From 2009: What the Holy Synod in Resistance intends by its Resistance to Ecumenism and Papism and How it Views These Objects of Resistance

A Statement of Clarification by Archbishop Chrysostomos of Etna [+2019]

“...[S]peak forth the words of truth and soberness”

(Acts 26:25)

I. Our resistance to ecumenism is not undertaken in a spirit of bigotry

To the secular scientist, nothing is more dangerous than committing what, in statistics, is called a Type I error. When a scientist commits such an error, he wrongly accepts as probable fact an incorrect or false hypothesis. As a con­sequence of this, other false hypotheses and theories, predicated on this error, may enter into the body of scientific knowledge. When this happens, the in­tegrity of that body of knowledge is even further compromised. In this same way, the Church Fathers were careful to protect the consensio Patrum, or the common voice of the Fathers with regard to that body of truth believed by the Orthodox Church in all places, at all times, and by everyone, [1] from false teach­ings and assumptions, or heresy (to use that word properly, and not as a mere denunciatory epithet), lest they distort the path towards salvation and human transformation (union with God by Grace, or theosis) which the unique Truth of Orthodox Christianity entails.

Hence, in rejecting the religious syncretism of the contemporary ecu­menical movement, which posits that ultimate Truth derives not from a sin­gle extant criterion, but from the synthesis of many different relative truths (religious traditions) into a single standard of veracity that will emerge in the future, we imitate the scientist in his quest for a single body of Truth and a single criterion for establishing and preserving it. We Orthodox resisters hold that Christ established a single Church, that it is the repository of Christian Truth, [2] and that its Traditions, the very criteria of Truth, contain, encompass, and perpetuate everything that the Lord gave us, that the Apostles preached, and which the Church Fathers have, through the ages, preserved. [3] To admit into the body of theological knowledge anything drawn from another source, or derived from any other set of traditions, is to adulterate the truth and to cut ourselves off from that sui generis quality that belongs only and exclusively to the fullness of truth, and not to its derivatives: that is, Grace.

It is not out of bigotry towards other religions, then, but in fidelity to the theological and ecclesiological principles which lie at the heart of the Ortho­dox confession, that we reject the notion of multiple sources of truth, a di­versity in traditions, and contemporary ecumenism. Like the secular scientist, we, as spiritual aspirants, wish to preserve an empirical, revealed Truth and to avoid its admixture with false hypotheses or groundless opinions. Moreover, we also consider it our sacred duty to resist any attempt to substitute such “demonic heresies”—to employ once again the vocabulary of the Church Fa­thers—for the Truth. In this resistance, we do not approach other religions (or the ecumenical movement, for that matter) as intrinsically evil or diabolical per se, but directly address, rather, the demonic consequences of extraneous and false teachings that impugn the existence of, or lead one away from, the Orthodox repository of truth. [4]

To any ecumenists—and especially those living in religiously pluralistic societies—who may still misunderstand these sacred responsibilities of ours before the Orthodox Church to constitute a condemnation of other confes­sions and religions, let us underscore what we have said above with the words of a contemporary Greek Saint, Nectarios of Aegina. With singular eloquence, this holy personage explains that, in defending the pristine body of Truth con­tained within Orthodoxy, we have in no manner abandoned love and the hope for Christian unity. It is love which transforms our preservative actions and deeds into an open call to those of all religions to join us therein and, ulti­mately, to embrace the fullness of truth which we so sedulously guard:

Dogmatic differences, reduced to an issue of faith, leave the matter of love free and unchallenged; dogma does not set itself against love.... Christian love is constant, and for this reason the deformed faith of the heterodox cannot change our feeling of love towards them.... Issues of faith must in no way diminish the feeling of love. [5]

The Orthodox in resistance see it as their Evangelical duty to expose re­ligious syncretism (ecumenism and the ecumenical movement) as something that, with whatever misguided goodness of intention, leads one away from the conviction that there is a true Church and an established path to spiritual per­fection. At the same time, as we have seen, the ethos and spirit of the Gospel also draw us into a love of our fellow man, such that our defense of the Truth and our resistance to religious syncretism springs from an all-embracing con­cern for the spiritual estate of all mankind, the salvation of every man and woman, and the abhorrence of any sort of religious bigotry, intolerance, or fanaticism, whether among our Orthodox brethren or those of other religions.

II. The true path towards unity begins in and with the Church

The goal of uniting Christianity, which we consider a sacred and desired one, is accomplished, as we see and interpret the teachings of the Orthodox Church and the witness of the Church Fathers, not by dialogue and by com­promise (that is, by overlooking the theological differences between various confessions and religions); it is fully realized only in the unity of Faith. So it is that Christ—to use a Scriptural passage so often abused and misused by the ecumenical movement—expressed His desire, during His earthly mission, that all Christians “may be one,” [6] avoiding the “scandal” of “division,” as St. John Chrysostomos tells us, in his hermeneutical comments on these words of the Lord, by adhering to the faith of the Apostles; [7] avoiding the “scandal” of “teachers” who are “divided” and not “of the same mind,” as St. Theophylact of Ochrid interprets this same passage; [8] and living in unity “not in order that we may believe,” as St. Augustine affirms, “but because we have believed.” [9]

There is, in the sacred Patristic tradition of the Orthodox Church, not a single word about finding ultimate Truth in dialogue (though dialogue and the search for mutual understanding are salutary things when undertaken in the proper context) or in joint prayer and common worship between the Or­thodox and heterodox. Indeed, there are canonical proscriptions against such activities. Rather, “because we have believed” and are “of the same mind,” we are one in our Orthodox confession, constantly, sincerely, and fervently calling others into the communion of the Church. As the late Father John Roma­nides, Professor of Theology at the University of Thessaloniki, says of Christ’s entreaty for unity among men (with a tone of irony directed at the syncretis­tic “ecclesiology” of the modern ecumenical movement), it “is certainly not a prayer for the union of churches,” [10] but for our unity and oneness in the transformative powers of the Orthodox Faith and our “glorification” by Grace, which Grace, as we have said, is a unique quality of Christianity in its fullness. It is in the “one body” of the Orthodox Church—in the “one faith” and the “one Baptism”—that Christ calls us to oneness: a unity to which we, in turn, invite all men and women, freely and openly. [11] So we teach and so our Fathers have called us to teach.

III. We are not Anti-Roman Catholic in our opposition to Papism and Vatican policies

That our opposition to Papism and Vatican policies is not born of backwa­ter anti-Catholic bigotry is evident in what we have said about religious tolera­tion. Moreover, we have a common heritage with Rome—and, by extension, later with its Protestant scions—in the early Church. The Orthodox Church, to quote one encyclopedic source, “stands in historical continuity with the communities created by the apostles of Jesus.” [12] As members of “Christen­dom’s oldest church,” [13] in the words of another standard source book, we Or­thodox resisters are acutely aware of our roots in the undivided Church, in a Christianity which knew no Papacy and which knew no Vatican, and of our responsibility, as the continuators of that Church, to preserve the principles and traditions handed down to us as the only paths to Christian unity.

A. Papism. It follows, therefore, that what we have said about the threats of ecumenism to the integrity of the Faith which we guard and pre­serve also applies to the Papacy, which introduced into the body of Christian doctrine, from an Orthodox perspective, the false claim that Christ built his Church on the person of St. Peter, and not on his confession of Christ’s Divinity, as well as the many heresies which this innovation spawned (Papal infallibil­ity, the Immaculate Conception, etc.), thus cutting itself off from the Ortho­dox Church. As the late Czech Protestant theologian and veteran ecumenist, Joseph Hromádka, avers,

[i]n the judgment of Eastern Christians, ...the Roman Catholic Church...sepa­rated herself—way back in ancient times—from the one Apostolic Church. It was the Bishops of Rome that had set themselves against the mystical fellow­ship of faith, and followed their particular interests and designs. [14]

It would behoove the Orthodox ecumenists, in their dialogues with the Vati­can, to be open and honest and to acknowledge anti-Papism, not only as a fundamental element of Orthodox ecclesiology, but as one of the chief psycho­logical motives behind the tragic schism between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. It is inarguably, after all, the primary source of the theo­logical differences separating Rome from Orthodoxy.

It is also inarguably the case that the “interests and designs” of the Papacy, and especially with the rise of the Papal Monarchy in the Middle Ages, brought much suffering on the Orthodox world (the Fourth Crusade and the conquest of Constantinople by Latin Crusaders in 1204, which Sir Steven Runciman describes as “one of the most ghastly and tragic incidents in history,” [15] being but one instance that we might cite). While, much to his credit, the late Pope John Paul II apologized for these and other assaults and outrages against the Orthodox, and while we Orthodox—though never to such a degree as in the instance cited— have at times also treated Roman Catholic populations within our dominions improperly, and owe apologies for such lapses, one cannot sim­ply dismiss as mere bigotry the historical sensitivities of Orthodox Christians and the rôle of those sensitivities in reinforcing our opposition to Papism.

The Orthodox East has always harbored, furthermore, serious misgivings about the specifically theological consequences of Papism. The Blessed Archi­mandrite Justin (Popovič) argues that the Papacy “replace[s] the God-Man [Je­sus Christ] with an infallible man,” thereby elevating the Bishop of Rome to a status “greater than [that of] the holy Apostles, the holy Fathers, and the Oecumenical Synods.” [16] In a similar vein, the well-known Russian writer A. Khomiakov observes that, for the Orthodox Church, “[t]he grace of faith is not to be separated from the holiness of life, nor can any single community or any single pastor be acknowledged to be the custodian of the whole faith of the Church.” [17] Such misgivings have been expressed, too, in the theological polemics of the Orthodox Church. In reaction to the installation of a Latin Patriarch in Constantinople, after the city’s conquest by the Crusaders, an anony­mous Byzantine author wrote, “The more we separate ourselves from the Pope, the closer we draw to the most blessed Peter and to God Himself.” [18]

When we resisters express our opposition to the Papacy, then, we embrace a long-established tradition in the Orthodox Church, which views Papism as antithetical to the structure of the Church established by Christ, a deviation from the consensus of the Church Fathers, and a source for the introduction of false doctrine, or heresy, into the body of Christian Truth. This does not constitute an assault against Roman Catholicism or an expression of religious bigotry. Indeed, even in its polemical characterizations of the Pope—as the An­tichrist and the source of evil and discord within the Christian world, to quote such Orthodox luminaries as St. Kosmas Aitolos and the celebrated contem­porary Elder, Archimandrite Philotheos (Zervakos)—the Orthodox Church does not ignore the good intentions and often fine character (notwithstanding many historical examples to the contrary) of some who have occupied the Pa­pal See. It focuses, rather, on the anti-Christian spirit of human “infallibility” and, once more, on the demonic and diabolical consequences that fall upon the Church when its faithful are called to pay heed to anyone but Christ Him­self and to recognize any authority outside the unity in Christ which defines the Orthodox Church.

B. The Vatican. With regard to our resistance to Vatican policy, there are many who, in this age of ecumenism, would argue that our negative stance fails to acknowledge the ecumenical outreach of Rome, which has fostered good relations with the Orthodox Church by recasting the prerogatives of the Papacy in more conciliar language. To these would-be critics, we would re­spond with the words of Pope John Paul II, who on May 25, 1995, in his encyc­lical “Ut Unum Sint” (That They Might Be One), affirmed the role of the Pope as the “visible sign and guarantor” of Christian unity—and this in a document issued by the Vatican as a statement of its continued commitment to ecumen­ism and the ecumenical movement!

It is likewise often said that the Vatican, in its ecumenical outreach, has discarded the claims of Roman Catholicism to an ecclesiastical primacy in Christianity, approaching the Orthodox, as we see in the aforementioned doc­ument, “Ut Unum Sint,” as a “Sister Church” or as “one lung” of the “two lungs of Christianity.” [19] Nonetheless, the ecclesiological definitions set forth in the Second Vatican Council’s decree on the nature of the Church, “Lumen Gentium” (A Light for the Nations)—upheld and ratified by every Pope in the four decades since the close of that council—affirm that the Roman Catho­lic Church is the “one holy catholic and apostolic Church founded by Jesus Christ” and that “the sole Church of Christ which in the Creed we profess to be one, holy, catholic and apostolic” is found concretely and solely “in the [Roman] Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him.”

It is with some justification, therefore, that we Orthodox critics of the ecu­menical movement have accused the Vatican of disingenuousness and hypoc­risy in its ecumenical overtures. At the same time that we are condemned as virtual bigots and ecclesiastical exclusivists for upholding the primacy of the Orthodox Church (and with no mean historical arguments to support our case), the Vatican at one and the same time supports the ecclesiological syncre­tism of the ecumenical movement and maintains that the Papacy is the source of Christian unity and that the Roman Catholic Church is the one Church. It, along with the World Council of Churches, has also endorsed labels such as “official” and “uncanonical” in differentiating, respectively, those Orthodox who support and participate in the ecumenical movement from us Orthodox resisters: a distinction wholly foreign to the ecclesiological life of the Chris­tian East, where “officialdom” is considered spiritually deadly to the Faith and where canonicity rests on adherence to the canonical directives that dictate the observance of Church traditions and the ascent to holiness.

It is, in the final analysis, obvious to any objective observer, whether he agrees or disagrees with our position, that the opposition of us Orthodox re­sisters to Papism and Vatican Policy is based on firm historical precedents and on theological and ecclesiological principles of long-standing importance, dat­ing back to the age of an undivided Christianity. We moderate Orthodox re­sisters, moreover, are by no means motivated by bigotry or prejudice against Roman Catholicism; instead, it would seem, the characterizations and assess­ments of our efforts by our detractors in the ecumenical movement and in the Vatican leave them open to accusations of unfairness and harshness, if not hypocrisy and holding to a double standard.

IV. Old Calendarism is not a mark of Orthodox troglodytism

It is well known that the Holy Synod in Resistance adheres to the Church Calendar (the so-called Old Calendar); that is, to the Paschalion (or date of “Easter,” or in Orthodox nomenclature, “Pascha”) established by the Oecumen­ical Synod of Nicaea, in 325, and to a festal cycle determined by the Julian Calendar. This Calendar was everywhere used by the Orthodox Church until the early twentieth century, when some local Orthodox Churches adopted the Gregorian Calendar, originally imposed on Western Christians by Pope Gre­gory XIII in the Papal Bull “Inter Gravissimas” (Among the Most Serious—a title taken from the first words of the initial sentence of the Bull), issued on February 25, 1582 (Old Style). The Pope, by virtue of “the attribute of sovereign pontiff,” thus declared that October 4 of the same year would be followed im­mediately by October 15, omitting the ten days separating the Julian from the Gregorian Calendar (a separation which is at present one of thirteen days).

With the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar by various local Orthodox Churches—including the Church of Greece, in 1924—the unity of the faithful in their liturgical celebrations was broken. In addition, among those Churches which adopted the Western date for Pascha (the Church of Romania briefly and the Church of Finland permanently), fidelity to the dictates of the Oecumenical Synods and Canons, by which the canonicity of any Orthodox body is established, was set aside as a criterion of the Faith. As a consequence of this serious rupture with Holy Tradition and the rudimentary definitions of Ortho­doxy, the Orthodox world was divided into two camps: the Orthodox innova­tors, who accepted the calendar reform, and the Orthodox resisters (deprecat­ingly called “Old Calendarists” or “Old Stylists), who rejected the reform and who hold forth today in several national Churches (those of Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania).

Here, too, our position has been misrepresented and we have been ac­cused of promoting separatism and of troglodytic tendencies in adhering to an antiquated and meaningless calendar—of being triskaidekemerolaters, or worshippers of the thirteen days that separate the Julian and Gregorian Calen­dars. Some years ago, a Jesuit ecumenical activist penned an entry for a Roman Catholic guide to world religions that serves as an egregious example of these wrongful allegations. His comments are also, interestingly enough, marked by an apparently deliberate attempt to downplay the importance of the Greek Old Calendar movement by misrepresenting both its foundational precepts and its statistical profile:

Palaioimerologites (Gr. for Old Calendarists), a term used for the 200,000 Greek Orthodox who broke ecclesiastical ties with the main Greek Orthodox Church because of the official Church’s change in 1924 from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. [While accurate statistics are difficult to ascertain and the Old Calendarist population has dwindled, at the outset of the movement, the number of Old Calendarists was many times this number.] In the late 30s they split to form two separate hierarchies. There are about 250 Old Calendar Greek priests [this is an absurdly underestimated statistic] who keep alive among the faithful people the burning conviction that there is an immense importance in maintaining the 13 days that separate the liturgical cycle (the Kingdom of God) from the official state calendar (the Kingdom of this world). The Old Calendar­ists consider the other Greek Orthodox who follow the Gregorian calendar as heretical [this is not universally true and is an outrageous statement] and refuse to communicate with them. [Old Calendarists, by virtue of their opposition to the calendar innovation, do not have intercommunion with the New Calendar­ist innovators.] All the monks on Mt. Athos, except those of Vatopedi follow the Old Calendar. [All of the monastic institutions on Mt. Athos presently fol­low the Old Calendar.] There are two such parishes in the United States. [There are, in fact, scores of Old Calendar Greek parishes in the U.S. and Canada.] [20]

It is, to address these misperceptions (beyond our bracketed interjections above), under the banner of the Church Calendar, and not out of an absurd worship of days, that we Orthodox resisters carry out our opposition to the ecumenical movement and the Papacy. This is because the issue of Church Calendar is, in actuality, closely tied to the doctrine of Papal supremacy and to the emergence of ecumenical ideas that, as we have demonstrated, erode the very foundations of our Orthodox Faith.

A. The Papacy and the Calendar Issue. With regard to the Papacy, the Gre­gorian Calendar was imposed on Western Christianity by the authority of the Pope, as we observed earlier. Issues of astronomical accuracy—which are not of concern to us here—aside, beyond the divisions and strife that the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar by various Orthodox Churches produced, our resist­ance to the Papal Calendar is also an expression of our opposition to the no­tion that Pope Gregory XIII, acting as “sovereign pontiff,” had the authority to impose his calendar reform on the world. The rabidly anti-Protestant Gregory, who considered the calendar reform an effective tool in the Counter-Reforma­tion, generated similar resistance to Papal power in Protestant Europe, where the Gregorian Calendar was not adopted for several centuries after its impo­sition: Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, and Norway in 1700, and England and the American colonies, where the Gregorian (or New) Calendar was considered a “Popish” device, only in 1752. We Old Calendarists, therefore, have an historical counterpart in such Western European and American colo­nial resistance to Papism, and it is only historical amnesia that allows ecclesias­tical polemicists to dismiss our concerns as outlandish or eccentric.

B. Ecumenism and the Calendar Issue. It is an indisputable fact that the ad­vocacy of the calendar reform in the twentieth century had its roots in the ecu­menical policies first embraced officially by the Orthodox Church in an encyc­lical promulgated by the Oecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople in 1920. As part of its program for the reunification of the Orthodox and heterodox Christian confessions, the Patriarchate proposed that Christians everywhere accept “a uniform calendar for the celebration of the great Christian feasts at the same time by all the churches.” [21] It moved forward with this plan, not by offering as a model of uniformity the ancient Orthodox Church Calendar, but by adopting, in 1924, the Papal Calendar (or, as it was euphemistically and a bit ridiculously styled, the “Revised Julian Calendar”). This action was justi­fied by the rejection of the Julian Calendar, by which the Orthodox Church Feasts are partly calculated, on the grounds of its “astronomical” insufficien­cies, which were put forth in such a clearly unscientific and naive way as to be embarrassing.

The hodgepodged New Church Calendar which Constantinople adopted (as did the Church of Greece and other local Orthodox Churches shortly there­after), crudely grafting the traditional Paschalion of the Orthodox Church onto a festal cycle determined by the Gregorian Calendar, was to suffice until such a time as the Orthodox Paschalion could also be abandoned for the celebration of a common Pascha by all Christians. That goal has not yet been achieved by the innovators, who nonetheless still see it, along with the New Calendar, as an essential component of Orthodox participation in the ecumenical move­ment. Hence, while the Orthodox Churches of Russia, Serbia, Georgia, and Jerusalem, among others, still follow the Old Calendar, but are to varying de­grees active in such ecumenical organizations as the World Council of Church­es, they too have flirted from time to time with the idea of adopting the New Calendar or the Western date for Pascha. On account of this—and because of their communion with the Orthodox innovators and ecumenists who follow the New Calendar—the Holy Synod in Resistance does not commune with these Churches (being walled off from them, as it is from the New Calendar­ists, though not denying the Orthodox identity of either group), even if these Churches do follow the Old Calendar. This fact further brings into focus our fundamental raison d’être, which is not a witless commitment to the Church Calendar alone, but that of a sober, circumspect opposition to the compromis­ing effects of ecumenism and Papism on the integrity of the Orthodox Church and its traditions, as evidenced in the calendar reform. In that opposition, our goal is not to condemn and divide our fellow Orthodox, but to return them to the fullness of Holy Tradition that is in the end, rising above temporary divi­sions, the fundamental unitive force of the Church in time space.

V. Concluding Statement

We are acutely aware that many of our intentions and goals, as well as the Patristic language which we employ in formulating and expressing our opposi­tion to ecumenism and Papism, are open to misinterpretation and misunder­standing. This is partly because we are sometimes incautiously identified with those who, departing from the Royal Path of moderation, undertake to oppose the ecumenical movement and the Pope with a spirit of intolerance, disallow­ing that many ecumenists and the vast majority of those who embrace the Roman Catholic confession are individuals—though misguided— of sincere purpose. These same unwise zealots misuse in a denigrating and insulting way the diagnostic theological nomenclature of the Church Fathers, who, in op­posing heresy and decrying the demonic and diabolical nature of that which leads one from Truth to error, speak with analytical purpose and certainly not with ad hominem invective. By way of such mistaken association, the quality of love in which our resistance is undertaken, and at which it inexorably aims, is obfuscated. As we are also painfully aware, we are not infallible, whether in our views or in expressing them, and our Bishops and clergy, individually, have at times spoken or written injudiciously or imprudently. (I count myself chief among these.) Demanding of us a perfection that none of us claims, some de­tractors have used these instances further to denigrate us. This is regrettable.

It is also the case that we resisters are at times the victims of ecumenists gone awry and of Papist policies and their designers gone astray, holding forth, as they do, with the rhetoric of religious toleration and openness, while at the same time deliberately distorting our proclamations and positions. Such unsa­vory assaults against our integrity tend to mask the fact that we, no less than the sincere ecumenist, pine for the unity of all Christians, for tolerance be­tween people of all races and religions, and for peace and harmony, to the extent that these things are possible in a fallen and imperfect world. That our heartfelt quest for such ideals is bound by our commitment to the Truth of the Orthodox Faith and constrained by the observance of our traditions in the pursuit of holiness and perfection in Christ should not be something that excludes us from proper treatment and the freedom to articulate and set forth our views as they are, and not as others would distort them. It is for this reason that I have, with the aid of the Fathers here at the monastery, compiled this personal statement of my understanding of the intentions of the Holy Syn­od in Resistance and the nature of our opposition to ecumenism and Papism, speaking in peace and in love and with truth and sobriety.

 

Notes

1. Cf. St. Vincent of Lérins, “First Commonitorium,” §2, Patrologia Latina, Vol. L, col. 640: “In ipsa item Catholica Ecclesia magnopere curandum est ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est” (Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all).

2. See St. Paul, who calls the Church “the pillar and ground of the truth” (I St. Timothy 3:15); St. John Chrysostomos, who calls the Church “that which ties together the faith and preaching.” (“Homily XI on the First Epistle to St. Timothy,” Patrologia Graeca, Vol. LXII, col. 554); and St. Theophylact of Ochrid, who affirms that the Church is the “mainstay of the truth.” (“Explanation of the First Epistle to St. Timothy, Patrologia Graeca, Vol. CXXV, col. 49B).

3. St. Athanasios the Great, “First Epistle to Serapion,” Patrologia Graeca, Vol. XXVI, cols. 593C-596A.

4. Ecumenists, reacting to such Patristic language, have at times reproached us Old Calendarist resisters with shocking invective. A recent publication of the World Council of Churches, the Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement (Geneva: 2002), for example, portrays us as virtual recidivists, “fundamentalists,” and “uncanonical,” citing one critical assessment of ecumenism out of context and leaving the reader with the clearly unfair impression that we are unbridled religious bigots. I am, much to my chagrin, personally characterized as some sort of fundamentalist hothead.

5. St. Nectarios of Pentapolis, Mathema Poimantikes (Athens: 1972), p. 192. 6. St. John 17:21.

7. St. John Chrysostomos, “Homily 82 on the Gospel of St. John,” §2, Patr. Graeca, Vol. LIX, col. 444.

8. St. Theophylact of Ochrid, “Commentary on the Gospel of St. John,” Patr. Graeca, Vol. 124, co. 237C.

9. St. Augustine, “Tractate CX on the Gospel of St. John,” §2, Patrologia Latina, Vol. XXXV, col. 1920.

10. Father John S. Romanides, “Orthodox and Vatican Agreement: Balamand, Lebanon, June 1993,” Theologia, Vol. VI, No. 4 (1993). 11. Ephesians 4:4-5.

12. Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia (1983 edition), s.v. “Orthodox Church.”

13. Christendom & Christianity Today, Vol 3 in The World’s Great Religions (N.Y.: Time, Inc., ‘63), p. 266.

14. Joseph L. Hromádka, “Eastern Orthodoxy,” in The Great Religions of the Modern World, ed. Edward J. Jurji (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946), pp. 286-287.

15. Steven Runciman, The Eastern Schism: A Study of the Papacy and the Eastern Churches During the XIth and XIIth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 149.

16. Fr Justin Popovic, “The Highest Value and the Last Criterion in Orthodoxy,” in Orthodox Faith & Life in Christ, tr. Asterios Gerostergios et al. (Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994), p. 89.

17. Alexei S. Khomiakov, The Church is One (Seattle, WA: St. Nectarios Press, 1979), p. 21.

18. Cited in Archimandrite Spyridon S. Bilales, Orthodoxia kai Papismos, 2nd ed. (Athens: Ekdoseis Adelphotetos “Evnike,” 1988), Vol. I, p. 148.

19. This image, which has been employed widely by Orthodox and Roman Catholic ecumenists alike, was actually coined by the Russian poet Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949).

20. George A. Maloney, S.J., Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion (Washington, DC: Corpus Publications, 1979), s.v. “Palaioimerologites.”

21. “Encyclical of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, 1920,” in The Orthodox Church in the Ecumenical Movement: Documents and Statements 1902-1975 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1978), p. 41.

 

Source: The Shepherd: An Orthodox Christian Pastoral Magazine, Saint Edward Brotherhood, Woking, UK, August 2009.