The Pope, The Patriarch, and True Ecumenism

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Saturday, May 24, 2014

The Pope, The Patriarch, and True Ecumenism

Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras attend a prayer service in Jerusalem in January 1964. Pope Francis will meet Patriarch Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew May 25 during his three-day visit to the Holy Land. The ecumenical session will mark the 50th anniversary of a 1964 meeting between Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras. (CNS photo/Giancarlo Giuliani, Catholic Press Photo)

The Pope, The Patriarch, and True Ecumenism | Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille | Catholic World Report

Seven things that true ecumenism, which is rooted in the prayer and desire of Jesus Christ, is not

With the pope of Rome and the patriarch of Constantinople going to Jerusalem this weekend, there is naturally a great deal of conversation and consideration of where Orthodox and Catholic Christians have been and where we might be going. I have discussed some of this elsewhere. Here, however, I want to do something different, following a theological method beloved of many in the Christian East, as well as many Western mystics (St. John of the Cross comes to mind), namely the apophatic or “negative” way. I wish, in other words, to explain what true ecumenism is not.

Let us thus proceed by ruling out seven false forms, or understandings, of Christian unity.

1) Ecumenism is not a Pan-Heresy: Some ignorant and hostile Orthodox bloggers are endlessly recycling the fact-free fantasy of “ecumenism as a pan-heresy.” This ludicrous notion—for which nobody anywhere has ever provided the slightest shred of logical and credible evidence—is used to stir up fear that if Catholics and Orthodox draw closer to one another, it can only mean that one side has destroyed all its truth-claims and given in to the other side. Ecumenism is presented as a zero-sum game; in the words of certain economists: you win, I lose.

If this were, indeed, what the ecumenical task involved, then we could have accomplished it generations, even many centuries, ago: I set a list of demands, and you simply give in to every one completely while, perhaps, scrupling in the mildest possible way about one or two of the least significant—just as the (largely Orthodox) Serbs did before the (largely Catholic) Habsburgs in July 1914.

But the fact that we are still divided should give the lie to this notion: no Catholic or Orthodox hierarch (or theologian) wants to see the other surrendered and lying prostrate before its own side, which is precisely why the search for unity takes so long and is so utterly painstaking. We do not seek the capitulation of the other and the diminution of the truth (the way of the world) but the conversion of ourselves to Christ (the kenotic way), and in so doing we shall discover the unity he demands (about which see #7 below).