The Catholic Orthodox Dialogue: A Catholic Ecumenical and Ecclesiological Perspective

Transcription

1 653878TDR / The Downside ReviewNichols research-article2016 Article The Catholic Orthodox Dialogue: A Catholic Ecumenical and Ecclesiological Perspective The Downside Review 2016, Vol. 134(3) The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav DOI: / tdr.sagepub.com Aidan Nichols Dominican Priory of St. Michael the Archangel, UK Abstract Having distinguished out the various Communions of Oriental Christians which might be covered by the name Orthodox, this article narrates the history of the official dialogue of the Roman Catholic Church with the Chalcedonian Orthodox, asks after the provenance of the theological notions used in that dialogue and concludes with some reflections on the primacy. Keywords dialogue, orthodox, primacy, theology Unitatis redintegratio, the Decree on Ecumenism of the Second Vatican Council, gave preference to dialogue with the separated Eastern Churches when compared with the bodies stemming from the 16th century Reformation in the West, devoting the first half of the third and final chapter of the Decree to the special position of the Eastern churches. This as Catholics must be our starting point, although it should be pointed out that the phrase separated Eastern churches can have one or more of three possible denotations. First, it can refer to the oldest surviving communion to break away from the Great Church, the Nestorian, or, more politely, Assyrian church, which began its independent existence when a significant portion of the patriarchate of Antioch refused to accept the dogmatic outcome of the Council of Ephesus, namely that blessed Mary is the Godbearer, along with the understanding of Christ s person which that title implied. Corresponding author: Aidan Nichols OP, Dominican Priory of St. Michael the Archangel, Blackfriars, Buckingham Road, Cambridge CB3 0DD, UK. aidan.nichols@blackfriarscambridge.org.uk

2 Nichols 89 Expanding subsequently to the south and east notably in India and China that body, which by the later 20th century was reduced to some few hundred thousand faithful, termed itself in its official parlance The Catholicate of the East. 1 Second, the phrase the separated Eastern churches could refer to those communities, linked by a common communion, which broke with the Great Church at the Council of Chalcedon. Vulgarly known as Monophysite, owing to their insistence that there is only one nature, phusis, in Christ after the union in him of divine and human at the Incarnation, such Christians are now to be found in considerable numbers in Egypt, Ethiopia, Armenia, Syria and South India. Like the Assyrians, these Non-Chalcedonian or Pre- Chalcedonian Orthodox churches (to give them the names modern ecumenical etiquette prefers, although the neologism Miaphysite is also acceptable) have considerable 20th century diasporas in areas of Western European colonization and settlement, notably in North and South America and Australia. 2 Third, when it spoke of the special position of the Eastern churches, the Decree on Ecumenism might have had in mind the Eastern Orthodox churches, that is, the Chalcedonian Orthodox as separated from Rome. The Eastern Orthodox are a family of largely national churches, internally differentiated by a multiplicity of often overlapping and sometimes conflicting jurisdictions, which nevertheless share a common faith. 3 That faith is defined negatively by their rejection of the Reunion Council of Florence and positively by their acceptance of the Seven Councils, up to Nicaea II, which they share with Rome, together with a variety of synodal and hierarchical acts and documents whose status is at any rate commonly recognized by them. The Chalcedonian Orthodox separated from Rome are to be found historically in the Balkans, Russia, the Caucasus, excluding Armenia, and the Middle East, although once again political and economic conditions have sometimes favoured their exodus from their traditional homelands to other parts of the world in the course of the 20th century. Additionally, many Orthodox in the United States are former Byzantinerite Catholics who abjured Roman communion in protest against the Latinisation efforts of Irish-American bishops in the 19th century. Finally, the presence of the Orthodox in such countries as Japan and Uganda is the result of modern missionary activity by, respectively, the pre-revolutionary Church of Russia and the Greek Orthodox patriarchate of Alexandria. It is sometimes said that the Eastern Orthodox are Chalcedonian Christians in communion with Constantinople rather than Rome, but this is not really correct as was shown by the short-lived but passionately felt break of communion between Moscow and Constantinople in the 1990s. No one suggested that during that period the Russians ceased to be an Eastern Orthodox church. So which Eastern Christians did the authors of the Second Vatican Council s Decree on Ecumenism have in mind? Without consciously excluding the Assyrian and Non- Chalcedonian Easterners, evidence both internal and external strongly suggests that they intended to focus on the Chalcedonian Orthodox who, after all, owing especially to the large Orthodox constituency in the population of Russia are by far the most numerous group of Christians separated from Rome. Indeed, while the Vatican Secretariat for Christian Unity, whose original remit concerned exclusively non-catholic Western Christians, eventually accepted direct responsibility for relations with the Orthodox, it has never in practice done so for the Non-Chalcedonian Orientals, relations with whom

3 90 The Downside Review 134(3) are mediated by an Austrian-based entity called the Pro Oriente Foundation, the ex officio president of which is the archbishop of Vienna. What reasons does the Decree on Ecumenism give for ascribing pre-eminence to the Orthodox where dialogue with non-catholic Christians is concerned? The decree lists seven reasons in all: first, the apostolic origin of a number of these churches; second, their patrimony of Liturgy, spirituality and jurisprudence, described as a treasury on which the churches of the Latin West have drawn; third, the sufferings they have undergone in defence of the Trinitarian and Christological dogmas shared with the Catholic Church; fourth, their liturgical devotion; fifth, their pietas towards the Mother of God and the saints; sixth, their possession of the sacraments of Order and Eucharist; and seventh, the Christian monasticism which began in the East and there achieved its classical spiritual form. As a consequence of these seven reasons, taken cumulatively, it is imperative, says Unitatis redintegratio, that Catholics understand, venerate, preserve and foster the exceedingly rich liturgical and spiritual heritage of the Eastern Churches, in order faithfully to preserve the fullness of Christian tradition and to bring about reconciliation between Eastern and Western Christians. 4 The remainder of this section of the Decree is a tactful plea for reunion through the recognition, not only theoretical but also practical, of the due autonomy of these churches. For the bishops and experts at the Council were perfectly aware of the problem the next 50 years would amply illustrate, namely, the extreme prickliness of the Orthodox on anything that touches their self-government as autocephalous churches, churches with their own heads and, by extension, anything that smacks of imperialism or even interference by Rome. The Decree uses what is, in terms of theological notes (the degrees of authoritativeness attaching to Church pronouncements), a powerful formula when it introduces its statement on the subject with the words: This sacred Council solemnly declares that the churches of the East have the power to govern themselves according to their own disciplines, since these are better suited to the temperament of their faithful and better adapted to foster the good of souls. 5 Notice, however, that there is an important qualifier which I have left out of this passage precisely so as to draw attention to it now. It is, we hear, by keeping in mind the necessary unity of the whole Church that the extent and nature of this legitimate selfgovernment are to be assessed. Evidently, then, in the minds of the fathers of the Second Vatican Council, the autonomy appropriate to the churches of the Orthodox, should they recover their unity with the see of Rome, is not absolute and unconditional just because it is inappropriate for the good of one part of the Church, one particular church or one group of particular churches such as the Church of Russia, say, or the Church of Greece, to take precedence over the good of the universal Church as such. Some observers of Catholic Orthodox relations would regard this point as by itself probably enough to postpone the reunion of these churches till Doomsday. What then has happened in the 50 years since Unitatis redintegratio was promulgated? 6 Immediately before and also during the Council, considerable confusion attended

4 Nichols 91 the question, Will the Orthodox agree to send observers? This dubiety was caused partly by the tendency of individual autocephalous Orthodox churches to determine their own policy and partly by the frequent intractability of the church-political or even straightforwardly civil-political issues affecting the Orthodox response. After the Council, that same confusion returned to haunt Catholic Orthodox relations. Things got off to a relatively good start. In 1964, contemporaneously with the promulgation of the Decree on Ecumenism, the Third Pan-Orthodox Congress, a global meeting of the heads or representatives of the Orthodox churches, authorized individual churches to initiate contacts aimed at restoring goodwill between Catholics and Orthodox goodwill, be it noted, not ecclesial union. Indeed, the Conference, meeting on Rhodes, warned that what it called a dialogue of charity was a necessary preliminary to even the opening of theological dialogue, so grievous were the wounds, the painful memories, of the past. The chief form that dialogue of charity took was the warm personal relations Pope Paul VI established with Athenagoras, the patriarch of Constantinople: the spirit of their 1964 meeting at Jerusalem was summed up in a much-photographed embrace. Then in 1965, there came the mutual lifting of the anathemas reciprocally pronounced in 1054 on and by the Byzantine patriarch Michael Kerullarios and the papal legate Humbert of Silva Candida, and in 1967 an exchange of visits, Athenagoras to Rome, Paul to Constantinople, the letters passing between them and the speeches made on these occasions subsequently published under the title Tomos agapês, the Tome of Love. 7 In 1975, in the course of celebrations marking the 10th anniversary of the mutual lifting of the anathemas, an envoy of the ecumenical patriarch announced the establishment of an Inter-Orthodox commission responsible for official theological dialogue with the Catholic Church. After the selection of members for a comparable commission from the Catholic side, work could begin, and in 1978, at Rome, a Joint Co-ordinating Group was mandated to decide the method the theological dialogue would follow. This was prudently determined to be a method that would set out from common ground. Thus, while by contrast the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission specifically sought out Church-dividing articles Eucharistic doctrine, the understanding of ordained ministry, the theology of justification, the principles of Christian morality, as its meat and drink this was psychologically feasible because when Anglicans thought of Catholics in the 1970s, they were not filled with barely suppressed rage. In the same decade, the depth and liveliness of Orthodox hostility towards Rome ruled out so high risk a strategy. In the words of the Joint Preparatory Plan produced by the Joint Co-ordinating Group, the dialogue was to begin with the elements that unite the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches specifically, the sacraments in their relation to ecclesiology. 8 That sounded safe enough, and so it proved for a while. In 1980, the two commissions met each other for the first time, at Patmos, where the monks of the monastery of St John the Theologian are guardians of the traditional site of the writing of the Book of the Apocalypse. Some monks, however, found the encounter between the delegates itself an apocalyptic occasion and ran up on the monastery s impressive battlements a flag with the skull and crossbones which bore the legend Orthodoxy or death. Undeterred, the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches went on to produce that decade a trio of documents which carried forward the project. And these are as follows: the Munich statement, the name of which is taken, obviously enough, from the capital of Bavaria, in 1982: its title

5 92 The Downside Review 134(3) is The Mystery of the Church and of the Eucharist in the Light of the Mystery of the Holy Trinity ; then in 1987 the Bari Statement, named after the Italian city on the coast of Apulia where lies the body of St Nicholas of Myra, an enormously popular saint in Orthodoxy: this document is called, more briefly, Faith, Sacraments, and the Unity of the Church ; and finally in 1988 the Valamo Statement, produced in the originally Russian Orthodox monastery of that name in the new site it has occupied since the October Revolution just over the border into Finland: here, the Commission gave its text the wordiest of the three titles, The sacrament of Order in the sacramental structure of the Church with particular reference to the importance of apostolic succession for the sanctification and unity of the People of God. 9 The three texts, whose language of composition is French although official translations into English and Greek were issued by, respectively, the Vatican and the Phanar, are closely inter-related to the point at times where one will cite another. The writing of these documents was indebted to, in particular, two theologian members of the Commission. On the Orthodox side, there was the Greek bishop, formerly lay-theologian and professor at Glasgow and Thessalonica, Metropolitan John of Pergamum, otherwise John Zizioulas. On the Catholic side, there was, not as Co-chairman, like Bishop Zizioulas, but as a highly influential member, the Canadian- French Dominican Jean-Marie Tillard who died in the year The texts present the sacraments of the Church and the apostolic succession within which, for Orthodoxy and Catholicism, those sacraments are celebrated as expressions of the outreach of the Holy Trinity for man s salvation. From a Catholic standpoint, they belong with the ecclesiology of communion, a way of thinking about the Church only sporadically present in the documents of the Second Vatican Council but emerging to greater prominence with the 1985 Extraordinary Synod called by Pope John Paul II so as to evaluate the impact of the Conciliar event. 11 Since 1985, the ecclesiology of communion has been, it would seem, the preferred ecclesiological style of contemporary official Catholicism, although one registers the note of caution sounded by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in its 1992 Letter on Certain Aspects of the Church understood as Communion on which more anon. 12 Speaking positively, it is typical of the ecclesiology of communion to link a doctrine about the Church and her nature as closely as can be to the theology of the Holy Trinity. The Father, Son, and Spirit are the primordial Communion of which the Church is, through Christ, the derivative expression. Typically, such an ecclesiology will consider the Eucharistic synaxis the supreme disclosure, in this respect, of the being of the Church. 13 It is also characteristic of the ecclesiology of communion to balance, in rather a self-conscious way, the Church as one and the Church as many, the Church as universal and the Church as local. 14 Speaking negatively, an ecclesiology of communion this at any rate was the conviction of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Letter just mentioned can give priority to the local church, the church under the individual bishop, in such a way as to run the risk of treating the universal Church as simply a network of such churches (the more provocative term would be federation, but both words are, as it were, degenerate versions of the communion idea), thereby undermining due respect for the unity of the universal Church, since the local church is, it may be said, only the Church by embodying in a given time and place the one universal Church founded by Christ and animated by his Spirit.

6 Nichols 93 The writings of Père Tillard for whom Pentecost is the founding of the total Church in and with the first local church, the church of Jerusalem, were, so he gave the present writer to understand on a visit to Blackfriars Cambridge, chiefly in view in the 1992 Roman intervention. 15 One dicastery of the Pope s Curia was thus investigating the soundness of his theology at the same time as another, the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity (as the erstwhile Secretariat had now become) was championing him as its representative in dialogue with the Orthodox. This state of affairs was reflected in the public disagreement about the relative importance to be given to the universal Church and the local church between the two curial cardinals most closely involved, Joseph Ratzinger, for the Doctrine Congregation, and Walter Kasper, for the Unity Council. 16 In the Catholic Orthodox discussions, judging by the trio of texts, Munich Bari Valamo, the temptation unduly to majorise the local church does not seem to have been a serious problem. That, no doubt, is partly because the role of the patriarchal principle in Orthodoxy obliged the authors to give adequate weight to that level of the Church s life and activity which falls halfway between the universal Church on the one hand and the local church on the other: the level of what they called, in a not especially felicitous phrase, the regional Church. It remains true that in this general aspect of the Munich, Bari and Valamo accords the ecclesiology of communion as a Trinitarian theology, eucharistically focussed and concerned with the Church as one and many we can (or so I surmise) detect the hand of Tillard. We see the hand of Metropolitan John, the other principal theological architect of these documents, in another outstanding feature of the texts. And this is the way they understand the apostolic succession, or, more widely, the apostolicity of the Church, as actualized in the sacred Liturgy. Like the trio of documents, John Zizioulas thinks of the Liturgy in two manners: both as the recreation of the worshipping life of the original apostles gathered round Christ and as the anticipation of the worship of heaven in the Last Age as the 24 elders the 12 apostles with their Israelite predecessors under the Old Covenant cast down their crowns in loving homage before the throne of God and of the Lamb. This combined appeal to the Church s origin and the Church s goal to ecclesial protology and ecclesial eschatology is central to the work of Zizioulas as is the notion that the being of the Trinitarian relations, relational being, is reproduced on a human scale in the life of believers as co-worshippers at the Eucharist: in the English title of his most influential book, Being as Communion. 17 There are, however, in Zizioulas system or vision certain anomalies, when compared with the normal presuppositions of Orthodox thought. His refusal to entertain a theology of divine being, the divine ousia, as distinct from the communion of persons, lies behind, arguably, what could be considered an exaggerated emphasis on inner relations in the Church, somewhat at the expense of the activities her new being prompts, notably in mission and the transformation of culture. 18 Again, his treatment of the Church as nonhypostatic yet co-constitutive of the corporate personality of Christ (in contrast to a view of the Church which makes her in her own right a corporate personality who is Christ s vis-à-vis, his Bride) makes it impossible for him to allow the Mother of God her status as the Church s archetype or icon. 19 Perhaps, this is one reason why John Paul II s appeal for the Catholic Orthodox dialogue to incorporate the rich common patrimony of Marian doctrine and devotion, not least in connexion with ecclesiology, fell on deaf ears. 20

7 94 The Downside Review 134(3) More widely, however, insofar as we have here an effort of tying the Catholic Orthodox dialogue to one specific theology or rather two theologies at their points of overlap obvious dangers of what we can call incomplete representativeness arise. In the Orthodox Lutheran dialogues, for example, the Orthodox resisted the attempt to introduce as the lingua franca of agreed statements eucharistic ecclesiology, an earlier version of the ecclesiology of communion, on the ground that Orthodox theology does not recognize any one individual conceptual scheme as the key to the mystery of the Church. 21 A parallel point from the Catholic side would be to note the more frequent incidence in the Latin church of a so-called universalist ecclesiology, usually taken as the polar opposite to an ecclesiology of communion, since it treats the Church as a unity of which the local churches are portions. Such a universalist ecclesiology is still alive and flourishing, albeit alongside an ecclesiology of communion, in the documents of the Second Vatican Council. 22 Still, from a Catholic standpoint, there is in these texts much to inspire and edify, little to disturb. I identify what I think are the most useful elements in their doctrine in the exposition of them I offer in Rome and the Eastern Churches. 23 They are, frankly, too numerous to reiterate here a very good sign, of course. At one point, it is true, in the Bari document (p. 4) a corner of the curtain is briefly lifted to show some of the worrying disputes that went on behind the scenes. That is when it is suggested, for the first time in Christian history so far as I know, although perhaps it came up in the quarrels of Franks and Byzantines in 9th century Bulgaria, that the Latin church s frequent reversal of the normal patristic order of the two post-baptismal sacraments of initiation (Confirmation followed by First Eucharist) could amount to a doctrinal difference from the East of a Church-dividing kind. There is, however, little to prepare us here for the difficulties which, after Valamo, derailed the ecumenical project as mapped out by the Joint Co-ordinating Group in the years That the situation in the Balkans and Eastern Europe might be a powder-keg had already been hinted by the fuss in 1985, delaying the production of the Bari document, over a display of Macedonian icons in the Vatican an exhibition regarded by the Church of Greece as a coded overture from Rome to the Orthodox Church of Macedonia which had declared its autocephaly in the wake of the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. Far more important, however, was the re-emergence in the later 1980s of the so-called Greek Catholic Church in Transylvania and, more especially, the Western Ukraine, following on the liberalization of the Soviet Union. Permitting Catholics of the Eastern rite to register their congregations in the Ukraine was part and parcel of Mr Gorbachev s perestroika. The Orthodox already had principled objections to the existing Catholic Eastern churches, but these unlikely resurrections induced a crisis of proportions unparalleled since the Tomos agapês. Not surprisingly, work on the expected fourth document of the Commission, which was to consider the consequences for authority in the Church of her Trinity-grounded sacramental structure, was now shelved and replaced by work on what became the 1993 Balamand Statement, named for a Lebanese monastery (a former Benedictine abbey from the Crusader period) in the Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch. Entitled Uniatism, Method of Union of the Past and the Present Search for Full Communion, 24 this text had the unfortunate fate of seeming to please almost no one, creating a remarkable united front between Eastern Catholics and more rigorous

8 Nichols 95 Orthodox, both of which groups rejected it, albeit for diametrically opposed reasons: the Eastern Catholics because it implied they should never have existed in the first place, the more rigorous Orthodox because while saying, Never again, it did not in fact call on Rome to present such Catholics with the option of either entry into the Latin rite or return to Orthodoxy. The editors of a 1996 American collection of the Commission s documents, amplified by some statements of the national Catholic Orthodox consultation in the United States, made a virtue out of necessity, considering that the crisis over Uniatism could bring a note of realism to the work or at least could usefully show how fragile ecumenical dialogue can be if it is not rooted in the actual life and experience of the churches. 25 Despite the passions aroused on both sides, the Dialogue in fact survived so as to produce eventually, but not till 2007 its fourth and last document so far. And this is the Ravenna Statement achieved, of course, in the city of the exarchs of the East Roman emperors in Italy and bearing the title The Ecclesiological and Canonical Consequences of the Sacramental Nature of the Church Ecclesial Communion, Conciliarity and Authority. 26 Its key statements are, I believe, twofold, one more general and one more specific. The more general one asserts that Primacy and conciliarity [the co-responsibility for communion of those who are not, in a given context, in a primatial role] are mutually inter-dependent. That is why primacy at the different levels of the life of the Church, local, regional and universal, must always be considered in the context of conciliarity, and conciliarity likewise in the context of primacy. (p. 43) The more specific statement I would single out one affirms that in the canonical order of the ancient Church which was recognised by all in the era of the undivided Church, Rome, as the Church that presides in love according to the phrase of St Ignatius of Antioch, occupied the first place in the taxis [the ranking of sees], such that the bishop of Rome was therefore the protos [the first] among the patriarchs (pp. 40, 41). The question thus arises, as the authors formulate it: What is the specific function of the bishop of the first see in an ecclesiology of communion? (p. 45) In a leaked document from the meeting of the Joint Co-ordinating Committee at Aghios Nikolaos in Crete in the autumn of 2008, we learned that the topic of the next stage in the Dialogue is to be indeed The Role of the Bishop of Rome in the Communion of the Church in the First Millennium, a decision which explains the rather rough reception accorded to the delegates when they arrived at Paphos on Cyprus a year later so as to discuss a draft document that is chiefly historical and, so far as agreement on interpretation allows, factual, in character. Even more contentious, no doubt, will be its still unborn sister, on the primacy in the second millennium. It remains to be seen, then, what will emerge. Some very general comments may, however, already be made. First, a purely honorific universal primacy is ecclesially pointless. Second, a universal primacy exercised after the fashion of a patriarch in his own patriarchate entails an ecclesiological category

9 96 The Downside Review 134(3) mistake. The question, accordingly, is how to draw the line that will give the right outline for the office of the bishop of Rome in the Church. Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia, at the Heythrop College, London, conference in commemoration of the 15th anniversary of the papal letter Orientale Lumen, spoke helpfully in this connexion of weaving the universal primacy into the manner of functioning of the regional primacies of the patriarchs and their equivalents. Taking up this cue, for what it is worth, the present writer would envisage a major reform of the Roman curia, distinguishing clearly between, on the one hand, offices concerning themselves with the dioceses of the Latin church (the Pope s own patriarchate whether that specific term be used or not) and, on the other hand, offices at the service of the universal primacy. The latter offices should be subordinate to a council consisting of the apocrisaries (permanent envoys) of the Eastern churches together with representatives of the heads of the regional assemblies of the national conferences of Latin bishops, under the presidency of an apostolic secretary, that is, a more appropriately re-named pontifical Secretary of State. The charism of discernment of the Pope (consulting, in moral freedom, the patriarchs and others) would remain, however, the basis for final judgment in disputed questions. And so the neuralgic point of this Dialogue has been reached, though in circumstances rather more favourable than could have been expected some years ago. It is a remarkable thing that the publishing house of the Moscow Patriarchate produced in 2009 a collection of the writings of Pope Benedict XVI, shortly to be followed up (though this is less surprising) by the publication at the hands of the Libreria Editrice Vaticana of a collection of the writings of Patriarch Kirill. So we may make some advance in the dialogue of doctrine. But, as Metropolitan Georges Khodr of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch once remarked, We are always behind in the dialogue of love. 27 Notes 1. There is what may be found a convenient overview in Aidan Nichols OP, Rome and the Eastern Churches: A Study in Schism, 2nd ed. (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 2010), pp Nichols OP, Rome and the Eastern Churches, pp The classic study in English remains Timothy Ware [Bishop Kallistos], The Orthodox Church, 3rd ed., Revised ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2015 [1980]). 4. Unitatis redintegratio, p Unitatis redintegratio, p Two useful surveys by Colin Davey takes us from 1963 to 1991: Orthodox Roman Catholic Dialogue, One in Christ, vol. XX (1984), pp ; Colin Davey, Clearing a Path through a Minefield : Orthodox Roman Catholic Dialogue, , 1, One in Christ, vol. XXVI (1990), pp and Clearing a Path through a Minefield : Orthodox Roman Catholic Dialogue, , 2, One in Christ, vol. XXVII (1991), pp Tomos Agapês, Vatican-Phanar, (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1971). 8. So much was made plain in the statement issued by the first plenary meeting of the full Commission at Patmos (transferred to Rhodes), 1980, under the title Plan to set underway the Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. For this text, see John Borelli and John H Erickson, eds, The Quest for Unity: Orthodox and Catholics in Dialogue (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir s Seminary Press and Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 1996), pp

10 Nichols Available in various sources: for example, in the ecumenical journal One in Christ, vol. XIX (1983), pp (Munich); One in Christ, vol. XXIII (1987), pp (Bari); One in Christ, vol. XXIV (1988), pp (Valamo), but also, conveniently, collected together in ed. Paul McPartlan, One in 2000? Towards Catholic-Orthodox Unity (Slough: St Paul, 1993). A more realistic title for this book might have been One in the Third Millennium?. 10. He was actually from the islands of St Pierre et Miquélon, which, though situated in the St Lawrence estuary, are a département of the French State. 11. One of the most successful statements of a Catholic ecclesiology of communion was also one of the earliest: Hâmer Jerome, L Eglise est une communion (Paris: Cerf, 1962). Père Tillard s version, at the point where he had arrived after the Second Vatican Council but prior to the Extraordinary Synod, can be viewed in L Eglise de Dieu est une communion, Irénikon, vol. 53 (1980), pp Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of the Church Understood as Communion, 28 May This is a claim shared by Tillard and Zizioulas: compare, for example, Jean-Marie R Tillard, L Eucharistie Pâques de l Eglise (Paris: Cerf, 1964) with John Zizioulas, The Ecclesiological Presuppositions of the Holy Eucharist, Nicolaus, vol. 19 (1982), pp It should be noted, however, that Zizioulas is not so much interested (by contrast to Tillard) in the universality of the Church across space the Church seen synchronically, as in the universality of the Church over time the Church seen diachronically, from Pentecost to Eschaton. The difference this makes, when juxtaposed with a Western ecclesiology more interested in Church governance, is suggested in a comparison of Zizioulas with the Jesuit theologian-cardinal Henri de Lubac in Paul McPartlan, Eucharist and Church: The Contribution of Henri de Lubac, The Month, vol. 21 (1988), pp , and especially at pp See more widely the same author s The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993). 15. Tillard had set out his fully developed thinking in Eglise d églises. L ecclésiologie de communion (Paris: Cerf, 1987). On his high doctrine of the local church, see Christopher Ruddy, The Local Church: Tillard and the Future of Catholic Ecclesiology (New York: Crossroads, 2006). 16. Walter Kasper, On the Church, America, April 2001, pp. 8 13; Joseph Ratzinger, The Local Church and the Universal Church: A Response to Walter Kasper, America, 19 November 2001, pp John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir s Seminary Press, 1985). Unlike Tillard, Zizioulas writes essays, which eventually he is persuaded to publish as collections (persuaded, in the case of the book just mentioned, by Tillard!). See also his Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church, ed. Paul McPartlan (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2006). 18. For the absence of a theology of divine being considered as distinct from the Trinitarian relations of communion in Zizioulas, see most recently Nigel Rostock, Two Different Gods or Two Types of Unity? A Critical Response to Zizioulas Presentation of The Father as Cause with reference to the Cappadocian Fathers and Augustine, New Blackfriars, vol. 91, no (2010), pp See, conveniently, the summary of his thought in John Zizioulas, The Mystery of the Church in Orthodox Tradition, One in Christ, vol. XXIV (1988), pp For appreciations and critiques, see Douglas H Knight, ed., The Theology of John Zizioulas: Personhood and the Church (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 20. Davey, Clearing a Path through a Minefield : Orthodox Roman Catholic Dialogue, , 1p The reference to the role of women in the Church, including the Mother of the Lord, in the Valamo Statement (p. 32) can hardly be regarded as doing this theme justice.

11 98 The Downside Review 134(3) 21. Risto Saarinen, Faith and Holiness: Lutheran-Orthodox Dialogues (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), p That has especial reference to the Finnish and German dialogues, but Saarinen notes the absence of a developed ecclesiology in the other conversations as well. 22. It might perhaps be argued, however, that the presence of a theology of the episcopal college in the Valamo Statement (p. 26) preserves a vital conceptual link with that other major ecclesiological scheme. 23. Nichols OP, Rome and the Eastern Churches, pp The Balamand document is included in Borelli and Erickson, eds, The Quest for Unity, pp Borelli and Erickson, eds, The Quest for Unity, p The Ravenna document is available in official English translation as Joint International Commission for the Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. Ecclesiological and Canonical Consequences of the Sacramental Nature of the Church. Ecclesial Communion, Conciliarity and Authority in Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity Information Service, vol. 126 (2007), pp Davey, Clearing a Path through a Minefield : Orthodox Roman Catholic Dialogue, , 2, p. 290.