www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West Eastern Catholics - why are you in union with Rome?

Ray,

Would you mind creating another thread on what you discovered? I'd like to know what you are referring to, but don't want to clog up this thread.

Thanks.

From its very beginnings, the papacy has been surrounded with the mantle of timelessness, or rather, with a particular historical myth, whose vulnerability, considered simply as history, is every bit as problematic for Catholics as for anyone else. At least since the high Middle Ages the papacy has been understood as an institution directly created by Jesus Christ in his own lifetime: he willed that his Church should be ruled by the Apostles and their successors, and he gave to Peter, as leader of the apostles, the fullness of spiritual power, the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Peter came to Rome, and there appointed his own successors, whose names are recited to this day in the canon of the Mass - Linus, Cletus, Clement, and so on down to John Paul II. All that the modern Church claims for the pope, his authority in doctrine and his power over institutions, is on this account a simple unfolding of the dominical bestowal of the keys, and the post-resurrection command to Peter to feed Christ's sheep.

We have known for more than a century that the historical underpinning of this account is unfortunately not quite so simple. The Church of Rome during its first two centuries based its claims to precedence not on the Lord's words to Peter, but on the preaching and death in Rome of two apostles, Peter and Paul. The commission in Matthew 16:18, Thou art Peter, and upon this Rock I will build my Church, and I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven, is quoted in no Roman source before the time of the Decian persecution, in the middle of the third century, and even then the claims which the Pope of the time tried to base on that quotation were indignantly rejected by the Churches of Africa to whom he was addressing himself.

And indeed, the very roots of what may be called the foundation myth of the papacy are themselves uncomfortably complicated. The Church established itself in Rome some time in the AD 40s: we now know that for the best part of the century that followed, there was nothing and nobody in Rome who could recognisably be called a pope. Christianity in Rome evolved out of the Roman synagogues, and to begin with it was not so much a single Church as a constellation of independent churches, meeting in the houses of wealthy converts or in hired halls and public baths, without any central ruler or bishop. The Roman synagogues - there were 14 of them in the first century - unlike the synagogues in other great Mediterranean cities like Antioch . . . were all independent, with no central organisation or single president, and to begin with at least, the churches of Rome also functioned independently. Many of them were in any case ethnic or regional churches, groups of Syrian, Greek, Asian residents in Rome, using their own languages, following the customs of the Christian communities back in their home regions.

Elsewhere in the first century, episcopacy emerged as the dominant form of church order - the rule of each church by a single senior presbyter who took the lead in ordinations and the celebration of the Eucharist, and who was the focus of unity for all the Christians of a city or region. But Rome, probably because of the complexity and ethnic and cultural diversity of the Christian communities of the capital of the world, was very slow to adopt this system.

In the conventional accounts of the history of the papacy, the letter of Clement, written from Rome to the Church at Corinth around the year AD 95, is often thought of as the first papal encyclical, attributed to Pope Clement, Peter's third successor and the last pope personally known to the Prince of the Apostles. In fact, the letter is written on behalf of the whole Roman Church, it is unsigned, and the author speaks unequivocally of the elders who rule the Church, in the plural.

EVERYTHING we know about the Church at Rome in its first century or so points in the same direction, to a community which certainly thought of itself as one Church, but which was in practice a loose and often divided federation of widely different communities, each with its own pastors and its own distinctive and often conflicting liturgies, calendars and customs. It was in fact the threat of heresy within this seething diversity, and the Roman need to impose some sort of unity and coherence on the Church in the city, that led to the emergence of the Roman episcopate, and the firming up of the Roman community's pride in the life and death among them of the two greatest apostles, into a succession narrative. By the 160s the graves of Peter and Paul had shrines built over them and were being shown to Christian visitors to Rome: by the early third century the bishops of Rome were being buried in a single crypt in what is now the catacomb of San Callisto, as a sort of visible family tree stretching back, it was believed, to the apostolic age. But all this was a construct, tidying the mess and confusion of real history into a neat and orderly relay race, with the baton of apostolic authority being handed from one bishop to another.

This symbolic rearrangement of the past is of course an unavoidable aspect of all human attempts to make sense of the present, and it is a notable feature of the New Testament itself. My point is not that any of this disproves the claims we would wish to make for the papacy: it is perfectly open to us to read this process as providential. Nevertheless, the recognition that the emergence of the bishops of Rome was the result not straightforwardly of a direct and immediate act of the incarnate word of God in his own lifetime, but rather of a long and uncertain evolutionary process, which might conceivably have run a different way, surely rules out any absolutist understanding of the nature of papal authority.

From its earliest appearance, the papacy has been preoccupied with issues of unity and uniformity, the imposition of Roman order on regional diversity - and from the beginning it has been resisted, and been rebuked by other Christian leaders who were able to appeal to its own remote past against its more authoritarian and tidy-minded present.

In the face of history, then, we cannot quite subscribe to the notion of the papacy as timeless, founded by Our Lord's command in the beginning and maintaining through all the vicissitudes of time the constant exercise of that divine mandate. But another version of that story can be told, less direct, in which the history of the papacy is the history of the steady unfolding of its inner reality. In this version of papal theory, full weight is given to the transformations of history. What remains constant, however, is the inner reality of the papacy, a mission revealed in the biblical sources and the early history of the Church, and steadily rendered clearer and clearer in its long march through time.

Some version of this account, it seems to me, is fundamental to any Catholic belief in papal authority. As it stands, however, it is probably far too tidy. The process by which the papacy has emerged as the administrative and ideological centre of the largest wing of a divided Christendom has been by no means straightforward and progressive. The later doctrinal centrality of Rome for Catholics cannot, I think, be read out of the history of the formative stages of Christian doctrine: the papacy did indeed play a decisive role at the Council of Chalcedon, when the so-called Tome of Pope Leo the Great provided the council with the essential formulation of Catholic incarnational teaching. But this was a highly unrepresentative event: for the most part the early papacy contributed nothing whatever to the shaping of fundamental Christian teaching, and the creative centres of the Church lay elsewhere, in the East.

Nor has the institutional unfolding of the papacy been a story of steady upwards evolution. Papal claims reached their height in the central Middle Ages. Bernard of Clairvaux told his pupil, Pope Eugenius III: In truth there are other doorkeepers of heaven and shepherds of flocks: but you are more glorious than all of these . . . . They have flocks assigned to them, one to each: to you all are assigned, a single flock to a single shepherd. You are called to the fullness of power.

Bernard made these lofty claims in a treatise designed to teach the pope the obligation to serve others, and to reform himself and the papacy, but the same claims were turned by the popes into a platform from which to dominate and cow the world, as Boniface VIII attempted to do in the Bull Unam Sanctam, in which he declared that it was altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff. Everything the modern papacy claims, and very much more, such as the right to appoint emperors and to depose kings, was then claimed for the popes. Yet in the centuries that followed, the reality of papal authority declined drastically, not simply in the countries of the Reformation, but among all the Catholic powers of Europe. The Baroque papacy inhabited buildings which spelled out a megalomaniac vision of papal dominance, but the reality was that the popes were increasingly reduced to ceremonial figures, preoccupied with preserving their interests in Italy, increasingly marginalised in the councils of kings.

The modern papacy, therefore, is not the product of a steady evolution from simple beginnings, the natural growth of some essential acorn into a mighty oak. In some real sense it is, rather, the result of an historical catastrophe, the French Revolution. The revolution swept away the Catholic kings who had appointed bishops and ruled Churches. The hostile secular states which emerged to replace them in nineteenth-century Europe attempted to control the influence of the Church in public life, but were glad to leave its internal arrangements to the pope.

If one had to single out the most crucial and important practical power possessed by the modern popes, it would certainly be the right to appoint the bishops of the world. It is salutary to remind ourselves that the popes did not possess this power in canon law till 1917, and that as a matter of fact the practice of direct papal appointment of bishops did not become general until well towards the end of the nineteenth century, largely as a result of the decision of the anti-papal kings of Italy not to exercise this traditional prerogative of the secular ruler. Most of the bishops appointed by the pope before then were in fact appointed by the pope functioning not as universal pastor, but as primate of Italy or as secular ruler of the papal states. The 1917 Code of Canon Law, itself, which lies at the heart of papal domination of the modern Church, owed at least as much to the Napoleonic Code as to holy Scripture, and most of the actual exercise of papal authority in the modern Church is rooted in quite specific aspects of the institutional and intellectual history of the last 200 years.

Or maybe not, I don't know. In the end I think the point is the quote wars achieve nothing. Primacy should be the primacy of love as St. Ignatius spoke of. Primacy of honor should not be viewed as a hollow or useless status, but as something of true spiritual authority. In other words not something people must follow, but would choose to follow. JPII I think was a good example of this. It was not his authority as written in dogmatic constitutions that I think people respected and desired to follow in example of, but his life and his witness to holiness and desire to serve the will of Christ. A primacy of love.

a final arbitrator vested with divine authority (embodied in the Church of Rome and its bishop) is necessary for the common life of the Church.

Somehow, but I don't know how, there has to be a way of looking at the pre schism state of the church to find a way they could officially relate to one another again.