Position of Ecumenists in the Church

 

Metropolitan Cyprian: “The Position of Ecumenists in the Church”

 

The position of ecumenists in the Church should be viewed in terms of the question of heretics who have not yet been brought to trial in the Church.

In other words, the members of the Body of the Church can be ailing, that is, they can be in error regarding the Faith. But even as ailing members, they are not dead, and continue to belong institutionally to the Body.

The mortification of ailing members and their decisive alienation from the Body occur in two ways: either through schism, in which case they are cut off by themselves from the Body and form a clearly distinct heretical community; or through a synodal verdict, in which case, following a specific procedure, they are expelled from the Church as being incurably ill.

In the first case, the innovating ecumenists, insofar as they have not yet been brought to trial, are ailing members of the Church. The healthy part of the Church, however, should not have communion with them, but should wall itself off from them.

This rupture of communion, or walling-off, has very concrete goals: that we should not become sick ourselves; that we should make the other members of the Body aware that they should likewise break communion, so as not to become diseased themselves; that we should aid in the repentance and cure of the ailing members with brotherly love; and that we should contribute to the convocation of a competent synodal body of the Church, which would take suitable measures to prevent the disease of heresy from spreading to the entire Body.


- Ορθόδοξη Κατάθεση, April 2001, pp. 18-19. Metropolitan Cyprian of Oropos and Fili, being interviewed by Apostolos Kapsalis. Translation from “Anti-Ecumenism: The Great Challenge for the Orthodox.”

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