Archbishop Elias on Double Communion (Part I)
July 2, 2008
Since the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I, has recently spoken of the possibility of “dual unity” for Eastern Catholic Churches—that is, that these Churches would restore communion with the See of Constantinople without breaking away from the See of Rome—I am posting a chapter from the book We Are All Schismatics (in French, Tous Schismatiques?) by the late Melkite Catholic Archbishop Elias (Zoghby) of Baalbek, Lebanon. Archbishop Elias made a similar proposal for dual communion as early as 1975, though not without criticism both from Rome and the Orthodox Churches.
Since the selection is rather long (and meandering, as is typical of his style), I will divide it into several parts. I have edited the translation minimally for grammar. Your comments are of course welcome; I ask that readers bear in mind that each excerpt is part of a larger chapter and thus a segment of a longer argument.
Archbishop Elias Zoghby, We Are All Schismatics, trans. Philip Khairallah (Newton, MA: Educational Services, 1996), pp. 90-92.
CHAPTER 14: THE PROJECT OF DOUBLE COMMUNION
I love the Roman Catholic Church because it is the Mother Church of most of the Christians in the West, and is also the Church of the missionaries. It has preached, and still preaches the Gospel to the pagan world. Thanks to it, the name of Jesus Christ is known and glorified today in many of the countries of Africa and Asia.
I love the Roman Catholic Church because of what I have personally received from its missionaries and particularly for what I have received from my teachers, the White Fathers of Africa. These missionaries wanted to give us what they knew best, and for which they sacrificed everything. They could have initiated us further into our proper patrimony, but they did not know anythign about it at the time. Whatever else may happen, we must never forget their models of virtue and sanctity that has profoundly marked our life and our apostolate.
I love the Roman Catholic Church because all the Popes of Rome who have succeeded one another since my childhood were, above and beyond all, men of God. If they have committed serious errors in their relations with the Eastern Churches, it was not due to bad will on their part but because of the inheritance that they had received—a post-Tridentine conception of their primatial role in the Church.
I love the Roman Catholic Church because it has placed in the service of its missions a wonderful organization, sometimes too centralizing and too constricting, but nevertheless doing good, as long as it did not overrun the boundaries of its proper Patriarchate of the West.
I love the Roman Catholic Church because it is the cathedra presiding in charity, having been sanctified by the blood of the Apostles Peter and Paul.
I Also Love the Orthodox Church
I love the Orthodox Church (including the Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Orthodox Churches) because it is through it that our fathers have transmitted to us the faith of the Holy Apostles Peter, Paul, Mark, James and others throughout long centuries of martyrdom and daily persecutions.
I love the Orthodox Church because it is the origin and source of a theological, liturgical, ascetical and monastic patrimony without equal, elaborated and lived by throughout the centuries, and in which Eastern Christianity as well as its Western counterpart has developed and continues to develop today.
I love the Orthodox Church because it is poor according to the world and carries its treasures in a clay vessel, in the image of Jesus Christ who carried His divinity in fragile flesh.
I love the Orthodox Church because it has been persecuted, and still is persecuted today, by enemies of the faith. In its own territory, it does not even have a stone to lay down upon, having been mutilated by its own proper sister of the West. Like Rachel, she still cries for her children and deplores, with Pope Paul VI, “the confusion that has been introduced into her ranks”, and, with Patriarch Ignatius of Antioch, “the wounds dug deep into her heart by the Catholic Church during the past three centuries”.
I love the Orthodox Church because, like Jesus Christ, it is indulgent and human. Less juridical and more attuned to the weakness of men, it always looks for a human solution to its problems with its understanding and economia.
In brief, I love with the same love the Roman Church, just as Patriarchs Athenagoras and Demetrius I and their colleagues have loved her. I love the Orthodox Churches in the same way as have recent popes such as John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II. I love them with the same love that Jesus Christ had, who recognizes in them pieces of His dismantled Body.
The Roman Church and the Chalcedonian Orthodox Churches had lived Christian unity for a millennium. Together, they have held ecumenical councils and have defined the fundamentals of Christian doctrine, in spite of the rivalries and natural conflicts that came between them, including intermittent separations due to human disagreements. The non-Chalcedonian Churches have rejoined them, following implicit and explicit agreements on the identity of their doctrine in spite of the diversity of their formulations.
Thus, nothing has changed in Orthodoxy since the first millennium. And that which the Roman Church has introduced into its traditions since the Schism does not belong to the essential deposit of the revealed faith and concerns only the Roman Church. Not having been ratified by an ecumenical council comprising the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, these doctrines are not definitive and can be reviewed and reformulated by the reunited Churches. Thus, nothing essential forbids the reestablishment of communion between the Roman Church and Orthodoxy, both Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian.
Ecclesial communion continued during the first millennium in spite of ruptures occurring within the one and undivided Church. The door was kept open, the door to the return of communion. Even after the Schism, acts of communion were carried out between the separated Churches without causing protestations from either side.* It was only the creation of Uniatism that put an end to these acts of communion.
[To be continued.]
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* On this subject, see Metropolitan Kallistos’ fascinating essay, “Orthodox and Catholics in the Seventeenth Century: Schism or Intercommunion?”, in Schism, Heresy and Protest (Studies in Church History, Vol. XI), Ed. Derek Baker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 259-276. [--- W.H.]
