Catholic News Agency reports that a group of U.S. Catholic and Eastern Orthodox clergy and scholars are working on a statement regarding the prospects for reunification, nearly a thousand years after the Great Schism split the church into eastern and western bodies.
I have to do more research, but given what I already know from professional and personal experience, this is an incredibly unrealistic goal. The various branches of Orthodox churches (Greek, Russian, OCA) can't even agree to unite within America; there are separate groups within Russia and Greece, as well. There isn't even a shared date for Easter most years between and among Catholics and Orthodox Christians around the world. Plenty of traditional Orthodox Christians consider Catholics to be heretics, prompting some mild anxiety recently about how Pope Benedict would be received in Cyprus. Last but not least, hinted at by Gary Stern at Blogging Religiously, is simply that there are layers upon layers upon layers of bureaucratic and theological differences large and small that would have to be addressed, nevermind the highly emotional angles involving things like tradition, ethnic identity, etc.
All this leads me to believe that reunification isn't really the goal here -- perhaps this North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation just aims to keep the ecumenical dialogue moving forward, emphasizing what the groups have in common and encouraging the global warming of Catholic-Orthodox relations we've been seeing since the Cold War ended (particularly out of Russia).
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2 comments:
I don't think it is a difficult as the article makes it out to be. I still have hope that we will see something positive from the Orthodox in the next 50 years.
Lol, I think we'll see it sooner than 50 years. The author of the above piece thinks that things like the date for Easter are significant issues, for example. Like he said, he probably hasn't thought enough about it, but he's right, there are a lot of parties and contentious groups in Orthodoxy, which would be a problem whether they were united to Rome or not.
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