ABSTRACT
After 50 years of ecumenical endeavour, the late Cardinal Yves Congar said that he had come to ‘the firm conclusion that at the sacramental level, i.e. where the supernatural mystery is expressed in our world, East and West are the same church’.1 Nevertheless, ‘there is every difference between East and West, even in what seems to be held in common or to be identical in substance’.2 If this diversity caused problems even in the first millennium, when East and West were basically in communion, how many more does it cause now when the two sides have developed in faith and life largely without reference to one another for almost 1000 years? In principle, there is so much to favour Catholic-Orthodox dialogue and unity,
but in practice there can seem to be insurmountable obstacles. Perhaps, at root, this dialogue, more than any other, challenges us to embrace and accept otherness, for the faith is the same – scholars assure us of that; it is simply that everything else is different! It is plain that the Orthodox fear that any union with the Catholic Church at present would crush their distinctiveness. What these two great Churches need, to underpin dialogue, is simply love and trust. In fact, theirs is a very Trinitarian lesson to learn, for in the Trinity all is held in common except the utter difference of the Persons as Father, Son and Spirit. As their two Churches try to draw closer together, Catholics and Orthodox find themselves in the school of the life of communion – the greatest mystery of all. Words such as the following seem to cut through all the complications with
wonderful ease:
These words were written to a young Orthodox as long ago as 1926 by the Apostolic Visitor in Sofia, Bulgaria – the future Pope John XXIII. Years later, having just announced his desire to hold a Council, Pope John had all the separated
brethren in mind when he said, on 30 January 1959, to the clergy of Rome: ‘We do not intend to set up a tribunal to judge the past. We do not want to prove who was right and who was wrong. Responsibility was divided. All we want to say is: “Let us come together. Let us make an end of our divisions”.’4 I would like to consider the history of Catholics and Orthodox a little, in order
to learn something of living with complementarity and dealing with difference.5 In 1994, reviewing preparations for the new millennium, Pope John Paul II reiterated the hope for unity by that date that he first voiced in 1979. ‘In view of the year 2000’, he said, reconciliation between the Catholic West and the Orthodox East is ‘perhaps the greatest task’.6 Then in 1995, in his heartfelt Apostolic Letter, Orientale lumen, which brimmed with love and respect for the Orthodox Church and tradition, Pope John Paul said: ‘A particularly close link already binds us. We have almost everything in common’.7 Shortly beforehand, his Lenten retreat had centred on the rich spirituality of the Eastern Churches. At the end of it, he had said: ‘We truly wish to draw closer and closer to our Eastern, Byzantine and Russian brethren, because we are deeply convinced that the same faith unites us.’8 And yet, all is different....
