Archbishop Elias on Double Communion (Final Part)

This morning, I received an e-mail informing me of a recent press release (dated July 5, 2008) from the Ecumenical Patriarchate which reports that Patriarch Bartholomew I never made any statement regarding the possibility “double union” for Eastern Catholics. It also reaffirms the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s position that “full union in faith is a prerequisite for sacramental communion”.

Overeducated readers can check out the original Greek here. If you poor things only read English and Russian, you’ll have to be content with the translations here.  And of course, don’t miss out on the discussions starting up over at Koinonia and Eirenikon.

Archbishop Elias was not available for comment, so I’m going ahead with this final excerpt from his book.  As usual, it has been minimally edited for grammar and syntax.

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Archbishop Elias Zoghby, We Are All Schismatics, trans. Philip Khairallah (Newton, MA: Educational Services, 1996), pp. 107-111.

The People of God Want Unity and Try to Live It

We do not pretend that the people of God living in the East need a long period of psychological and spiritual preparation to accept a renewal of ecclesial communion.  Catholics and Orthodox among us are related to one another, and frequently live under the same roof.  They participate in the same Divine Office, they share the same Divine Liturgy, and they have the same customs.  They show no difficulties in intermarrying among themselves and receiving the nuptial benediction from the Church in which they are married, whether Orthodox or Catholic.

We often see bishops and priests of the two Churches participating together in funeral services on the invitation of the family of the deceased, who thus seek consolation in seeing the two bishops, side by side, partaking in their sadness.  If the bishops did not oppose it, the Orthodox and Catholics would receive Holy Communion from one or the other of the Churches.

Those of the people of God who are not nourished by political or confessional interests are better preapred to return to communion than the senior clergy, who are held back by juridical and administrative scruples which are not shared by the faithful.  As a matter of fact, the hearts of the faithful beat with joy when, following Vatican II, they believed—for the right or wrong reasons—that Christian unity was already very close.  How greatly they are deceived today when they see that the years are passing, and unity still remains a long-term goal.  The people of God are certainly bothered by a communion that can only happen at the price of another schism, such as has occurred with the creation of Uniatism.  A return to communion not accompanied by a new split can only be a source of joy for them.  They wait with impatience.  We see evidence of this in the great number of faithful from all confessions who come to the common celebrations and ceremonies during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

That unity needs a certain preparation is indeed understandable.  As Archbishop P. K. Medawar, the former Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarchal Vicar in Egypt, recently wrote: “Finding a solution to the problems that can arise in case of reunification in the Patriarchate of Antioch requires study of the political and parliamentary problems of each community, the question of marriage and the civil laws, Church properties, and other things that the two branches of the Church of Antioch must settle between themselves and other interested countries.”  However, we do not need an indefinite time to arrive at answers to the above.

No.  Our Catholic people do not need a long preparation to unite themselves to their Orthodox brothers.  They already feel themselves to be very close to them religiously, liturgically and socially—much closer to them than to their Latin brothers.  The people of God, here and elsewhere, are and always will be united, as they were during the era of the Council of Florence where, according to Cardinal Willebrands, “the Council had considered the Oriental faithful as being members of the same Church.  What was still needed was unity among the hierarchs.”

Let it please God that we, the members of the hierarchy, need more psychological preparation than our do our people for renewing our links with our brothers in Jesus Christ.

It was not so long ago that I blessed a marriage between a Catholic and an Orthodox.  During the service, the reader was chanting the Epistle of St. Paul to the Ephesians, where the Apostle compared the union of two Christians in matrimony to that of Christ and the Church.  I found myself faced with this painful paradox: How can two faithful, who this morning communicated the Eucharistic Body of Christ and who from now on will be as intimately united as Christ is to His Church, how can they continue living together but in schism?  Schism means a rupture of communion, and yet they are supposed to be one as Christ is in His Church.  To marry them, it was necessary to remove a canonical impediment which was an obstacle to their union, and yet the schism, an even greater obstacle, remained.

For how long can we accept such equivocation, we who have chosen to be the doctors and the leaders in Jesus Christ?

In All Conscience: No to Schism

It is regrettable that the Roman Curia reacted so negatively to my project of double communion.  They could have made it an object of profound study and found a way to end the suffering of these Eastern Catholic Churches, allowing them to settle a situation about which they have done nothing but complain since their creation.

In the third point of the reply presented by these three Roman Congregations, after having recommended  that these Churches “progressively reconstitute, wherever this is possible, the groundwork of fraternal existence and collaboration”, then stated that the time is not yet suitable to consider “more ambitious projects”.  Ambitious, such as the project of double communion?  Evidently, it is more ambitious than the project of communion between Rome and Orthodoxy.  The Roman Church thus, has not yet considered the unity project.  To envisage, according to the Larousse dictionary, means to “consider in spirit”.  Thus the Church of Rome, as of April 9, 1976, the date of the report of the three Congregations, has not yet considered in spirit either a project of communion or ways leading to effective intercommunion.

Why then all these talks and these communications coming from Rome and from high Orthodox authorities, leading the Christian people to believe that since Vatican II only one short step was needed to change the almost-perfect communion between sister Churches into a perfect communion?  Why then these commissions and sub-commissions if unity, or even a local and modest experience of unity such as envisioned in the project of double communion, is nothing but an ambitious project?  Why ambitious?  Probably because it will require an infinite amount of time to arrive at an understanding of “the privileges of the Holy See of Rome, their origins, their nature and their extent”.  These points were brought up by the report of the three Roman Congregations as being the essential elements of any dialogue which, so far, appear to be a stumbling block for any project leading to inter-communion.

These “privileges of the Holy See of Rome” have been elevated to be equal to the great dogmas of the Church but do not interest the People of God and do not constitute, according even to Western theologians, a truth essential to the depositum fidei, nor is it a sufficient reason to perpetuate a disastrous schism.

As for me, I cannot tolerate in good faith this state of things.  In conscience, I call upon the bishops, pastors and masters in Jesus Christ to denounce the vanity of the pretexts that have divided the Church of Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy, and that maintained the canonical rupture between the Eastern Catholic Churches and the Churches of their fathers in the faith who have transmitted ot them the faith in Jesus Christ through their suffering and their martyrs.  I call upon to say “No!” to the schism that can affect several more generations of the faithful.

May my brother bishops, Catholic and Orthodox, permit me to state that they are giving the impression of being comfortably installed in schism without hurry to come out of it.  As for us Uniate Easterners who are at the core of this separation, we have least of all a reason to resign ourselves to the established state of things.

A high dignitary of the Catholic Church belonging to one of the major religious orders of the West, with whom I shared my anguished, asked me: “Why don’t you become Orthodox?”  I answered him: “Why do we Eastern Catholics have to live in schism?” We have been implicated by the Orthodox as being in schism created by Uniatism, a schism that has separated us from the Church of our fathers.  I do not want to end my life with another schism, this one personal and in conscience , that will separate me from the Church of Rome, the first among all the Churches.  No, this time I want to be a witness of an inter-communion and a reconciliation between the Roman and Orthodox Churches, both of whom are authentic, apostolic, complementary, faithful to the apostolic teachings and to the doctrines of the Fathers and the Ecumenical Councils.  I want to render witness to one and to the other even though I may have to hurl myself against one or the other.