr. Augustine Thottal the Director of CIIS, requested me to deliver the Lectures’ of the year 1991, I was not hesitant to accept it. ‘Two reasons motivated me to give my assent to the proposal. Firstly, during my student-days in Rome I had the privilege of associating myself with Father Podipara and had the for- tune of being a beneficiary of his immense erudition on matters related to the oriental Churches, especially on the history of Christianity in India. I am only happy now to honour him and express my gratitude to him through this humble service. Secondly, these ten talks provided me an occasion to organize the few stray thoughts 1 had in mind on ‘the processes and problems of ecumenical dialogue between Catholic and Orthodox Churches and to put them togetherna printable manner. ‘The unavoidable compul- sion to prepare the text decently for the lectures, furnished ‘me also the opportunity to reflect more deeply and more comprehensive the subject-matter and bring out -s0 do ‘ope - a useful and handy treatise for the students of Cath- olic-Orthodox ecumenical movement and for the interested readers, events of the past se facts and events occurred + Catholie-Orthodo: dialogue and being an istory of ecumenism between Orthodox-Cath- hurches, I am intensely aware of the recent develop- ja these Churches. My reflections on the past events, my humble evaluation of the present state of affairs of the I dialogue between Catholic-Orthodox Churches and ns for the future are succinctly predicated in this volume, namely, Church Unity Union or Uniatism ? was the lecture of the ‘Placid Lectures’ of 1987.! 1 am im- imensely grateful to him for the faultless work he has done. {take this opportunity also to express my gratitude to the Centre for Indian and Interreligious Studies Rome for giving me the opportunity to present these papers and for the pain the Centre has taken to bring out this handsome volume. 1 also do want to mention here that the German edition of this modest work is due to appear shortly. It is my sincere hope and ardent prayer that this volume would help interested People of all countries to develop a fuller and more just n of the common endeavours of the Orthodox- Churches for unity. E. C. Suttaer tut fur Patrologie und Ostkirchenkunde University of Vienna Schottenring ~ 21 A-1010 VIENNA, Austria te: The theme of the “Placid Lectures’ oftered by Dr, Brian MeNeil was ONE CITY, ONE BISHOP? ECCLESIOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIENTAL CHURCHES. These lectures have by the CIIS, Rome under the same4M. CONTENTS Page ‘The one Church consists in and of focal Churches 1 What if the local Churches stand in a relationship of mutual schism ? . 2 15 Sypemises Gf Set taunt IIL. Resumption of communio or reductto in oboedientiam asa path back from schism to unity 34 me's 28 IV. In seareh of unity 36 1. Reconciliations in the period of the early Church 36 2 ‘The secular power in the concern far the unity of the Church 38 3. Latin suzerainty over Eastera Christians 43 4, The Unions of Lyons and Florence 8 5. The new situation under the Osmans aL 6, ‘The Western Church reaches out to South India and Ethiopia 52 @ Tee Moldavian Church and Rome at the end s4-te of the sixteenth century 9) ‘The Union of Brest ¥ G1 mura Ter, C i alee we 9. The Union of Marea 6 10. The Unions in Upper Hungary ‘and ‘Transylvania 67 HL. 17th and 18th centuries in the Osman empire: co-operation ends in rivalry 71 12. A Catholic Melkite Patriarchate comes into existence 77 Dee's waren, 3 4 be wows Shs nero:18. Io the age ofwerioogicalexctusivinn) 4% 80 14, Orthodox, Uniates, Latins, Old Believers and’ “*“"™ Oriental Orthodox are brought into obedience to the Synod of St.Petersburg 83 Stalin's interference in the problematic of Union 87 16. Spiritual concerns and historical cireunistances Hi Gams | as motivation for union agreements "90 Uniformity achieved through uniatism: a eericature of Church unity 129 2) Union without Uniatism 138 THE ONE CHURCH CONSISTS IN AND OF LOCAL CHURCHES The Orthodox-Catholic dialogue commission stated in ite(Munich declaration})“If one looks at the New Testament fone will notice first of alf that the Church des reality. The Church exists in history as local church ... It always a question of the Church of God, but ina given place". ‘The text goes on to say that the existence of the Church in a place is given as a gift of the divine grace and becomes a fact where “a ‘Jerusalem from on high comes dowa from God,"; that the church in a given place ifests_itself_ when it js “‘qssembled’"; and that the assembly “is fully such when itis the eucharistic synaxis". This is se harmony with the teaching of th(Second Vatican Council, which states in the dogmati Constitution about the Church that the oneand only Catholic Church consists _in and of local Churches? “The Church of 1 hrist is really present in all legitimately organised local groups of the faithful, which, in so far as they are united to the pastors, are also quite appropriately called Churches in the New Testament. For these are in fact, in their own loca- lities, the new people called by God, 1n the power of the Holy Spirit and as the result of full convietion. tn them the faith- ful are gathered together through the preaching of the Gospel of Christ, and the mystery of the Lord's Supper is celebrated ‘so that, by means of the flesh and blood of the Lord, the whole brotherhood of the Body may be welded together_In each altar community, under the sacred ministry of the bishop, ‘8 munifestsymbol_is to be seen of that charity and “unityof the mystical body, without which there can be no salva- tion’. In these communities, though they may often be small and poor, or existing in the diaspora, Christ is present through whose power and influence the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, is constituted.” It is true of all the local communities which can be called “Iegitimate” in the sense used in the Second Vatican Council's Constitution on the Church, because they may cele- brate the eucharist,* that one and the same Spirit is at_work in them, dwells_in them and in the hearts of their believers asin a temple, praysin them and bears witness to the believers’ adoption as sons; that he leads the community into all truth, unites it, makes it ready, guides it through the various hierar chical and charismatic gifts, and adorns it with his fruits.’ Where the the Spirit of the lord is at work, the eucharist is celabrated-and the KenvenlyJerosalem descends, there isthe Church - and_the—one Church, since there exists only one Oe beginning states in detajk—“The_body of Christ is unique. ‘There exists then only(one Church of God. The identity of ‘one eucharistic assembly~with another comes from the fact that _all_with the same faith celebrate the same memori that all By eating the same bread and sharing in the same cup become the same unique body of Christ into which they have been integrated by the same baptism. If there are many celebrations, there is nevertheless only one mystery celebrated in which all participate”.* ‘The fact that the Churches are many and yet one is ‘a fundamental insight on which all the reflections in this present series of lectures are constructed. 2. The unity of the many Churches and their abiding multiplicity in unity come into being because the Father, in Keeping with his eternal counsel 7 into the world, so that he might accomplish the work of redemption on the altar of the Cross, subordinating the entire creation to his lordship and introducing the all ~ embracing 2 kingdom of truth and of life, of holiness and of grace, of righteousness, of love and of peace,’ and because he poured out the Holy Spirit, that he might complete all sanctification through him. 8) The mission of the Son lasts until the preliminary character of the present age is overcome. For his words, “AS the Father has sent me, so also I send you" (Jn 20:21) hold good until his appeal, “Repent and believe in the Gospelt” (Mk 1:15) is complied with. We read in the Letter to the Ephesians: “And his gifts were that some should be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature ‘manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles, Rather, speak- ing the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every jvint with which it is ‘supplied, when each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and upbuilds itself in love” (Eph 4:11-16), For thi ing, it needs to_be_rescued from the ‘corruption of this world; this necessarily involves repentance, purification and the obedience of faith. This is why guidance and leadership are needed as long as growth is still required. >) The outpouring of the Spirit is the beginning of the pew age -and the down-payment of the coming glory 7 the Spirit works, there is divine life and freedom. Through him, everything that is merely preliminary js to be overcome, ‘and every stain is to be removed. This will be completed when the Son hands over to the Father the kingdom of holiness and of grace. Then everything will be filled by the Spirit, and guidance and, Teadership wil be unnecess ‘be unnecessary. The tn ch the Spirit grants sllows this condition to grow to maturity: ‘the Munich declaretion of the dialogue commission says of This: 3“Fat_from excluding diversity or plurality, the_koinénia supposes it and heals the wounds of division, transcending the latter in unity. Since Christ is one for the many, so in the Church which is his body, the one and the many, the universal and the peal are necessarily simultaneous Stil more radically, because “he one and only God is the communion of three persons, the ne and only Church is _a communion of ‘many_communities and he local Church a communion of ynia_will be fulfilled in_the world that lies beyond death, It has its beginning on earth, if the believers become one to form the local Church, and the many local Churches become one to form one Church, in keeping with the prayer of the Lord: “May they all be one: as you, Father, fare in me and I in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. And I have given them the glory which you have given me; for they are to be one as we are one, I in them and you in me. So they are to be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that you have sent me, and have loved those who are mine just as you have loved me” (Jn 17:21-23), ©) The unity of the many in abiding multiplicity, which according to the high-priestly prayer is in keeping with the love between Father and Son in itsstructure, isa gift of the Spirit; it remains forever. The love and unity between the Father and the Son, which according to Jesus’ words is the archetype of the Church's unity, is such that it_is ordered, but_knows neither ahigher position nor a subordinate position. ‘Through the guidance and leadership which the risen Lord guarantees when he sent his disciples as the Father had sent hhim, he offered a means of salvation to the earthly Church, which for the time being is not capable of perfected unity. ‘This means of salvation is destined for the present time, in which the Churches yearn for the coming of what is perfect and for the disappearance of what is only fragmentary (ef. 1 Cor 13:10), 4 Since the Churches are to stretch out towards what lies before them, their burning desire must_be that their unity should be chiefly borne by the Spirit and only 1 a small degree ! be something guaranteed by leadership and obedience, But since they are familiar with the frailty of their provisional earthly form of existence, they should be grateful that the Lord gave his mission, and they should he glad to make use of the means of salvation - viz, the guidance and leadership -which the Lord made ready for them, because of the sins and deficiencies of the present time. 3. Thus, wherever a share is gi mystery of Christ, the Church exists asa particular local Church, which is distinct from the other local Churches with which it ioe. Hence the loa Churches have the ight To tad thei ym own lives, to possess their own Traditions, (0 Tay” claim to aiifonomy and to temein true to their own traditional usage even when this is not identical with the traditional usage of other local Churches. The fact that the one Church is realised in many localised Churches makes not only unity between the local Churches necessary, but also boundaries and distinguishing ~4iA~{* marks: and these are an ecclesiological necessity, foreach Church _has the right and the duty to administer the gifts of the divine grace in the manner appropriate to itself_in_ terms of place and historical epoch, and the other Churches have the obligation to respect the freedom which is a prerequisite for this. ‘The right to one’s own traditions makes associations of episcopal Churches (i. € , of local Churches in the original sensi of the term) which have the same tradition to form (units which in turn can be called local Churches, something _necess” ary: for, in order to administer God's gifts of grace in a manner that is genuinely appropriate to the conditions of time and place, the episcopal Churches must also hear in mind the fact that thgse_who belong to one people, one nation, or one cultural community (whether they inhabit a distinct area or form & diaspora) feel that they belong together, because they possess ‘common language, common customs, common cultural elements 5 in the one salvifieag, we"4 epee “hn kocae Ga head as their own, This requires a particular form of co-operation of particular episcopal Churches which are required to administer together the divine gifts of grace in the way appro. priate to these persons, and which consequently are distinguish ed by the characteristics which are common to them {rom the other episcopal Churches. Iu order to be able to develop and maintain this co-operation, the episcopal Churches in question need the ability to_act in common; and itis accordingly ecelesiologically correct to call them a local Church heir nsemble™ On ths Lumen Gauls apn Wee BT come abrut through divine providence (divina Providentia factum ‘el) that, in the course of time, different Churches set up in vorious places by the apostles and their successors joined together in a multiplicity of organically united groups which, whilst safeguarding the unity of the faith and the unique vine structure of the uniyprsal Church, have their own iscipline, enjoy their own “liturgical usage and inherit a theological and spiritual”patcimony”. The reason for this lies deep in the history of salvation, for the constitution Lumen Gentium teaches that the Church is “one complex reality which comes together from a human anda divine element”, and says that it “is compared, not without significance, to the mystery of the incarnate Word’, ‘the Church which ix led by the Spirit will thus also be essentially characterised also by the situation on the earth, determined by many contingent factors, of the human beings who are called to form the new people of God. The individual Churches are characterized by the history and the cultural values of the human persons who are called, as well as by the unity that has come into being among them though history and cuiture, as well as the multiplicity and the differences between them. ‘This means, however, that they also characterise the one and unique Catholic Church which cousists in and of these individual Churches. ‘The Catholic Church “fosters and takes to herself, in so far as they are good, the abilities, the Fesources and customs of peoples. In so taking them to herself she purifies, strengthens and elevates them. The Church indeed is mindful that she must work with that king to whom the 6 ‘ations were given for an inheritance and to whose city gifts are brought. This character of universality which adorns the people of God is a gift from the Lord himself where by the Catholic Church ceaselessly and efcaciously seeks for the return of all humanity and all its goods under Christ the Head in the unity of his Spirit. In virtue of this catholicity each part contributes its own gift to other parts and to the whole Chureh, so that the whole and each of the parts are strength- ened by the common sharing of all things and by the common effort to attain to fullness in unity.”"' It remains the Church's task until the Parousia to purify, strengthen and elevate, and then to take to herself and gether in unity. It is the gift of the Lord that makes the Church able to carry out this task. Church history shows thet the Lord permits the individual Churches which are allowed to work for the salvation of human persons in people or in the area of a particular culture to co-operate in a mutual exchange, when he_empowers the one and_unigue Catholic Church through his Spirit_to gather toge- ther what is_good in thei le_and in their culture; and he allows the Churches of all the regions _to co-operate in bringing together the good things of humauity as_a whole under Christ, the one Head. All the gifts that the Spirit activates in each individual Church, and all the insights concerning the purification and gathering together of the good things of huma- nity, belong to them all. They have, the duty to alternate in giving others a share in what they have, and in taking a share in what others have. A local community that would refuse to give and_take, i.e. which would refuse the mul and thereby the unity with the other local communities, would d_thereby the unity with the other local communities, woul ‘cease to be legitimate. It would no longer deserve to be called 1 el 4. In order that the local Churches may be one among themselves in the manner in which the high-priestly prayer of Jesus asks for unity and in the manner supported by the sending to carry out the tasks of guidance and leadership, their freedom is inviolable, while on the other hand necessarily limited. This is because the fragmentariness in this present age can lead to developments and situations of crisis in 7 Sees Feean te obaneresidual Churches which endanger the unity that is required. be necessary for the other Churches to intervene ‘on a correction, thanks to the mission Wi ied in the Church to act authoritatively in have many witnesses to this in first centuries of its existence, jegal in the Roman Empire and severe handicaps, it rejected the merous systems of the Gnostics, sand the Novatianists, sata. The_Church also and the christology of Paul of possessed _a procedure that _made it possible_to conamunto intact in the face of the errors which have been of their adherents. isely the procedure h used at that period, since the a forieal sources are so few; but the results prove was effective. Al been attained, either in the way used in of the Church or at an ecumenical Counc cI to bow to the verdict. For the the exalted Lord, who is the Head of the Church, is at work in the Church which is his body. In any case, it was only after a balanced solution had been found through the common endeavour of the Churches that the categorie demand could be made toi Churches that they should move away from th position. Although, objectively speaking, every questional position was just as inadequate before a common verdict as it was afterwards, no local Church might be forbidden to hold on adequacy had been determined in the relevant free consensi of fact have signified the The Churches held to this rule in the development of Uni ‘ches exercised this discretion which we have described, despite the reservations that they had to ith full justification, against particular positions ef Churches, reservations that were voiced loudly and clear particular theologians - and quite correctly, as ment de faclo showed. The anxious and warning voices of such theologians provoked a serious effort to clarify the questions iate the process whereby leaders in high positions - their warning and objection did not permit categorical demands to be made of individual local Churches and their bishops. Since_no condemnations were pe “common affairs) we_count 5. Because of our historicity, we human right answers in very many questions only with long discussions, and not everywhere at the same time. This is why the Lord established the Chureh for that it is but at the same time remai ie, which we have not yet ygma of the ly) does_not_mean_to_be +jot _ granted’ to the earthly Church, for, according to St.: Paul, ‘our knowledge is fragmentary, our prophetic speaking is fragmentary, and only when the perfect comes, will what is fragmentary vanish” (cf.1 Cor 13: 9-10). Rather, to teach infallibly means that the Church, thanks to the assistance of th Holy” Spirit does net Tall away-Toae-tRe-UaT Tee something taken for granted, that the Church's act of teaching remains characterised by inadequacy and therefore always needs improvement. As the concrete course of Church history shows, another element of the inadequacy of our local Churches is the fact that different interpretations could be arrived at with regard to very many subjects. Among these were the interpretations could be arrived at with regard to very many subjects, Among these were the interpretations that were felt by the local Churches to bea serious matter, so that they became anxious about the compatibility of these differences with the unity of one Church. If it was a question of subjects of practical eccle- siastical life, @ solution was usually found very quickly. But if it was a questiun that gave rise to the anxiety that it might call the unity of faith into question, and if no under- standing was reached quickly, then the Churches considered themselves obliged to break off the communio among themselves, ‘This bring us to the subject of the next hour. NOTES 1. Section 1; official English translation, Londox| 2. Nr. 23, quoted fom Vatican Council Ui: TAS Conc Conciliar Documents, od. Aust Fit i ‘translates the Latin ecclesia partic ularts. The vaval Germen translation for this phrase, “Teilkirehe", is understood by many Orthodox ‘theologians to mean “part of the Church" (in the sense of a “fragment Of the Church"), and Professor Sutiner_ therefore uses the German ord **Binzelkircbe wurch, 10 avord this potential misunderstanding. Tad Translations, the capitalisation (*Church™ or “‘church”) of the official tents is alway followed. 3, Bid, Ne. 26, 10 4. In Unitatis Redintegratio, in the chapter about the Churches and ‘Ecclesia! Communities separated from th: Apostolic Ste, itis taid of the Oriental Church:s, after a listing of the signs of Goi"s grace wiven in the eucharist: “H:nce, through the celebration of the eucharist of ‘the Lord in each of thes? Churches, the Church of God is built up ‘and grows in stature” (Nr. 15). 5. Lumen Gentium, Ne. 4. 6, Section II. 1. Ct. the Preface of the Solemaity of Christ the King in the Roman Missal. 8, Section Tj 2. 9. It is appropriate to do as Orthodox ecclesiology traditionally doss and ‘call_the boundaries between the individual epis:opa! Churches and also_the boundaries that scparate several episcopal Church:s ar @ unit from the other_lo:ai_Chutches boundaries between Tocal_ Churches. Oa the appropriateness of this proseduce, cf. also G. Gresnake, Stellung des Protos in dsr Sicht der romisch-katholisch:n dosmat-schen ‘Theologie™: in: Kanon 9 (1989), 17-50. 10, Lumen Genttum, Ne. 8. Wh Bid, Ne. 1. "I WHAT IF THE LOCAL CHURCHES STAND IN A RELATIONSHIP OF MUTUAL SCHISM? ‘The local Churches arc’what_they should be, only if alt stand in a mutual relationship of communio, But what if tl is_not the case? Does the disturbance that then exists affect nly the visible element in the Church, the ordered structure ‘which is necessary so that the world may know that the Lor hhas been sent by the Father and that the Church may bring human beings to new birth as the children of God in the power of the divine Spirit? Or does the disturbance also affect the invisible element ? 1s the salvific_working of the Spirit called into” question when the" comanio ofthe Church Ts broken? 1. Before we examine this problem in detail, let us ecall the fact that our Churches have given witness through their pastoral activity “wq_their faith in the continued salvifle working of God on both sides of a gap that has opened up between them because of a schism. In the centuries in which Greeks and Latins celebrated the ecumenical Councils together, there occurred a-number of schisms between them in_which’ both sides knew that they continued in a mutual relationship and were urgently summoned to go to work to clear up the problems and to take up the communio again. Yves Congar guqtes two figures in researches into Church history which list(G }chisms totalling 203 yeas between 323 and 787 in the one case, and im the othe 2 schisms totalling 217 years between 337 and 843.! Despite the mutual accusations and’ the mutual rejection which grew out of these, neither the Latins nor the Greeks ever_had_the idea at that period that they should deny that the other side had the daly of being the Church Aliough they Took sirfously the problems UAT hed areas and ‘considered that they were prevented for the time being from granting each other sacramental communio, neverthless they were convinced that these problems did not reach into the ultimate depths. No-one doubted that, despite the important-qusttinns That called.for correction, both parties to the dispute remained the*Church of God and the Wdministrators of the divine gifts of grgce: nor that, thanks to the working of the Holy Spirit, the Sacramental ecel raha NG The same is true of the conduct of the Latins in the™**‘¥¢t~ great papal schism of the middle ages: the membership in one and the same Church of the two or three parties was never called into question. ‘An example on the Orthodox side is the lack at present of the fellowship in prayer and eucharist between the fourteen autocephalous or autonomous Churches which are leading the Pan-Orthodox consultations together, and other Churches: a0 one casts doubt on the fact that these are Orthodox Churches, but for various reasons conflicts exist in their regard. One must also recall that even in the fifteenth century, Greeks and Latins could still_erlebrate a Council _together. Although this Couneil did not bring unity, nevertheless “it shows that both sides knew that they were spiritually ied lo each other.—Yves-Congar petals au that Bath ouncil of Florence often to clear up which began at a date that cannot be determined exactly?~ in the same way as with the breaks in communio in the above-mentioned 203 or 217 years, and that serious contacts were taken even after the Council of Florence.* Already a decade before the Catholic Church became open to ecumenism at the Second Vatican Council, he drew the conclusion that the 13schism, which began before Cerularius, was not completed under him, and in fact was never put fully Into effect! ‘The_life of the Church is logically antecedent _to the vs theology, since 1: Spee ture ET of the Church. Theology has never been able to draw me wee ae sol Yr iding-lines for the life of the Church; rather, the life of Te Sihurek a the orientation for theology. This means that, when we ask what is the ecclesiological ‘significance of the Schism, we may not lose sight of the fact that the Churches know of schisms that do_not tear oj boundaries that touch: the very mystery of the Church. 2. The communio between Churches has been broken often and for the sake of various differences. The decisive reasons for this rupture had unequal weight. Let us leave aside those ‘cases in which the rupture of the communio was due to misunderstandings, and could be revoked at once, when the true motivations of the supposed wrong conduct were known. Even schisms based on justified grievances must, as Church history shows, be evaluated in various ways. But it was not easy for the Churches to distinguish the absolutely essential demarcation lines from other boundaries which had only a lesser importance, For on the one hand, the local Churches knew from of old that the identity of the gifts of the Spirit need_not mean an identity inthe Way tn which The We of the” Church is structured. They held the plurality in the structure of the Chureb’s life from the very beginning to be legitimate. “The heritage handed down by the apostles was received differently and in different forms, so that from the very beginnings of the Church its development varied from region to region,” says the Second Vatican Council with regard to this, and it argues that the living of the legitimate traditions alongside one another is necessary, in order faithfully to preserve the fullness of Christian tradition”. On the other side, the Churches also knew very well that not_all_divergences_are equally legitimate, but rather, that many differences make plain fa reduction of the sacramental reality. Thus the attempt was repeatedly made - though always with unequal results - to “4 work out a rule that would permit the Churches to evaluate the importance of the boundary lines that were drawn. 3. Bishop Cyprian (+258) raised the problem for the first time, when he denied that it was possible to confer baptism outside the boundaries of his Church. For Gopriat It was absolutely clear that God gives human persdns salvation through the Church. Thus he empha- sised that only where the Church is, dues the Holy Spirit bestow the sacramental act_of salvation; and that, conse- quently, there is no salvation outside the Church. This insight into God’s ways of salvation which Cyprian brought forward with urgency was to remain precious to the Church in all ages. But Cyprian at the same time upheld the view that i¢_boundaries of the Church which_meditates_ salvation lay at the point_where his own local Church, after_a serious investigation of the problems at issue, had uttered a sentence of extommunicalion against particular groups” of Christians, For Cyprian held that not only Jews and pagans who con- verted to Christianity were to be baptised, but also all con- verts from schismatic Christian groups, if they had been baptised by their community, which did indeed confess Christ, but did not stand in communio with Cyprian’s own local Church. For the lack of canonical and sacrameutal fellowship 7 between such a group\gnd Cyprian’s own local Church counted year in the African Church ks an_unambis of God did not work in that group, and that therefore no possibility of celebrating the sacraments existed there. Despite the confession of faith in the risen Lord, which the excom- municated community made just like Cyprian’s own local Church, it was denied categorically that they were the Church of Christ. Eyen in Cyprian’s own day, his view was_contradicted. ‘The Roman Bishop Stephen did so, because his Church did rot accept the possibility that God should refuse to take into account people who carry out the commission given in the Gospel in faith and trust in the word of the Lord, and baptise 6 ool us ign thatthe Spit so!in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. In the conviction that ‘such an act could not possibly be a merely human act devoid of grace, the Roman local Church received converts who had been baptised in the manner practised by the Church, though by heretics, without rebap- ig them. ‘Thus the Roman_and the African Churches had each its_own understanding of the effects produced when the structure of the Church lost the order required by the Lord, Caran TaN Test ae appropriate oak Mat aboot Teld that it was appropriate to ask first about the M structive of the order in the. Church which was based on the Lord’s sending-out of the Church, for it seemed to him im- possible that the Holy Spirit should work where there was an offence against the commission given by the Lord. The tra~ dition of the Roman Church, which Stephen followed, reckoned fon the contrary that the Holy Spirit, in order to heal our human inadequacy, would in certain circumstances continue his working to build up the body of Christ even when human failure had broken the structure of order of the Church which ‘was established in the Lord’s act of sending the Church. 4. In the following period, great pains were necessary in order to distinguish Cyprian’s ecclesiological insight concer ning the all-embracing mediation of salvation by the Church from his excessively sharp conclusions concerning the decisive importance fer salvation of the canonicel Church boundaries (G'storovexijwrites: "St Cyprian, was correct in saying ‘that_the_sacfaments_are_celebrated_only in the Church, But he determined the ‘in’ too hastily and_too narrowly. Would it not be better to draw the conclusion the other way round: where sacraments are celebrated, there is the Church? St Cyprian tacitly presupposed that the canonical boundary of the Church is always, and .as a matter of course, her charismatic boundary too". Florovskij emphasises that “pre- cisely this unproved identification was not acknowledged by the Catholic awareness"? In the African Church, some time after Cyprian’s death, the Donatists intensified the rejection of any sacramental reality 16 in the case of Christians whom they held to be unworthy. Suet» Not only in the cases of all excommunicated did they reject the administration of the sacraments; they also doubled the character of grace of the sacramental rites if they were per- formed by @ priest who had become subject to the Church's Penitential judgement because of sin, but had not yet been made subject to ecclesiastical penalties, i.e. a priest who was unworthy of the fellowship of the saints, in fact, ought to be excluded, Against the Donatists, Augustine pointed to God's sovereign activity and expounded the principle that it is not ultimately important who carries out the ministry, since it is the Lord himself who grants salvation. He was ready to allow the ecclesial ministry, to which he has linked the sacra- mental grace, to be performed by priests who need penance or even through persons with whom a particular loval Church does not have communio. G. Florovskij, whom we have just quoted, appeals that we “take Augustine's theology into count, The first point in Augustine to which our attention is drawn is that he makes an organic link between the question of the significance of the sacraments and the general teaching about the Church. ‘The validity of the sacraments adininistered by_schismatics_means, for Augustine, that they continue to be Tinked: ‘the Church. Indeed, he says explicitly that it ig the Church that acts in the sacraments of the schismatics (he Church gives birth to some Inside, to” others outside through the servant-maid) and that the baptism of the schis matics is significant because it is the Church that carries it ont. ‘The significant element _in_the schisms is what they possess of the Church, Temains in thei inheritance and the holiness of the Church, and that which still links them to the Church, in quibusdam rebus nobiseum sunt”? 5. The praxis of the Church in the following centuries and further reflection led to the formulation of canon 95 of the Synod in Trullo (691), which lays down three different ways of receiving converts in terms of the link which their Ww u eran hands of the snw\5Fetus soph ease % ay wt geet Stir hae he BAe previous group had had with the Church. In specifically named cases, the converts were to be’ baptised like newly-converted ‘pagans; in other cases, they were to be“anointed with myr and in other cases again, they were to be received after only a recantation of their previous errors. The Church had recog. nised that, of all_the many schisms, only some had broken out for reasons that touched the very essence of the Church. ‘The boundary line separating the Church from the particular groups did not therefore mean in every case that fundamental division which Cyprian saw as present, without distinction, in every schism, = [uh Vey Oe hee Bin Bout ad eoonk, Pag When schisms broke out after the ecumenical Councils Between the Greek-Latin imperial Church on the one side ‘and the Oriental Orthodox Churches on the other side, the accusation of heresy was made, but no one doubted that _the sacramental life continued io each of these local Churches which were no longer united to each other. After the schism had come between the Greek Church and the Latin Church, there was hesitation for a time on both sides about whether a cautious judgement should establish the mutual closeness and hold converts to have been baptised already, or whether one should make a more severe judgement, emph sising the mutual alienation and baptising converts anew. We have examples of both these practices, on both sides. Pes stout theology_of the sseraments pat ann festern side to the uncertainty bishops and priests felt about whether they might cautiously acknowledge the closeness between Greeks and Latins, or whether they ought to make the more severe judgement and accept the mutual state of alienation, which meant that they would have to baptise converts. On the ‘Greek side, a synod of the four Orthodox Patriarchates in 1484 made the decision that converting Latins ‘were nol to pe rebaptised.? Against this, the Moscow Synod of 1620 laid down that the Latins upheld worse heresies than thése heretics and schismatics whose baptism was recognised by the 95th canon of the Synod in Trullo and that they therefore need_be baptised when they converted, since they ‘were far from the Church, The Synod bused its description of 18 | the Latins on misunderstandings and false information; these have tong since been recognised as such, and could be wholly forgotten, if it were not that they are significant. for us here because they show that the fact of @ schism was not t for the Synod in order to establish the inval aptism of the Latins: ‘aly with supposedly weighty arguments that The Latins wee dese) «sa alienated from the Church, i, ¢. that they were no To an el Church Ted by the Holy Spine7——— ne toaaer a} G 6. The consequence of the by the Greeks and the Russi the correct view of the 5; dignity of the Westernys bebac: Christians: the question was whether the Holy Spirit's gift’s Gris gt of grace could be found among them.!! The Greeks endeavoured oho zealously to shift the Russians from the attitude adopted in On jun” 1620, and _they did in fact achieve the revocation of the ““”) decision of 1620, by the Moscow Synod in the 855 aeaiaty Years 1655/56 (Patriarch Macarius of Antioch) who travelled through Russia, took an intensive part in thé conversations. We can see from a letter which he wrote to the Moscow Synod,' Precisely from the objections which he makes to the Protestant aptism (objections which were not adopted by the Greek Church, as was seen immediately afterwards), that he was convinced that_oue must look for the gifts of the Holy Spirit even where the right order of the Church, based in the Lord's sending of her, is damaged and the communio is lacking. He ‘argued that one must baptise Calvinists and Lutherans, Because | <4 these were genuine heretics who acknowledged no priestly ¢T™ ordination and rejected the tradition, and because their baptism was thus false and unholy. But the Latins mus not be baptised,~by for they had the ‘Priesthood, recognised all “Seven sacraments, venerated the”holy relics and the'fcous, and were all correctly “baptised in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; to rebaptise them would meen falling into the heresy of the rebaptisers and contradicting the erced which professes the one baptism. “We acknowledge their 19priesthood, and we never re-ordain Latin priests who convert to_Orthodoxy; thus we must also acknowledge their baptism. ‘They are only schismatics; but @ does not make the person an unbeliever and unbaptised, but only separates him from the Chureh, Some decades earlier, another Greek who was asked about the baptism of the heretics had written: “You ask how tone person who stands outside the Church can bring another “person. through baptism into the Chureh. I say that the in the Holy Trinity is enough to administer ‘the true faith and the good disposition”. Here he was thinking of the baptism of the Protestants, for in his day no ‘one among the Greeks called into question the continuance of shurches which were united to the Pope. the Churches that one must hin the Holy even on the far ‘Thus the awareness existed i ‘working of God's gras Ghiy co's own communio of Tocal Churches had remained faithfully in the way that the Church of God ought to. be in accordance with the he_other_side had way from its dignity through a_serious obscuring of SUM and must be summoned to carry out earnest corrée- tives, s0 that “ceclesial fellowship might be possible with it once more. Since both sides remained clearly aware that the Church of the Lord is sent to be maler ef magistra for all who re in danger of felling into error, great pains were taken to help the others, so that they might learn to sce andto correct Tevarstakes which were laid to their charge. But the zea! to teach the tra the directive of the Lord, made them forget that their(duty)yis-6-vis the local Churches tm whic hey were vide Waa. onl to eat aie 20 overlooked the fact that one-sided help of one Church for the others is not correct, but rather that mutual help ought to promote the growth of the local Churches. 7. Unfortunately: as time passed the art of i one another was forgotten more and mores time went on. The situation escalated in the eighteenth century, whe Customary in apologetics in West and East to spea! exclusively, when dealing with the Churches from which one yx» ‘was separated, of that which was alien 1 these Churches. ‘thought was now given to what united one to them. Thus the gradual transition was made from the previous 0 one’s Church had remained belter and more faithful than the which the Lord wishes to have bis Church, to the conviction that one’s own Church was in fact one the Church of Gods un marerouer > A364 let keg aay bane Ge” OE ‘Anew kind of ecclesiological thinking had entered_Cl ‘Anxiety had about whether the salvation of the souls of Christians was safely guaranteed if they were not unambiguously related _to soe ar of uit Ub MEnMGRNE a he one_ERtor—as p> that the Church of Christ iven to the one supreme which the part of these of the turmoil that arose in the East as a result of this. a“I oust net Jey \ Raweo ‘The Orthodox Churches, which were bitterly hurt by the attack on thelr sess diguty, Began aE one Te tira —ageoat the Catholic Church, fortheir part. In July 1755, the Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexaudria and Jerusalem made a common declaration: “We, who have grown up through God's mercy in the Orthodox Church, who obey the canons of the holy apostles and Fathers, Catholic and who acknowledge only, the one, our holy. apostolic Church, who accept her sacraments, consequently also holy baptism» but who look on the sacraments of the heretics, which have not been earried out as the Holy Spirit told the Apostles and asthe Church of Chit has observed Ns wp to the ‘are the inventions of corruy as Fale and fveign tothe entire apostoli tradition: we reject these in a common decision, and we accept the convells who come to us as unsanctified ‘and_upbaptised..."> ‘This_decision disregarded_one and a half millennin_of ological endeavour and once again posited the importance of the boundary of the Church which mediates salvation. Cyprian hhad identified it, namely, the canonical boundary of one’s own communio. & The Russian Church, however, could not_accept_that the boundary of the sacramental action of God's grace, mediated through the Church, must be sought at the canonical boundary ‘of Orthodoxy. It made known sts dissent by laying down, a ttle Tater, in the year 1737, that converts from the Catholic Church who had already received the sacrament of confirmation were to be received without a new anoiuting with myron, Accordingly, the most prominent representatives ot the so- called Russian scholastic theology never_doubted_that_even the_non-Orthodos Christianity somchow belonged _to_ the 22 Church. Thus the Metropolitan (Filarei) (Drozdov) of Moscow stated in the “Dialogues between a steker and one who is convinced of the Orthodoxy of the Eastern Greek - Russian Chureh” that_the Eastern and the western Churches are from God, because both fulfil the criterion established in t Jn 4:2-3 and Profess Jesus Christ as having come in the flesh." Metro- Politan Platon (Gorodeckij) of Kiev is the author of the often. Fepeated image of the walls between the Churches which do not reach as high as heaven.!? ‘Metropolitan (later Patriarch) Sera) (Stragorodskij) Wrote in 1931: “The Church excludes totally And forever only ‘the heretics in the true sense of the word; but in fact, they themselves have already totally alienated themselves from her. The Church leaves _to the schismatics, who have separated ‘themselves because of questions that permit of a healing, a basis for such healing: baptism in its abiding characteristic of an ecelesial sacrament. To those who have given themselves a Church order of their own, she leaves, in hope of their healing, the laying-on of hands and the anointing too. As in the sacra- ment of penitence in the personal discipline, the sinner becomes a member of the Church enjoying full rights, retaining his baptism and other things that he has already ‘received from the Church, so here too the cunvert receives from the Chureh what he lacks one receives the anointing, the other reccives the absolution of sins in confession - and he retains all those effective sacraments which his fellowship with its different faith was able to administer to him - i.e., that which the Chureh gave him, although not directly, but only thet fellowship which was not yet totally alienated from her”.!® Even when Rome and the Greeks no longer did so, the Russian Church still_recognised the separated Churches _as Sister Churches, though naturally as Sister Churches tor whom Orthodoxy Tad been established by the Lord as maler ef magisira. 9. A. new phase began when the Orthodox Church, at the Pan-Orthodox Conference in 1963, offered the Cathy Church _a “dialogue on the level of equal Tn 1964, the 3 & Second Vatican Council also permitted such a dialogue, when‘! 23,it declared in the Decree on Ecumenism that the Church of God builds itself up and grows in the Orthodox Churehes_and that these Churches, “although separated from us ... are still joined to us (the Catholics) in closest Intimacy”. The Oriental Orthodox Churches tov joined in this new way of looking at things. From ten on, Oriental Orthodox and Catholic Churches hhaye begun to think’ back to the mutual relationship of which the Churches remained aware in ancient times, when they broke off the communio between them for a time because of serious problems. Bilateral theological dialogucs have begun, in which oth sides listen to each other and both sides bear witness to each other of their own gifts of grace. NOTES 1-¥, Congas, Zerrissene Christenbelt, Vienna 1989, 111. 2 On the occasion of the 900ih adaiversary of the events of 1054, be ted that alrcady in 1954 it woe an “almost universally a:knowledged thesis by nom" tbat “July 1054 cannot at all be regarded as the besion- ing of the *castern schism’ "; cf. Zerrissene Christentelt, 3. Y. Congar, ibid, 9, *,... between the year 1054 and the Councit fof Foorence the facts of (e"ouship (arr) 40 nwmerous that it is not possible either 10 speak of a total rupture which was oniy interrupted by & few favourable inconsistencies or exceptions. Even after the Eastern ‘Churches rejected the Councit of Florence .. many points of contact remained”, Ibid, 10. ‘Decree on Ecum.nism, Ne. 14 id, Nes 1S. G. Plorovskii, “0 aranicach cerkvi", in: Pas” 44 (1934), 16f.; French in Messager de U'exarchat di Patrlarche Russe en Europe Occidentale 10 (1961), 28-40. The adjective “Catholic” is use! here in the sense of the profession of faith; vith this sentence, Flosovskij summarises hi rea.t'on of the Church as a whole to Cyprian's stance in thaptism of heretics”. Here he 8 G. Florovskij, “0 aranicach cerkvi", 22. teception of converts drawn up im 1484 by Tomos agapes tasi 1698, $68 570; Rallis-Poths, 3-147; French tans. by L. Petit, ia: Echos ‘La pentarchic” in: fstina 32 Patriarch Dosithens, ‘Symtagma, Vol. V, Orient 2 (1898/99), 130-131. (987), 341-360, has recently argued for th> binding character of the i 4 B 1s 16 7 tyaodal decision of 1484, On p. 352f, be liste the Synod of 1424 ‘among “ths councils of the pentarchy .... whose decisions have been ‘received" by the autozephalous Churches as 8 grou FFor the argumzntation of the Syno5, ef. A. Greaiov, “Sobor byvsil v ‘Moskve pri patriarch: Filarete v 1620 godu, i eg opredelenija” in: Pravoslamy) sobesednik 1864, Vol. I, 158-163. “The theo'ogical struggle is dosum-ated by Sutiner, “Die cine Taufe za: Vergebung der Sunden’, in: Anzelger der Osterr. Akademie der Wissensch, Philehistor. Klasse 127 (1990) ‘The letter is quoted by Makarij (Bulgakov), Istorija russkoj cerkei, Vol. Xif, SPB 1888, 197, Georgiou Lorestou, ltrou kal Theologu tes M, Ekklesias ton Christou, et chre ton halrettkon anabaptizesthal erotethels hypo tou Patrlarchiow ‘Konstantinoupolees, in Nea Sion 9 (1908). 115-12, quotation on p. 119; fon Koressios, cf. G. Polsha'sty, Griechlsche Theologie in der Zeit der ‘Turkenherrschaft, Munich 1988, 183-190. Ja ovder to understand what it meant then when one held a spiritual Moctrin: 10 be theotogical discane'on stout Probabilism and Probabiliorism; on thi cf. A.M. Mruk, art. "Probilismus” in: LTHK Vol. 8, 771 ‘Text of ths resolution ia Mansi, Vol. 38 col. 619. Quoted in detail ty M. Jusie, Theologia dogmatica Chistianoran ‘orlentallum, Vol.4, Paris 1931, 304-307. Tbid., 309. Jugie goes on to list further theologians who made similar statements, ‘Metropolitan oumoscnie Cerkvi Christovoj k oWdelivsimsjam ‘ot nec obsceetvam", ia: zwrnal Moskovskoj Patriarchii 4 (1931). 7 German traas. by H. Schraeder in: Kyrios 1 (1960/61), 182. Unitatis Redintegratio, Ne. 15.fer HT somone teaches; m RESUMPTION OF COMMUNIO OR REDUCTIO IN OBOEDIENTIAM AS A PATH BACK FROM SCHISM TO UNITY Chureh, the affairs as quickly as possible. They must seek th They must seek the path that leads from schisms to unity. Tn order lo do this in the. way appropriate to their dignity, they must on the one hi re into account the fact that ad munio i in the divine unity of must pay atte : der exists in the Church which jon to give guidance and leadership and inadequacies with which it st itself both as the ‘nagistra Churches. 1. Mf con is attained once more while taking both of these aspects into account, then a genuine union will be made between the Churches, through a dialogue of partners. 26 ee I ET A NA In order to arrive at the resumption of communio through dialogue of partners, the separated local Churches. must first step on the correct Only when this first takes place, will the neces shown to the autonomous dignity of the various respect be they must help ‘be helped in the double-sided ple, so that the temporal relationship as magistra and jons can be overcome to the defects which extent that this When such a dialogue is conducted, partners of equal rank encounter each other, each of whom and each of whom receives. Despite the us Churches in dialogue), for the Lord permitted them to remain the administrators of ‘of grace even beyond the division, Despite the errors jed to the schisms, each of them is permitte in its own way to continue to play a part in the divine work of salvation in the power of the Holy Spirit. Thus_they_have ed ea g Sister Churches and each acquired its own spiritual experiences, Therefore they can also help one another, by ing the experiences to each other, to overcome practised, one forgets gifts of grace that _have been bestowed on the and oné thinks'little or scarcely at all about of one’s own Church. And one no longer refle "sf God's grace which have been deposited ax“ 3" ineath of them, Fr Ht Is these git of grace that ere the gonChurch has to learu and to mature as it remains on earth, but takes one’s own Church to be the teacher of all the others: One holds that it is its task and obligation to bring the . One holds that it in its task and obligstion to_bring th other Churches on to the path which it takes itself, and that mgr Fhe Hse it has the right simply to prescribe to these other Churches the correctives that seem to it necessary in view of this goal. Such Uniatism has taken many forms in the course of history. The next chapter of this course of lectures will deal with them. What they have in common is that in each case one Church, which held itself to be more pleasing to God Snnrmuttnec racecar Greatest possible portion of them, or at least individual believers in them, in such a way that they joined it. 2 The statements in the Acts of the Apostles that the believers in Jerusalem were of one heart and one soul! portray fan ideal which the Church must always strive to attain, but which it will never be able to reslize in a pure form here on earth, The same is true of the model path of a total dialogue between partners from schism to communio. Human weakness, which characterises the earthly Church as “one complex tea- lity which comes together from a human and a divine ele- ment’? until the returmof the Lord. has meant that the dialogue between partners was continually disturbed. For one or other local Church insisted too much on the autonomy of the Churches, and was unwilling to accept either mutual help the acceptance of help. Many other local Churches. which ‘had acquired particular importance as a consequence of histo- ricol circumstances, were willing to exercise the function of ‘a magistra for other local Churches, but were not ready to be their disciple too and to accept’ corrections of their own inadequacy. Yves Congar draws attention to such an inade- quate relationship between Catholics and Orthodox when he shows that for many centuries the Catholics behaved like the teachers of the Orthodox and the Orthodox like the teachers of the Catholics, and that both sides attempted all the time to convince the others of the exculsive validity of their own Point of view. He writes: “During the centuries of a sepa tion which has never been totally carried out, efforts were made to restore the fellowship and to arrive al an agreement, Unfortunately, the aim on both sides was only to draw the other side over to oneselt”.* Such an gct of drawing over to uneself, whereby the one side wish only to give and think that it is only the others wi 0 that what is sought is not_a mutual i the obedience _of other side, is (Uniatism, oS 3. It would, however, be a mistake lo condemn en bloc et, everything connected with the attempt of one Church to in- AACO/Riy struct another. Although such attempts often tosk place ia : previous centuries of Church history ina manner thit certainly 6. ep Geverves eriticsm, in most cases what “was dons was done®*4) out of a genuine willingness to obey a commission given by™ the Lord when he sent the Church. For every local Church is obliged to bear a share ia responsibility, beyond its own barders, for the salvation of all_human beings and to share in concern for the good progress of the spiritual life of the Sister Churches. Let us not for example overlook the fact that the oldest document of the patristic period which has come down to us, the so-called First Letter of Clement, which ‘comes from the first century, was written out of the conscious- ness that the Church of Home had a share_ia_responsib for the Church in Corinth on the other side of the sea, Charches which practised Uniatism wanted to pass on further the gifts of God which had been entrusted to them. In so doing, they were doing something of what has to take place even in a dialogue between partners. But in the course of this, they forgot to accept in reverence the gilts of the Holy Spirit which lowered outside their own canonical boundaries. ‘The unacceptable element particular Churches were concerned about others and sought to influence them. Rather, the mistake is that many ecclesias~ tie itis idered the dialogue of partners to be & too slow path to communio, and yielded to the temptation to shorten the process. Instead of clearing up the dimculties that had arisen in a spirit of reverence for the Sister Churches 29 in Uniatism is not that 2» and through patient conversation and the painstaking search for a consensus with them, the leaders of the Church which ‘was favoured by historical circumstances which was-therefore for the moment the “stronger” Church (in the earth! of this word) permitied themselves to demand from the Sister Churches (or from particular parts of these) that they should obediently adopt the solution that the stronger leaders found correct in the theological, canonical or liturgical question which was at issue, ‘There_is nothing unacceptable in the mere fact that _a Church acts with authority. For the authority to guide and lead is present in the Church thanks to its divine mission, and is to be used. But if it is misused ine way that no longer preserves the necessary respect for another local Church which is led by the Holy Spirit, then this is unacceptable. For a Church that wishes to press a Sister Church, without sufficient respect for its spiritual dignity, to accept its own positions without further ado, through the reductio in obvedien- tiam, putting pressure_on this sister Church to join it ~ i. e. ‘a Church that practises Unistism — ottribuies an excessive significance to its leadership actions. \t_believes_that ting unity through the obedience It a Tae caaeavaat te Pani te Coe Gat he cteawoer eu te Cee et grace from being dulled by earthly inadequacy does not establish unity. The guidance and leadership that are exercised in the Church in the name of the Lord are only one factor that helps to allow the unity which was brought about by the gifts of grace and has been covered up by the schism that has broken out, but never fully broken, to emerge into the light once more. Therefore, before one may consider what actions the leadership should take, it is necessary to pay attention to the gifts which are proper to the Church for which one is concerned. 4. It is clear from Church history that insistence on authority and the requirement of obedience is appropriate in the cage of genuine errors, and that this must be well distin guished fiom what constitutes the unacceptable Uniatism, 30 monte Already in the period before constantine, In the case of Paul of Samosata’ a synod in Antioch had to intervene aud depose a_bishop who had become a heretic. The canons. of the first ‘ecumenical Council too testify that there existed from very early times in all the regions of the classical world autho- ritjes_which were empowered to intervene in the individual J local Churches, and that the Church explicitly approved of ‘this. But it is also clear from the early Chuich sources that the modalities of the intervention must be pondered seriously, and that it was necessary very early on to oppose abuses. It is just as olear that there js no doubt that the ecumenical Councils demanded obedience. There sppeared, however, other authorities in the Church whose rights to intervene did not remain undisputed. ‘They were able to have their way even in cases where they imposed obedience although there existed no prior consensus- When the debate about the teaching of Arius was in course in the Church, the emperor Constatitine offered it the possibility of a conciliar consultation that would take in the whole territory of the empire. The Church accepted this joyfully and gratefully. There grew out of this a right for ‘the later emperors to summon ecumenical Councils in si situations of necessity, and an obligation to care fort the organisational cohesion of the pentarchy of the early ChurchS This met with wide acceptance in the Church. Patriarch Antonius IV of Constantinople wrote indeed lo the Grand Duke of Moscow: “The sacred emperor occupies an important position in the Church ... It is not good when you say, ‘We hhave the Chureh, but we have no emperor”. It is not possible for christians to have the Church but not to have the emperor, For the empire and the Church are closcly linked together, and it is impossible to separate them from one another.” But we shall have to deal in the course of our lectures with cases in which political or military considerations led the emperors to demand that local Churches on the periphery of the empire, with which a theological dissent existed and which furthermore called into question the emperor’s right to exercise concern for the unity of Christians in the faith, a1‘should accept in obedience the formulae of faith drawn up by the imperial Church, Many emperors went so for as to bold that the best way for them to fuifil their obligation to protect ‘unity_of the Church was to issue imperial decrees in co-oper- ‘ation with the archbishop of the city in which they resided, in order to clear up dogmatic problems, and then to forbid the Churches in the empire to deviate from the theology which was laid down by order in this way. One may think of the Henoticon of Zeno (482), of the Ekihesis of Heraclius (6 8), or of the Typos of Constans 11 (648). The emperors who wished in this way to exercise their concern for the unity of the Chu- reh, and the bishops who co-operated with them in the dictation of the faith to the Churches inthe empire, did not only meet with contradiction: they were even stigmaticed as hereties. ‘The(Bishop of Rome) fulfils a_mission_which is to_be exgreised $h the service of the Church’s unity. ‘The great majority of Christians acknowledge his mission and thank the Lord uf the Church for it. They see in the ministry of the Petrine office a medicine against divisive tendencies which threaten because one of the consequences of the {ragmentariness of corthly existence is that the differences between the peoples, cae ee ie the Toca Chorcher of tre Roman Church fellowship are still far from being overcome in a spiritually ‘adequate way. But the historical part of these lectures will have to deal with many problems that arose because the ack Jedgement of this ministry was demanded also_from_Tocal y», Church (orfrom parts of these) that could not give this'+** acknowledgement of this ministry was demanded ie es local Church (or from parts of these) that could not give this acknowledgement in a free consensus. 5. In the course of one and a half millennia of our Church history, ithappened often, and in very diverse circum- stances, that the Churches sought to attain the communio once more, after they had lost it, through the reductio in oboedientiam rather than through the dialogue of partners; i.e. that they did what today's ecumenical thinking rejects as Uniatism. 32 The _historical_vesture_of Uniatism has _changed_very ‘This is why it is necessary, in each individual case of Uniatism which we shall discuss, to begin by clarifying what was truly intended in the concrete case. For if one joins the sadly widespread mistake of applying a genral, uniform concept of “union” to quite different processes in Church history, one conjures up serious misunderstandings and shares in the guilt for the prolongation of bitter controversies between the Churches. joanne! In what follows, we wish to apply ourselves to the at#”" distinctions. They are weighty. Because of the background in * the history of the times in each case, because of very divergent « motivations, and because of dissimilarity in the methods used, * the processes in Church history with which we must deal can only with great difficulty be compared with each other. ‘There was variety in the extent of the assimilation in ecclesiastical life that was imposed on the Christians who came over to one’s own fellowship, variety also in the tolerance that allowed their ‘own customs to continue wholly or in part From the time of emperor Justinian I up to most recent times, there stretches a sheerly endless chain of actions in whgih_now the one Church and now the other was strong enough to lead individual_Church communities, individual dioceses or even the Church of an entire region to an_obedience that went agonist their own positions, and to unite these to itself. Sometimes only a few, precisely defined conditions were imposed on them, but sometimes the newcomers were assimilated totally into the traditional form of life of one’s own Church. We shall have {0 restrict ourselves to individual scenes in the story, for it would be necessary to compose an immense work if one wished to list all the events and describe them in sufficient detail. It is, however, common to all these processes that ineach case one Church set itself above the others either in a more'moderate form, because it held itself to be purer than the other Churches and exalted itself to be their mistress in doctrine, or in aTadical way, because it held that it alone was the whole Churet 33,story, let us emphasise re pos their fc ‘area of Alerand! ‘that of Antioch no easteIV IN SEARCH OF UNITY 1, Reconciliations in the period of the early Church One who uses the common phrase about the “undivided Church of the seven ecumenical Councils” asserts that the Greek-Latin Church of the Roman empire was the entire Church until the end of the eighth century. He overlooks the fact that none of the ecumenical Councils met _with the undivided assent of all the Churches, In that period, in which the Church was allegedly undivided, there stood great Churches usually incorrectly called by the handbooks Arid, Nestorian ‘or Monophysite in an undifferentiated manner-ht_a_cl Churches. Greeks and Tathers held with one yn of those Churches, quite unperturbed, thus suppressing ns from their awareness. But the Churches were cone, not only in the period of the seven ecumenical it have been pos Shout which Cyprian of Carthage and. Stephen of Rome had rgences of opinion, to take place? And why would ry to formulate regulations for the recon- at Nicaea in 325? ion between local Churches which did theme of the granting of communio anew to individual 36 or to groups of thi bishop because of or because of i who had been excommunicated by the ersonal sins, because of deviant teaching, namely the forgiveness of tl are in the guilt attaching themselves to the unworthy previous ith schisms of the most difficult which the concern existed that af faith was present. The thi with a schism between the Churches of Alexandria and Antioch, which at first appeared to be of this kind of archbishops Cyril_of Alexandria _and_John of is bled _around them, took ‘up the misunderstandings between their Churches. The concerns about fidelity to the faith were removed, and the terrible effects of the personal blunders of the protagonists were overcome. Both Churches assured each other of their_mutual esteem, explained their own doctrinal formulae, indeed smoothed these out and proclaimed their interest in learning to understand the formulae which hitherto had been foreign to them in the sense in which the authors intended them. Thus the communio ‘was re-established two years after the Cou! A longer period was required, as well as dialogues full of respect that paid due account to both sides, in order to end in the year 519 the Acacian schism which had resulted 12 of Chalcedon. ion between the Nicene and jest_Gothic kingdom at the third synod of Toledo in the year 589, In these and similar events of Church history, both sides considered the other to be Churches equal in rank, supported 37 _eof God. They were aware of the obligation laid , to whom they administered the holy ie case of the Sister Churches with whom they practised the sacramental communio. They held that they themselves and their Sister Churches were ubliged to give ao caue +@e¥account of themselves to one another, and where necessary to penn 2 Senne ove ne seer castinnsy ask Cmrink bf [Sy right that qui correct one another and to accept suggestions from one another- ‘They did not make the equality in rank a pretext for insisting ‘services which were offered them. This is why they reacquired jialogue as partners the communio which had through the been lost. 2. The secular power in the concern for the unity of the Church e was not yet a baptised sanetified member of the service of summoning the of Nicaen in the year 325, As has been mentioned there grew out of this event, which was considered on s to be helpful and advantageous, and therefore was , a customary right that gave of summon- al_Inw speaks le the emperor Cor ing ecumenical Councils. No canon of ecclesi or do_we_know of any Te was, in fact, a customary simply became established, [t was an important 1m for the form of State Church in late antiquity Byzantine period, which came to full development under emperor Justinian (527-565). For in the concept of the jich has been mentioned above,* there lay an of this competence. 38 RT be active in other ways as the co-ordinator between the five patrisichates, But in the course of the period in which the emperor aisisted the Churches in this fashion, they lost more and more the capacity to engage in dialogue as partners. For the emperors, thanks to the nature of their office, demanded obedience and submission. They intervened when the unity of the Church was endangered, for they saw in the unity of the Church also a strengthening of the unity of the empire. But it was precisely ‘his that regularly led to the deepening of the ecclesiastical and to the consolidation of the divisions. For jependence was sought, it was now possible-given i erdependence between the ‘of the empire ~ to _worke? ttested vividly by the name “Mel (= “those who belong to the emperor”), which was given to ‘who were receptive to the Chalcedonian theology Chureh. ‘The emperors exercised pressure on those holding different beliefs to convert, because only one who _b Catholics could, lost for a period, this meant for those Christians there who did not belong to the Catholica that pressure was put on them to form ‘@ union with the Church of the emperor. After the reconquest of North Africa under emperor Justi the_non-Nicene migsion through measures taken by the state In the following period, the Armenians were often required to renounce the ‘non-Chaleedonian profession of faith and to join the imperial 30Church, when Byzantium had military success in the East.' One should, for example, recall here the emperor Maurice, who in the year 590 installed a Catholicos who was in union with the imperial Church for the Armenians in the territories of Anatolia which he had reconqu red - an anti-Catholicos in the view of those Armenians who lived outside the area of military power of the Roman emperor. What the emperor saw as his concern for the unity of the Armenians who lived in the empire with the Church of the empire, was in the ‘menian view the opening up of a new division of the Church, ivided into two The policy of integration pursued by the emperors led to the Copts and Syrians, who were non-Chalcedonian from a‘Teligious point of view, autonomous from a linguistic point of vieX, and heirs to great traditions from a cultural point of view, preferring the Islamic lordship to the Byzantine lordship. When Ostrogorsky deals with the definitive conquest of Alexandria by the Arabs after the attempt of emperor Manuel to reconguer it in the year 646, he writes that “the Coptic Population of Alexandria, with the Monophysite Patriarch Benjamin at its head, very willingly submitted to the Arabs and declared its submission in very formal terms, thus making it known once again that they preferred the Arab yoke _to that_of the Byzantines”.® Patriarch Michael the Syrian, one of the most important theologians, historians and hierarchs of the Syrian Church, laments the deep wounds inflicted _on (he Syrians by Byzantium: for example, he describes the measures taken by the emperor Heraclius after the reconquest of Mesopotamia: “He made a decree for the whole of his empire that one must cut off the nose and ears, and_ransack the house of whoever did not adhere to the synod of Chalcedon. ‘This persecution lasted a long time, and many monks adhered to the synod ... a great number of them accepted the synod and took possession for themselves of most of the churches and monasteries. Heraclius no longer permitted the Orthodox” to appear before them, and he did not accept their complaints about the robbery of their churchs. ‘This is why the God of 40 ‘vengeance, who alone is all-powerful, who changes the empire of men as he wills and gives it to whom he wills, raising up the ‘most hiimble of men, ‘seeing the wickedness of the Romans ‘who cruelly pillaged our churches and our monasteries in every territory of their dominion and who condemned us without pity, led up from the region of the South the sons of Ishmael,? to deliver us through them from the hands of the Romans. And if in truth we have suflered some toss, because the Catholic churches which had been taken from us and given to the Chalcedonians remained in their hands-since, when the towns submitted to the Mohammedans, these gave to each confession, the churches that they found to be in its possession, and at that period the great church of Edessa and that of Harran had been taken from us~ nevertheless, it was no_small advantage for_us to be delivered from the cruelty of the Romans, from their wickedness, from their wrath, from their cruel zeal in their dealings with us, and to flad ourselves at rest"”? ‘Where the Armenians were not subject to the lordship of the Byzantine emperor, their Church gave proof of willing- ness to share in the life of the Sister Churches." Despite all. the_attacks of the Byzantines on the Armenian Church in the course of their military successes in Anatolia, many Armenian hhigrarchs, theologians, teachers _and_artists were ready to accept_stimulus_in_ theology and_in the life of piety tram the imperial Church, once the Armenians attained their autonomy once more under the Bagratids."' But the Byzantines coati nyed_to act as conquerors, not as friends, and_in 1046 they put an end to the Armenian autonomy by capturing Ani. Since the Armenians counted as people with a different faith, as far as the Byzantines were concerned, a hard time followed for them. But not even these painful experiences prevented the Armenian Catholicoi in the following century from working afresh for the re-establishment_of_communio with ‘the Byzantines. Catholicos Nerses Sehnorhali, who adopted an attitude in the search for a reconciliation that remains 9 model for today’s ecumenists too," saw it as his duty, because of the great number of unhappy events in the most recent aast, to address a letter to the emperor in which he empha- sised.that great patience would be necessary to break down the emotions that had_built_up over the centuries of the separation. As a proof of his good will, the emperor wa asked first to Yffant peace to the Armenians in the empire, and to order the clergy and all the people to end confessional strife and acts of violence against the Armenians; won-Orthodox. who fled from the enemies of Christ ought no longer to suffer Persecution in the empire of the Romans too; vfhe Orientals would be able to be won to unity, were it not that the orthodox raged much more harshly than the infidels against their churches, altars, crosses and clergy: for it is not power, but kindness and love that lead men to what is right. But Byzantium and the imperial Church were not willing to Tenounce the striving for domination; the negotiations stagnated, ‘The centuries-old example of the Byzantine emperors who exercised concern “with a strong hand” for what they saw as the “correct” peace of the Church was gladly adopted by the rulers in neighbouring states-even when their own people had previously suflered bitterly under the actions of the Byzantines, We see this in the example of Armenia Minor. When Nerses Schnorhali sought dialogue in order to attain ‘once more communio with the Greek Churches, he also con- ducted conversations about union with the patriarchate of the Syrians, a part of which lived in Armenia Minor. We learn from Michael the Syrian that the conversations between Armenians and Syrians were broken off because the Armenian ruler, who despite the weakness of his state was still in the position of the stronger ruler over against the Syrians, began to support an anti-patriarch. ‘The Latins too were wenker_than the Greeks from a secular point of view, before the Frankish kingdom came to full_fower. Thus the Roman patriarchate was greatly redused and the Constantinoplitan patriarch increased through the adiition of large territories, after the Bishop of Rome refused bis assent to the iconoclastic imperial theology at the outbreak of the iconoclastic struggle. Confronted with this 42 refusal, the_emperor_decided_to remove _the patriarchs! competence for South Italy and Ilyria from the Bishop of Rome and to demand that the Churches of these huge territories give ecclesiastical obedience to the Patriarch of Constantinople, who was theologically subservient to him. When orthodoxy was re-established in Constantinople some generations later, the situation which had arisen from the violent act of the heretical emperor was accepted as something that bad grown up in the course of history. The historical boundaries between the two patriarchates were not_restored tq_what they had been; rather, the wide outreach of Constan- tinople remained over lands that had originally been attached to the Roman Church. Thus it is ultimately because of # dictate of the imperial power, because of an gct of strength vis-a-vis the one who was weaker, that even before the great schism the traditional boundary line between the Christian West and the Christian East was displaced, so that the native lands of the, its Slavonic neighbouring Churches grew out of the Christian West in the following centuries and into the Christian East. 3. Latin surerainty over Eastern Christians Abe In the eleventh century, the Normans acquired suzerainty /° in South Italy. They were Latins. But, os we have just mentioned, th which they overtook the government Iigd_been removed by the Byzantine emperor from the Roman patriarchate during the iconoclastic straggle and subordinated \ to the Constantinopolitan patriarch. No matter what may have happened earlier in the Church history of South Italy, the focal population at the time of the Norman conquest was “‘ot / Greck faith”. But this did not prevent the Normans from subordinating the native Greek local Churches! and their clergy _to their own (Latin) bishops. This state of affairs, which took into consideration only the structure of the Church's order and totally failed to respect the right of the individual local Churches to autonomy, was taken as a mgdel everywhere in the subsequent period when a Latin suzerMtaty lay over territories in which there were Greek local Churches. The x complaints which we have heard made against the Byzautines a Coles mie ay acit Ryton by oS Syne renns ate! Saget lets by Bt banceby Copts, Syrians and Armenians will from now on be made by the Greeks against the Latins, When the(Crusaders ished_th in keeping with this model. After Antioch had been captured in June 1098, they initially acknowledged the Greek Patriarch John IV there as their own patriarch, But already in the same year as the conquest, in the small city of Artesia or Arta, near Antioch, they were willing in future to raise their own people ‘to_episcopal sees when a vacancy arose. They did this for the local Christians in just the same way that they themselves had accepted the Greek Patriarch in Antioch at the beginning. The Latin prelate who was installed in Artesia was a member of the synod of the patriarchate. When Patriarch John had to flee from Antioch to Constantinople in the year 1100 or shortly afterwords, the Latin Bishop of Artesia was elected as the new patriarch, Soon all the episcopal sees of the Antiochene patri- archate wi in the Crusader states were occupied by Latins. Thus not only the land, but also the Greek Church of the Crusader states was in Latin hands. Similar things happened in the kingdom of Jerusalem which the Crusaders established after the capture of Jerusalem in July 1099." When Constan- Ainople was conquered a good century later in the fourth Crusade, they wished to put an end to schism there too by taking over the patriarchate into Latin hands. sed states, the ‘The Crusaders made use of their military and political superiority in order to bring together again the Churches East and West in a way that they found correct. In this, the superior power of the victors on the one side and the weakness or side caused much domination, forced submission nthe other side caused much domination, forced submission and prevented the kind of give and take which is proper to Partners; as a result of the military and economic successes, an eeclesiastical_imperialigm_grew out of the idea of the a ‘developed in the struggle the Persian empire and which had become familiar to the Latins through the Arabs and their idea of the mission of the sword. Today, sch ctios appear incomprehensible H.C. Be writer shot the een of he yur TOE "Pope lao “4 began by vacillating between indignation at the ‘abomiation of desolation’ that the Crusaders had carried out in a Christian place, and the scarcely repressed satisfaction of seeing this kingdom, which had preened itself on being Christian without being willing to give lasting acknowledgement to the papal primacy, at last brought down to the ground. It became obvious that the satisfaction won the upper hand and gave birth to a legal idea _in him that can be explained, in this hhighly educated jurist, only on the basis of the satisfaction which we have described ... The papal directives for the legate Benedict of St Susanna inelude ... the sentence ... ‘translalo ergo imperio necessarium, ut rilus sacerdotit transferatur, qualenus Ephroim reversus ad Iudam in axymis sincerilatis et veritatis expurgalo fermento veteri epuletur... "7 The victorious conquerors absorbed foreiga jurisdictional territories into their owa Church structure. They quite straightlorwardly sought to assimilate Christians who before this had_lived autonomously in keepi with their own traditions." This was for them the appropri understanding of Church union. Like the emperors Justioiam Maurice and Heraclius in an earlier period, so now the Latins too deduced from the conquest an ecclesiological right to extend the ecclesiastical jurisdictis ‘The fourth Lateran Council raised the submission of the Greek Church to the Latin Church to a Church law, at least for those territories in which the constellations of political power permitted this to be carried out the fact that in many places people of different languages live together in the same city and diocese, and despite all th unity im the faith have different rites and customs, we decree that the bishops of such cities and dioceses should install in office suitable men who shall celebrate worship according to ‘the_various rites and languages and also administer the sacraments. They are to teach their faithful also through word and example. But we absolutely forbid that_one and the same city_or_diocese should_have various bishops. That would be a monstrosity - as if one single body were to have several hheads. But when it is urgently necessary for the reasons given here, the local bishop is to install in prudent pastoral care a 6 In consideration of]a Le of the Greek rite as his vicar, who is tobe \ obedient and submissive to him in all things.” At we may be permitted to reflect a little on the@ne-way street} something unworthy of Sister Churches- accord'ng To WATEN 1t_is supposed that the Latins only give, hile the Greeks have apparently only the obligation to vase a *Tteceive_passively. It may seem that this is the street which y-+e 20 opens up here. The mistrust which continuesto smoulder in the Orthodox up to this present day against everything Tecalls the Crusaders even remotely, makes it clear how misgu- {ded the situation was at that period. We have too few sources to permit us to evaluate Now much the Latins imposed on the Greeks in liturgy, canon law and theology in individual points, in the period of their dominance; ond ‘the Greeks were able, after the Latin suzerainty which lasted only a short tim to remove totally things that seemed to them to be too for- eign. But much more important than the question of the extent of the Latin influence seems to be the result of a thorough ana- lysis of what actually happened: it_is_an error when it is sup- we Posed that the dominance of the Latins at that time signified a sed that the dominance of the Latins at that time signified ‘one way street of being influenced. At that time, the Byzantine Cchureh art” exercised-a Tasting Tafluence on. Western Europe; th of the West was enlivened and transformed by impu- legg-Uhat”those returning rom the East -brovght witt_Them, finally, the contact with the Greeks and with their theological tradition influenced in the longer term the Western universi- ties, which had their attention drawn anew at that period, when the high scholssticism Bourished in them, to the Greek Fathers — this was not something that happened only in the ime of the Renaissance. We ought to set out much more thoroughly what those who were much weaker were able to give to the mighty conquerors in the time of the Crusaders. coot 9For Srst, we sce clearly in this that mutual exchange belongs so deeply to the innermost being of the Church that It cannot beprevented totally, even by the misuse of power; second, to emphasise the active contributions made by Orthodoxy in the 3) period of the Crusaders and to express openly the fact that the Ws which came into a might) iden age at that period, owsta debt eratitude-to Orthedexy, may Help to overcome 46 the animosity which the Orthodox still feel towards the Crusaders, Western states penetrated the territory of the Greel Church ona wide front in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and everywhere they behaved in ecclesiastical matters in the way that we have described. Ia the North, the knights of the cross had behave in this way vis-a-vis the East Slavonic Christians. But since thekaights lost the battle ander Nevskij in 1242, the East Slavonic local Churches of the Greek tradition retained their freedom for the time being. This changed when King Casimir the Great (1333-70) won the principality of Holic’ for Poland, and when ‘wide Est Slavonic areas came under Polish-Lithuanian suzer- ainty after the baptism of the Lithuanian Jagiello and his marriage to the Polish queen Hedwig in 1386. In Hungary too, and in the colonies of the Italian merchant republics, the vigorous attempt was made to deal with the Greek local Churches there in keeping with the norm of the fourth Lateran Council. This meant that - in the same was av had been the case some centuries earlier on the eastern and southern boundary of the Byzantine empire - there now existed a wide area along the entire eastern boundary of the Latins i¢ which the_unity of Christians was_simed at, through hierarchical guidance and t_Feverence for the equality i f the Sister Churches. But something else too can be related from the same period in territories which did not stand under Latin suzerai- aty. "The( rst wie possessed political autonomy in the mountains-of Lebandtyentered into communio wit i at that time.” They did this as an autonomous Church and in a free decision, for there was no one who could have fopled them into obedient submission to Western Christianity, if they had not given their own honest consent to the commu: rnio. The free consent of the whole Church to the reception ‘of Church fellowship meant that the Maronite Church did not split up asa result of its union with the Latins. a7in the independent kingdom of Cilicia in Armenia Minor too, contacts on a basis of partnership were made at that period with the Crusaders, who encountered the Armenians as confederates, i.e. on the level of equality of rank, and the Church of Armenia Minor accepted communio with them. A mass of stimuli in liturgy, theology and pastoral life came to ‘the Church of the Armenians of Armenia Minor through the contacts which they had with their Latin neighbours. It is characteristic for the effects of a free dialogue between Churches that the Armenians integrated what they adopted into the self-evident substance of what counted as their auth- entic Armenian ecclesiastical inheritance, and also mediated this to their ancient homeland in the East, where the Crusaders never came. Here the community of the Unitores gave especial help: these were a religious province for Armenians who were linked very closely to the Dominicans. Their priests worked in the Armenian Church as preachers, teachers and pastors in the same way as the sons of St Dominic did in the West.” 4. The Unions of Lyons and Florence At the peak of their_power, the Latins had thought tuat_on*absorption"OU The: Grecls nty-the Latin” Church was the safest_solution to_the problem of Church unity. But it became clear that such a solution could not be put into practice even in the areas where Latin princes ruled. When & Greek_emperor came _to power once more in Constantinople, thoughts turned again to union. The emperor and the pope endeavoured to reach such a union at Lyons; negotiations were conducted between the one who retained the Greek Churches, after the schism between Greeks and Latins, the function of co-ordinator which Justinian had had for the whole pentarchy, and the one who was recognised by the Latin Churches as the first bishop. Once again, the obedience of the Churches would have been necessary in order the success of unification. This was not a, 1¢ obedience _of the Churches of wokened nations to the Church of the victors, asin the cases of the victorious ions of the emperor's forces into the East, or in the expanding states of the Latins: this time, the emperor demanded that the Churches of his own “fommunio should obey. They were to follow his example and to give their assent to what had been decided at Lyons without them, in his name and in the name of the pope. But the unification of the Churches for which the emperor and the pope hoped did not come about, When Greeks and Latins were assembled for the Union Council in Ferrara and in Florence, once again the pope and (<*" Y glare the emperor were active in a decisively important way. The ‘had places of honour in the aula, and it was their task to ‘moderate the sessions, But the council really was « council of Churches, and the theological questions were discussed with ‘#reQt seriousness. The Council Fathers from the Orthodox Church and from the Catholic Church sought a solution of the problems of faith that were regarded as standing in the way of a resum- ption of Church fellowship. In many sessions, they worked with methodological exactness in order to discover what imp- Tovements were necessary, and of what these improvements must consist. Finally agreement was reached that a deeper understanding of the doctrine of both sides recognises their compatibility, and that it is a misunderstanding to suppose that there exist fundamental contradictions in doctrine between. Latins and Greeks. Many take the failure of the union as evidence that the theological analyses of the Council Fathers were unsatisfactory, and that what they took to be a solution was insufficient. In ‘the case of the least of the four controversial themes which fare addressed in Laelentur caeli, namely that of the papal authority, there can be no dispute sbout the fact that only ‘n_apparent solution was given. For the unification took place with the formula that the Roman pope had authority “as contained in the acts of the ecumenical Councils and the sacred canons”, There can be no doubt that primatial privileges of the Roman see existed at the time of seven ecumenical Councils which are mentioned here, and that these have found an echo in the acts of the Couneils and the canons. But equally, there is no doubt that, in the period after the last Of these Councils, the interpretation of the primatial rights 022-Jp'y"And especially their concrete exercise on the Roman side hed Ree, ‘dergone a development about which the Greek and the Latin Council Fathers had contrary views. The(Latins\ held that ‘what vas practised in Rome was the appropriate wayto realise what Thad always been nt texts, they understood the cle in the sense of a confirmation of what had developed joie din Rome in tems of am wa ‘of the primacy in the course of the centuries. The(Gree! reject One may take up whatever position one will about the value of the theological work of the Council Fathers,” and fone may perhaps hold that the proceedings at the Council were illusory, but one must admit that Greeks and Latins and Ferrara / Florence endeavoured to conduct a dialogue as partners. But_why did the unification not succeed? Did the ® attempt perhaps fail because the intentions of those involved “ were not pure enough? They were in fact motivated, not only by the desire to follow the commission given by the Lord to establish recon and fellowship among his disciples, but also by earthly prudence, which hoped for strength coming from this unification in the struggle of resistance against the Turks, But no lasting blessing or eflectiveness for the cause of Christ comes from considerations of earthly usefulness. For the reasons from which earthly prudence deduces its motivat- ions are too short-lived, and the kingdom of Christ is not of this world. The endeavour to bring about a union that would is too_similar to chapter of Genesi ~ another reason { mpt at unification, which had begun ina spirit of partnership, the fact that the i yed to compel the Greeks to accept the results after jons_of the Council had come ton end? For at once supply the help which they had promised 50 a condition for this help. One looks on with 4 . One looks on with deep horro; ts one secs the attitude of the Greek Church ‘membership to ins bofore the fall of Constantinople and how i resembled the attitude of the Coptic Church membership” to the Greeks at the time whe: the Greeks at the time when Alexandria was conquered by 5) The new situation under the Osmans The chronicler Georgios Phrantzes, who had. close tionships to the emperor, Manuel If fad hitomi. has recorded that this affairs and make them all the more dangerous. Even if this statement does not come literally from the emperor, but has no doubt been formulated by the chronicler it does express the politics of the ; vas under hard pressure at. that peri tnderstand why the Osman ru ‘the Roman_Churely conquered after the Italian merchant republics, so that they would on¢ synod of the four Greek Patriarchates reac in 1484, which has been mentioned not to be re i the basis of the legal situation in the Osman state, which gave ‘the patriarch and the bishops the position of leaders of the people for the Christan s and thus meant that they ld make use of the police organs of the state to fulfill the duties which they had in this connection, the Greek hierarchs atCae Bes * bigee 4 pF Sas under the patronage of the Portuguese King, and. eos jost everywere to bring Church life into obedience ‘n after the end of the Latin suzerainty. We can appreciate the success that they had in the jing believers back into_obedience ‘ch, when one compares the avail- ‘on Crete or elsewhere about the ‘ucture in the decades before and alter the in, K, Draganovic has investigated similar ‘successes and the means used for these in a part of Osman territory which had a Slavonic population. 6) The Western Church reaches out to South India and Ethiopie 2) Thanks to a mission that is passed over in silence in the Acts of the Apostles, a mission linked to the name of the jostle Thomas, the Church ‘Thomas Christians has red in India since the most ancient times. It_fourished lo rtuguese arrived there, beginning the mission among the pagans and setting up an archbishopric in Gos. ‘authorities shared the concern of the new arch: the Thomas Christians should be incorporate quickly as possible into the metropolitanate of Goa: for tical obedience to the archbishop meant at the same time to the crown of Portugal. however, the Thomas Christians were ae, which had never been influenced by the theoloj liturgical and sy-tanonieal developmeate ofthe Latin West was vary_diirent from the forms which the archbishop of Goa and his clergy the Jesuit fathers_whom ind a doctrinal formulations must be read in the context of a theological way of thinking that was unknown to the West at that time: they took these formulations to be heretical. They ‘accused of superstition whatever in the liturgical customs of the Thomas Christians had no equivalent in the worshipping fife of the West, and they complained about defects, if no 52. sultable counterpart existed in inthe patri Charch to one of thelr own rita, Tnmeny oF MHP Toeal AA dialogue of partners would ha would have been a onde forthe now atv to lear to pric and to undrt 3 the extremely ancient patrimony of the Church which Tived . new arrivals were not interested _i : hey fle themievesexslsively to be the Teachers of all whom they eae, snc they were conscious ofthe mison to peoples and teach all men (ef. Matt 28:19). In his concern for the purity of the faith, Father t of doctrinal attempt was made to win over the cl i E lergy to use this. In 159 4 synod at Diamper condemned what the Europeans took . Herlial, made the Latnisations of the_ritual_obl and bound ihe Thomas Christians drmiy into the structure of archdiocese of Goa and the Portuguese patronage. Thei traditional ecclesiastical life and thelr link to their previous Syriac patriarch almost disappeared. mewn The new state of things was not solidly established Tos was shown inthe middle ofthe seventeenth century when the Dutch, who rebelled aginst the Spanish erowa (which in meantime had become united to Portugal), took the over South India to themselves, and the secular aries. At once, a_mighty cry br the Thomas Christians for the-feturn fo The tradiog b) We ask how it was y possible for this to hi when Jesuit fathers, esa iappen, ae eectanya in the Indian mission, aimed at the culture of India which is symbolised by the name of Father 53soa baby? Robert de N . In China too, Jesuits like Matteo Ricei_or S| ‘way in meeting the hro-X, loeal culture, as was the Visitor Alessandro Valigaano”S._J- India in the the period in question: here. years 1585-1587 — pr v An order to stand this one must besr in mind between the openness to pagans on the one hand and the tungenerous controlling of the Christian provenance of the ‘Thomas Christians on the other hand. The_Latin-Western bey mstinn i Chr B .d into question when they_permitted ividual points out of consideration for the persons whom they addressed. The_aim was a form of the ‘way of being @ Christian which they knew from their homelands, with Indian, Japanese or Chinese nuances. The missionaries who were sent as heralds of the faith to East Asia, to teach the peoples there, were to distinguish what they held must be maintained without change from what they were Cinodiff out of consideration for the land in. question. ne a wi For they had possessed from ancient times a mode of being Christian which had not passed through the Western history of ideas,~and only to a limited extent through the classical Greek-Latin history of ideas. What_was required was not_niédi fleations of a secondary kind to the Latin rite, carried out in es; rather, the had always been different from each other ought to have sought a means for the traditional forms of their Christian existence to live alongside one another. Latins of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not able to do thi ©) When it, was possi seventeenth century for missionaries to be sent from Portugal to Ethiopia, their activity 5 Ta enene 4 neat Conn” , too was guided by the consciousness that what held good it Rome and in Portugal was quite simply the sears ae Tn keeping with the instructions which they bad nd because of their small number, the mission who came from the Jesuit Order, addressed themselv 0 ia, ‘They impressed Sena eet ate edged Pe ene beir willingness to engage in work and because of us seriousness. They gave advice to the sovereign of the African kingdom that came out of European ideas of the seventeenth century about the relationship between state and Church. The secular arm began to compel the cler Ermoyh listant Europe to the yr the distant Ethiopian suits who had proved their worth at home but knew notbing of Ethiopia. new “patriarch” In the consciousness that he had been furnished by the pope with full jurisdiction over a Church that had not elected nd did not even know him or the pope, the “patriarch” at once_beganto rule and to reform when head same to Ithough he knew nothing at all about the situation in Ethiopia and had no notion of the life of the Church over which he was supposed to preside, We are profoundly shocked id not recognise that these were sacrilegious, bitterly. They went so far as , and the “patriarch” held to desecrate the Ethiopian ai 55that he ought to furnish the chief sanctuary of the Ethiopi at Axum with a Letin altar, and then to consecrate it anew. ‘We must see the consequences with consternation: a sea of blood and tears flowed, since a civil war was the result, because the emperor and some military Teaders supported the “Patriarch’s” wishes for reform, but the great majority took up arms in order to prevent these. The emperor fell. His son ‘and successor had to expel the missionaries from the country, in order to obtain peace once more?” 7) ‘The Moldavian Church and Rome at the end of the sixteenth century 2) A large delegation from the Moldavian Church had taken part in the Council of Constance, and the Moldavian Metropolitan Damian was among the prominent members ofthe Greck delegation in_Ferrara/Florence who favoured union. In the lest period of the rule of Prince Petru Schiopul (who reigned, with two interruptions, from 1574 to 1591), the Moldavian Church.” “through the work of its greatest bierarch, Gheorghe (dfovitd\who was metropolitan at that time, to declare itself dbenly in communion with the Roman see. In order to carry out this act, the metropolitan would have had to go to Rome at the mandate of the Prince at the head of a special Moldavian mission, But it was not possible to reali project because of the preasing threats of the Tartars. However, the metropolitan ‘wrote all the same a letter to the pope on 15 October 1688 addressed to ‘The most holy and blessed Father in Ghrist and Lord, the Lord Sixtus V, by the geace of God tovereign pontiff of the universal Catholic Church’. After having stated in this letter that he had not been able to go to Rome, although he had long desired to do so, he concluded with the following declaration: “L_submit_myself most_humbly_to Your Holiness and I'ask you to grant me most mercifully your most 36 t holy blessing, and to consider and recognise me from now. on.as the most obedient son_of the: holy Catholic roman Church, and if the Almighty God prolongs my life, I shall find the occasion to come and kiss the most blessed fect of Your Holiness in proof of my abiding love and obedience.’ ‘The letter was transmitted by the two ambassadors of Moldavia to the Polish ruler...... These went to Demetrius Solikowski, archbishop of Lwow, and_made the_formal_act of adhesion to the Roman communion and the act of obedience in his hands; the prelate says specifically ina letter of 14 December 1588 to Sixtus V, quod antea fuit faetum nunquam (‘something that has never happened before’). The same archbishop testifies in the letter that this attitude was not something held by the metropolitan alone, but was common to the “Greek clergy’ also, as well as the court. The act of Ghorghe Movila expresses in fact a fecling that ws fully shared by the bishops of the other two Moldavian sees also, Agathon of Roman and Gedeon of Radauti; as {far as the faithful were concerned, the life of St. Jeremiah of Walachia®® shows perfectly what veneration and respect they felt in those years, not only for the Roman see, but for the entire Latin Church? ‘As a consequence of the official step taken by the Moldavian ambassadors in the name of the prince and of the metropolitan, Sixtus V replied to Gheorghe Movila with a letter dated 12 January 1589 in which he declared that he accepted his submission and that of his lord.” ‘The link with Rome that the Moldavians sought can take ap. again the communio with another autonomous Church with which it found itself ina situation of schism, although it would not have been able tofind a sufficient reason for the schism. b) Was this a solitary act that would lead to fears of @ Grave conflict between the metropolitanate of Moldavia and 57those Churches with which it had lived in communio hitherto? -, ‘As we understand this today, this would have been the case: (-*\'.> the agreement of one single Orthodox metropolitanate to enter ‘unjon with the Roman see would count today as a lack of solidarity with Orthodoxy as a whole, and the unity of the Orthodox Church would be shattered by this. That metropoli- aA berEbleenate would go over from its previous Orthodox communio into the communio of Rome. Was it necessary at that period? b-1) From the point of view of the Moldavian Church, tne answer is certainly not. Tt_was convinced that it could in the Roman Church, just as in the Churches of the Greek tradition, a Slater Church of the true faith which administered the sacraments in the cofrest manner and media ted the divine life and access to the triune God to its believers. T. abip with the Roman Church meant on4or the Moldavian Charch Shihet period neither that it wished wo No change itself, nor that a change in its relationsbipa to its «NS ouier Sister Churches ought to take place. Mes, yutocephalous Orthodox Churches of our own not fall within the area in 7 dogs not live in eommunto. This was (aot the customary view in the Churches of the Greek tradition fn the century after rw the collapse_of the Byzantine empire. It was only in the course of a lengthy search for new modalities for their co-ordinated action that this became the conviction of these Churches and indeed took on the status of an obligatory norm. ‘An important reason why this conviction arose was givan by the bitter experiences of the Greek Churches wie Ua aye evenis in the post-Tridentine period. In order to expluie-this, ae ‘we must go into some detail. ‘After the collapse of the Byzantine empire, no other institution overtook the function which the emperor had exercised in the Church up to the very last, the function which we have often mentioned. While the Latin Churches _had wie SUS removed their emperor in the investiture controversy from coy " responsibility for the unity of the Church, and possessed in the 58 PUA Mona? REVI Grtretns eh ine DoD FS wt me MY A Ue sis Cazes a pope @ point of reference for the organisational expression of thelr spiritual unity, the Churches of Greek tradition _had.-no co-ordinator_available to" them after 1453_whom all the’ patriarchates would have recognised. Bul they gave proof of *1T their vitality by preserving the communi even without such 4 co-ordinator, and by guaranteting the necessary unfolding 4M ~~ of the Church's life, They never lost the awareness of being together the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church of the East, which consists in and of a number of individual Church But the concrete pastoral life of the Churches of Greek tradi- i differentiated in the following centuries, since it had to be inserted into the wholly different, social structures of Islamic states and modern Western states as well as in that of Orthodox Russia, and in addition to this, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also into the national states of south-eastern Europe and finally, because of large-scale waves of emigration, into almost all the social systems of our contemporary world. This presented ever more urgently the question, which might and should be solved autonomously by the individual Churches, and which required a common solution for the sake of the communio of Orthodoxy asa whole. Some of the developments which occured in this process collectiogs of the authentic witnesses to the faith ol Orthodox Church. To the extent that these are universally received norms of Church orde’\ they must_be consi s valid Orthodox canbn law, althugh they were never expressed in_formulated canons, so that there sometimes exist very divergent positions when the attempt is made to determine what these lay down exactly.” In addition, much in these ideas of Church order which grew up in the course of history is encrusted with secondary material which is not so good, and it cannot be acknowledged without further ado as wholly valid Church order. This is why the questions about the autonomy of the individual Orthodox Churches and about the relationships which ought to exist between them were put on 59rene? : Vatopedi,’? the agenda both of the Pan-Orthodox Consultations in 1925. at Constantinople and in 1930 in the Athos monastery” of ‘well as on the agenda for the Athens Congress for Orthodox Theology in 1936. They were taken up afresh after “the heads and representatives of several Orthodox Churches had met in Moscow from 8 to 18 July 1948, on the initiative of Patriarch Aleksij of Moscow, in a conference’ with inter-Orthodox character”,%* and In 1950 when Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople, in an encyélieal on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, raised for discussion the question of the ecclesinl existence of the Orthodox jurisdictions in the @iaspora,?? and when he pleaded through patriarchal Letters in 1951/52 for new Pan-Orthodox Consultations,** which began on Rhodes in 1961 and serve the preparation of a Great and Holy Council of the Orthodox Church? After these Consult- ations began, it was possible once more to continue the Orthodox theological congresses, which had been interrupted for a time by the Second World War; this theme returned to the agenda." We can see the difficulty of the evident problems! in the fact that it has not yet been possible to bring all the Orthodox Churches to participate in the Pan-Orthodox Consutations.*? At the beginning of the process of clarification, which began centuries ago and took on speed only in recent times, the reek tradition would certainly have been able to accept that_a Church which felt_the need to act in its particular pastoral situation could” follow the “moder_of a ceases from the time of the seven ecumenical Councils when the communio with a Sister Church, which had been separated from it, was to be renewed. For in the early centuries of Church Wistory too, the relationship to all the other patriarchates was not always changed immediately, when two patriarchates broke off or renewed communio with one another. When the*Mfoldavian Church began to act by itself in the eighties of the sixteenth century, it did not do so because of a lack of solidarity with the other Churches of its communio, but because the_ngrm which toda its_only a common action on the part o rodox Churches in the matter in question here had not yet taken shape. 60 6-8) ‘The reason why the action of the Moldavian metropolitanate would nevertheless have led . necessarily to conflicts i the Churches of Greek tradition, if it had been a aout conducted resolutely to the end, is to be sought In the Rome ®” of the Tridentine reforms. There, the opinion that the Molda-.. 4 thn vian Church would not need to change if the pope granted it as communio was not held, because in Rome one thought_firstof €*“"” 9 all_that all the dioceses should be drawn into the process of, uk-Y"y rengual wlich the Counsibat Treat had atrolacel Te Te” eo) Catholic Church and which now was to be brought comple- tion under the guidance of the Roman Pontifl. Rens bob Concrete ideas already existed of how the Greeks too were to be drawn into the reform processes, although these ideas had not been worked out in a dialogue with the Greeks, but had been formed exclusively in Rome. As V. Peri has shown, Congregation of the Curia had been working since 1566 on new regulations for the Christians of the Eastern Chirch tra- dition who lived under Catholic rulers in South Italy and Sicily, and in a territory for which a Latin hierarchy existed. Even aslate as the second third of the sixteenth century, these ) Christians under their own bishop were respected as a local Chureh of Eastern tradition with which Roman Church hed fellowship; but_this changed in the course of the reforms which now began. een that se Bag ons ae oe Te ishop was taken from them. They had no longer communio with the Sancla Romana Ecclesia as an? O“™*"" autonomous Church, but were absorbed into it as believers for = aieagnm whom, and for whose clergy, exceptions were made to the rules in the area of the liturgy. The guiding ecclesiological idea_of the new regulation’ was no longer that of Sister Churches in sacramental fellowship, | fag ou the incorporation under the first Pastor, the pope, of those ‘who hitherto had stood outside. This was taken as the model to be followed in Rome, when the request of the Moldavians was granted. Accordingly, Sixtus V and his advisers held that, if the step the Moldavians had taken was to have any value at urs all, they must be subordinated in avery clear fashion to. the gun!" pastoral ministry of the Roman Bishiop. When Sixtus V accepted ‘the Moldavians’ request for Church fellowship in January 1589, Tend bpm non pre DE Le AE AT be re Hn ASAT 1550 Coreen On SHR, ven ne ethers GAAS hayride comms ait arth, Be Conn eel Pn nnd sa is Ft ' Delmer tdte Brennen bowown £.o% the following exhortation was addressed to the Metropolitan: “.horlatur Te Sanetilas Sua ut caveas diligenter, qui erroribus provinciam purgasse scribis, ne ullae maneant in Te religuiae fenebrarum... Ilud praecipue Tibi in animum inducas, quod una omnium, et eorum mazime, quorum vitam et doctrinam merito. sus- picitis, Graecorum Palrum, quinimo et ipsorum Apostolorum sententia traditum est, ezlra Eeclesiam cathoticam, cuius caput est Christus et ilius in terris Vicarius Romanus Pontifex, tanquam extraarcam lam Noe, ex iis qui viount servari posse neminem...n' ©) The political developments in Moldavia meant that silence very soon surrounded the request for union. The_anti- thesis between the position of the Moldavians and that of Rome ‘was not fought out to a resolution. Thus no turbulence came like that which was to come.a decade later in Poland-Lithuania. ich was fo comes a ee 8) The Union'of Bret"? t eo ree 2) In Poland-Lithuania, which covered territory far away in the East in the sixteenth century and included the areas of the modern republics of White Russia and Ukraine, thus having a numerous population of the Eastern tradition of faith, Calvi- nism had had great succesees in the sixteenth century. For a time it look as if Catholicism and Orthodoxy would be suppressed by the Heformed Church there, But in the Tast third of the sixteenth century, the Jesuits were able to begina successful counter-movement, since they understood how to take up the concerns of the age in pastoral work and in their schools, and they made great efforts in the field of publications, They were itory that had wns to Protestantism. On the Orthodox side, this task was carried out by the Orthodox brotherhoods, associations of manual labourers and ywer-middle-class Orthodox believers which were exempt from episcopal jurisdiction, Since they had no experience in putting up resistance to Protestantism, they were glad to be guided eof the Jesuits, who were ‘a model especialy in their educational institutes. The brotherhoods erected school in which, against the opposition: of conservative circles who feared Western influence, Latin was_an obligatory subject of 62 fad instruction from the start. This was unavoidable, since they belonged to the Polish state, and could not do other than make their students familiar with the cultural and admini- strative language of this state. The_schools of the brothernoods wished to be inferior in nothing to the Jesuit schools. Since they took up what had proved its value among the Catholics in the confrontation with the problems created by the Reformation, their programme of instruction began at once to ‘set its own stamp on the Orthodox schools of Poland-Lithuania, ‘And thus it is not suprising that they soon began to make use of te: the Jesuit schools, since they knew ‘the Latin language in which these textbooks were written. Tt seemed that a pastoral_co-operation of both the ¢ traditional Churches of Poland-Lithuania was beginning, in their effort to master the modernistic tendencies of that period. It would be a rewarding topic to set out the services of the Jesuits to Orthodoxy in the decades before the conflict to which we must now turn at once, and to investigate how Orthodoxy builds further on these services, not only in the Seventeenth century, but until the present day. 'b) When the wish arose to overcome the schism between the two traditional Churches on the territory of the state of' Poland-Lithuania at the end of the sixteenth century through ‘@ union, antithetically opposed ecclesiological concepts led to the breakdown of _the pastoral co-operation. ‘The Latin theologians, especially Petrus Skarge, were concerned primarily — indeed, perhaps one must say, exclusively — in the sense of the Tridentine reform movement, to see_that the Church was led w in the appropriate manner_by the office-bearers whom Christ, ‘the Head, had equipped with authority. They brought forward with ever greater clarity year by year their view that it would be necessary to absorb the Eastern Christians of Poland-Lithuania igdee The pasar ar ‘pastoral care of the Bishop of Rome in exactly the same way as_the Latin Christians of the Tend had already ‘begn_absorbed. ‘The West asa whole had long ceased to be aware that ‘ boundary between patriarchates of the ancient Church ran 63primacy which would demand eveything, but nothing more soos) between the one group and the other, and. that ies ot ane han, what is dogma of the Catholic Church, In the centuries eal tradition of our Which the Roman pris . ccs i ies wet h“ame et | sit fee rw rp ek wr" Churches would have exactly the same jurisdictional relation- ning in Rome was the appropriate way to put into practice ship to Rome. For, thanks to the schism between Greeks and hat had always been the. papal prescgatives of ane rae Latins, the area of the popes’ authority had been limited de Pr see~or they could consider the development in Rome as an exerescence and a falsifying innovation rather than as something that made the order of the ancient Church clearer. facto to the Roman patriarchate; the a ‘Thus it had long agdb 4) At the end of the ‘making any distinction between the patriarchal and the papal teenth century, the erroneous 4, opinion was held in Rome that each time ome 14 FS: prerogatives of the Roman see. carted out bis duty of pastoral_eare for one (or for several) god p>" : Geet of the local Churches of his communio, a papal_act in the grin ‘The ecclesiology of the ancient Church eyntiaes Proper sense of the term took place. Consequently, noone on 4 oe ‘envisaged an ordered relationship of the Eastern Sister Churches tie Latin side ditinguane eee distinguished Between the papal and the patri- “@ to the Church of the first bishop of Christianity. But the aS archal jurisdiction, when a union was aimed at eee ‘tins und forgotten in the meantime that the ordered relations — 7y Lithuania and it was necessary to establish the ordered relatio- shin of Kastenn Sister Churches to-the Homes Hsiop Sid sot ae ship of the Eastera Christians there to the Bishop of Rome, vv +) ition. as. az It did not occur to the Latins that the Orientals would remain a) legitimately demands {com the Western Churches. ¥ trie to the tradition of the ancient Church in the ease olen PA ; agreement about union, only if they entered a relationship ©) At the Council of Florence, the Greeks agreed with with the Roman see different to the relationship that the the Latins in the decree Lactentur eaeli that the pope had Western dioceses have to it. Since the Latins in their own authority “as this is contained in the acts of the ecumenical country behaved just like ‘the missionaries show they ta Councils and the sacred canons.” This referred not only to at that period in South India, and thus failed to listen atten- Patriarchal prerogatives of the Bishop of Rome over the Latin tively to the witness of another Church, they aid net setiee West, but also to primatial rights of the first Bishop of What a great dlference existed. betwcea tive view and nen Christianity. But precisely the interpretation of the genuinely prima- view of the East Slavonic bishops of the Metropolitanate of (sie? bout what was correct. For the latter understood the owe tial rights in the entire Church and their exercise underwent : union in the spirit of the same tradition of the ones a Paste kat teneacsaties cal Goanalistoedl ancient Church in which the Moldavian Church had requested 7 deetlopment between the seven_ecumentcal Councils a Jopment cont the communio with the Roman Chureh a decade earlier. The seul the Church assembly at Florence, an ted even iter twas Oly atthe Pr Yates cote, tnd aie or en ee a hey almost three hundred years after the Union of Brest, did the Kiev, not at a relationship of dependence. =3At=™ pump Catholic Church succeed in defining the jurisdictional primacy * Poepentnee \ of its pope in an authoritative statement, i.e. in_demarcating When the union was in fact concluded in Rome on 23 Ne this against the excesses of too much and uo Tittle AL the December 1595, this was done in keeping with the conception $45 sixteenth and nth centuries, 10 0 of the Latins. A part of the Eastern Christians accepted the Kiev “4 Us av mee tot} Sumas fGen wen 4 fey fe tr Lanns nyt Tt? Sepawanay A pape sets yn Laantransition from the ancient Church’s idea of communio to a canonical incorporation under the patriarchal structure of ‘the Roman see, while another part did not accept this. A break_with in the Eastern Christians was the consequence. ‘Thus what had begun as a striving for unity ended up in division. 9) The union of Marca ‘The small diocese of Marca, which was in a weak position vis-a-vis the provincial Dict of Croatia and belonged to the Uskoks, realised to a certainextent in the second third of the seventeenth century what the Eastern Churches _of Moldavia and Poland-Lithuania had striven in vain to achieve at the end of the sixteenth century. This was at least de farto the case, although Latin prelates very frequently pressed for ‘a clearer situation”. The Uskoks as a whole were not very numerous, and they were a border people skilled in war. Both fof these reasons no doubt led to their being left in pence.”” ‘The Unkoks were Christians of Eastern tradition from the territory occupied by the Osmans, who crossed over into ‘Auteia om the sateenth century onwards. There the authori ties prized the skill in war of the new arrivals is the continuous fighting against Turkish marauding bands, and they tolerated ‘the situation in which the Uskoks led an ecclesiastical life in accordance with their own tradition and linked to their own aative patriarch Tn Bee. A small docese of Maren came into existence. The property situation in the area where they lived Id to cow etonomie relationships, between the Blahop of Marea and the Croatian Church. The diocese of Marca soon tnlared also into spiritual fellowship. with this Chureh, and tates ith the Rotem Gharek through the meation of te Croatian Church. In many documents, and through the profe- ssions of faith when its bishops entered upon their office, it is clearly shown that the Church of Marca was unit id with the Catholics, But for decedes, this did not mean any breach with Peer fa Church, historians and apotogats of the nineteenth century, whe did not under ‘a “double loyalty” of this kind, this led to con ee Partisans aT Ortiods ixy wished 66 to deduce from the loyalty to Pec that one could not truly speak of union with Rome, while their opponents sought to deny the occurrences in question, or - where these cannot be refuted ~ called the sincerity of these bishops of Marca into question. ‘The situation caused more and more uneas: on the Latin le, and was ended in the last third of the seventeenth century. The link of the Bishop of the Uskoks to Pec was definitively forbidden, and did in fact cease. This had happened before the Patriarch of Pec Arsenije III immigrated into Austria in 1691 ‘with many followers. There, he and his successors were acknow- eldged through a privilege of emperor Leopold I as spiritual and secular head of their people, so that the immigrant Serbs achieved a good legal basis as Church and as ethaic group. No sooner had they settled on Habsburg soil, than they attempted to use their cavalry to bring the parishes of the Uskoks under the jurisdiction of their patriarch. This attempt to bring the Uskoks ~ who in the meantime had become Uniates (ie., Catho- ics) in the sense of a clear confessional demarcation ~ back into obedience to the Serbian patriarch was the first_attemp the Danub monarchy to use military force to Christians to change their confession. The attempt the Hungarian Cardinal Kollonitsch intervened in favour of the Uniates. In 1777, Maria Theresia erected the diocese of Krizevel, which still exists, for their descendants, 10) The Unions in Upper Hungary and Transylvania a) When the Austrian armies penetrated south-eastwards after the great Turkish emergency of the year 1583, they dis- covered Eastern Churches among the people in Upper Hungary and in Transylvania. In the preceding period, when Hungarian Calvinist princes had been the rulers there, the Eastern Chri stians had lived as gerfs.® In keeping with their social status 5 persons without rights, their ecclesiastical life had not been able to unfold itself to_any great extent, and their clergy, which asa rule was likewise subject to the yoke of servitude, ‘was scarcely educated at all. The schools that existed were ‘open to Eastern Christians only if they were ready to become Calvinists or at least to restructure the spiritual life of their 67emphasis on Pantry te Calvinism and 1 learaing the Mange ‘were to grow into the Magyar-Cal which dominated the state, and to strengthen the superi in and the religion of the prince. Many “soci climbers” accepted this. For a long time, the Orthodox Chris” tians lost their potential leaders in this way, since these besas Hungarians, and the broad mass of the Orthodox remained caught in a state of having no rights in About the middle of the seventeenth century, howevers the Orthodox _Ruthenians_in those parts of Upper Hungary which owed obedience to the Tra an prinee but were adjacent to the territory of the Hal power, and coul ‘influenced by Austria according to the military tical situation of the moment, attempted to "se wae rise to a better social situation. The Int about protection which was made between the Church and the Ruthenian diocese of ‘Mukacevo, shing the fellowship in sacraments of the Ruthenians the Church of the Habsburg eae ee, as juaranteeing the 1 and ethnic tré social position of their clergy and their ful, we sn 3 tury, emperor b) Shortly before the end of the century, Leopold I, in teference to these events, issued a Diploma that 68 Guaranteed the uniate faithful and their cle; tl ‘the Latin Catholics had. Whi Eastern Christians were to be entire group) out of their lack of freedom through an agree- ment of union. Thereby would also allow the Catholic state Church in Transylvania, which had scarcely any impor- tance there before the conquest by the army of Austria, to become the strongest Church. Jesuits who came as military chaplains with the imperial army to Transivania were given the task of taking contact with the Orthodox Rumanians and of inviting them to union with the Catholic Church, both from motives of pastoral care and from motives of social Policy. Preserving their identity ed corporatively (i. Soon, the Synod of the Transylvanien Rumanian diocese was convinced of the spiritual and secular advantage of a corporately-concluded union. Thepiritual advantage promised ‘was that an end would be put to the interference of the who had threatened the patrimony of Ri century now. From a*scular poi union would leave the Rumanians with th and ethnic identity, making them finally bringing them the rights (which they sorely) of a fourth (and in fact the most poj is) Transyl- vanian nation, and making them a received community of faith. life'in the states of Europe and of the Near East. Accord- ing to our modern criteria of judgment, such a link between religious confession and civil right seems unacceptable, but at that period contemporaries took it for granted that_quest- to receive the rights of a nation together with the acceptance of communio with the state Church, negotiated their collective 69imperial government and with the i with th rege as ‘Rome like the Synod of Kiev primate of Hungary, not Carlie hon we investigate the intentions that guided these who began to negotiate about the union in Transylvania, we ‘Church, which was small in Transylvania the Rumanian diocese, which was popul- ights, wished to helped one another in a ous but had no spirit of partnership. ©) But the corporative union did uot come about as had been oped. There was a delay in Vienna about dealing at once with the request for union, although it would bay meant the strengthening of the Catholic element in the new territories For the autborites_in_Vionna_were not, strong enough to do in Traneylva a5 hey Td oy wee al Tranaylvanian Diet in yunt. Opposed to the union, because the sctl rise of the Rumanins 35_a united ethnic group would bave threatened _Thelr_power and in the Tong term would have deprived them of The ‘right to exploit the working capacity of the Rumanians who ept in servitude. 10 the opinion, of he Rumanians as converted indi 0 religions! should attain the rights that per who confessed the religion in question; but ‘anyone said he wished to nue for the future to change their rel continue for tl ee future to lose their_poten- der ‘the A further hindrance to a corp uni conditions which had been suggeste sme from the Strict Tridentine yn_of the Hungari wate at that it was to have riod. We see already in him the position thet Revastating consequences a few decades later everywhere in 70 the Orient. The Jesuit fathers who took up contact with the Rumanians were given the charge of opening the conversations about union on the basis of the Florentine Decree of union’! This, however, was not enough for the primate. He i on_an explicit assent even to those doctrines of Trent which dealt_with themes which were unfamiliar to the Ramanians, Apart from this, he had so Witte confidence in the Church with which the sought that he insisted on the ‘Transylvanian the cause of the failure of the attemy Rumanians and Latins to a soi 11) 17th and 16th centuries in the Osman empire: co-operation ends in rivalry ®) Although the Turks made it impossible to think of 4 public union with the Roman see on Osman territory in the sixteenth/seventeenth centuries, many contacts were made from the middle of the sixteenth century, which took on a wider scope. Individual _hierarchs, the Bighop_of Rome; they were, so to speak, first-fruits that wanted to anticipate a future unity of the Churches. Among these persons we find the highest representatives of Orthodoxy, even patriarchs of Constantinople. Other high Orthodox prelates, er knowledge had declared themselves to be united with Rome. ‘Thus the bishops of the Metropolitanate of Kiev were quite serious when they spoke, in the course of the preparations for the Union of Brest, of an openness among the Greeks to the idea of entering into Church fellowship with the Latins, which however had to be kept secret because of the Turks. The theologi made at that