unity

From “Unity as Calling, Conversion and Mission,” the opening address of His All Holiness the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew to the Plenary of the World Council of Churches’ Commission on Faith and Order event, “Called to be One Church” (Crete, Greece, October 7, 2009):

We should not be frustrated by our human limitations, which unfortunately determine our disagreements and divisions. Our ongoing and persistent pursuit of unity is a testimony to the fact that what we seek will occur in God’s time and not our own; it is, by the same token, the fruit of heavenly grace and divine kairos.

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… genuine humility demands from all of us a sense of openness to the past and the future; in other words, much like the ancient god Janus, we are called to manifest respect for the time-tested ways of the past and regard for the heavenly city that we seek (cf. Heb. 13.14). This “turning” toward the past and the future is surely part and parcel of conversion.

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… it is the preservation of creation as the proper way of worshipping the Creator and the promotion of tolerance and understanding among religions and peoples in our world. Working closely together on issues of ecological awareness and ecumenical dialogue is a crucial reflection of the “everlasting covenant” (verses 25-26), whereby Ezekiel’s God proclaims: “I will be their God and they shall be my people … forevermore” (verses 27-28). Continue reading →

From Interfax:

Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk

Moscow, September 21 — Head of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk, who is visiting Rome, has celebrated the Divine Liturgy in Catacombs of St. Callixtus.

Speaking to believers after the service, the Archbishop urged to overcome a thousand-year-old dispute between Christians of East and West and reminded about heroism of first Christians who prayed in catacombs and preserved unity in spite of persecutions from outside.

“Denied by the world, far from human eyes, deep under ground in caves, first Roman Christians performed the feat of prayer. Their life brought fruit of holiness and martyr heroism. The Holy Church was built on their blood shed for Christ,” the DECR press service has cited Archbishop Hilarion as saying.

Then Church came out of the catacombs, but Christian unity was lost, the Archbishop further said. Today, when the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church don’t have Eucharist communication and many Protestants gave up fundamental Christian principles, “we should clearly understand, that division is sin, tearing apart body of Church and weakening the power of Christian witness in secular world,” Archbishop Hilarion stressed.

He reminded that human sin was the cause of all divisions, while Christian unity could be restored only in the way of sanctity.

“Each of us, conscientiously fulfilling a task the Church has given him or her, is called to personally contribute in treasury of Christian sanctity and work to achieve God-commanded Christian unity,” the Archbishop said in his sermon.

And he meets with Pope Benedict:

Archbishop Hilarion highlighted the importance of mutual testimony by Orthodox and Catholic believers of traditional Christian values before the secular world. He noted the identiсal views of the Orthodox and the Catholic Churches on such matters as family, maternity, demographic crisis, euthanasia and many other ethical problems.

Archbishop stated that there were certain significant differences on these matters between the Orthodox and the Catholics, on the one hand, as well as with different Protestant communities which had pursued the liberalization of the Christian teaching.

In this context, the cooperation between the Orthodox and the Catholic Churches to develop a mutual position on the above matters gains specific meaning, Archbishop Hilarion believes.

Also see “Archbishop Hilarion’s speech at Sant’Egidio” on the National Catholic Register blog. Edward Pentin has translated part of the the archbishop’s speech from the “flawless Italian.” Excerpt:

We live in a de-Christianized world, in a time that some define—mistakenly—as post-Christian. Contemporary society, with its practical materialism and moral relativism, is a challenge to us all. The future of humanity depends on our response, as Christians, to this challenge, and maybe even whether life continues on our planet. It is a common challenge and also our answer must be common. Only together can we put forward all the spiritual and moral value of the Christian faith; only together can we offer our Christian vision for the family, only together can we affirm our concept of social justice, of a more equal distribution of goods.

These moral values are traditional because they have been affirmed by Christians for 20 centuries and have formed our cultural and European civilization. They are, at the same time, very new and modern, because the Gospel of Jesus is eternally new and modern. With this common challenge, the contemporary world challenges us, and we Christians must be together. It’s time to pass from confrontation to solidarity, mutual respect, and esteem. I would say without hesitating that we must pass to mutual love, living out Jesus’s commandment to love one another. As Jesus said, all will know you are disciples of mine if you have love for the other. This is what our preaching demands and it can be effective, it can be convincing, also in our contemporary world, if we are able to live this mutual love among us as Christians.

The Greek Orthodox Metropolis of San Francisco recently posted the keynote speech that Metropolitan Gerasimos delivered in April for the National Workshop on Christian Unity in Phoenix. It is a lengthy speech so we will post only a few excerpts here.

Metropolitan Gerasimos:

Metropolitan Gerasimos of San Francisco (GOA)

Our task as Christians is to keep the Body of Christ united and where we find division, we must become agents of healing and reconciliation. Dialogue in all its manifestations – bilateral, multilateral and other exchanges – is still the most critical pathway to reconciliation. Christians have been explaining their doctrine and theology to one another since the beginning of the Church, in order to maintain the integrity of the Body of Christ and to restore unity when divisions occurred. We can find examples of this from the earliest days of Christianity. The language of orthodoxy and heresy, lapsed and restored all emerged from the continual efforts of Church leaders – in those days usually the bishops – to maintain and pursue the unity of the Church.

Today’s ecumenical dialogues are heirs of this concern. Of course the context has changed and the actors are different, but the concerns are the same. Like in the past, we are all concerned about who we understand Jesus Christ to be and what we understand His Church to be. The Orthodox Churches have been involved since the beginnings of the modern ecumenical movement of the last century. It has not always been an easy journey for us, but who among us can honestly say that a pilgrimage through the desert was easy? Continue reading →

Watch and listen as American Orthodox metropolitans and bishops make a case for administrative unity — 15 years ago. The Ligonier Meeting was a gathering of twenty-eight or twenty-nine Orthodox Christian hierarchs in North America, specifically those affiliated with SCOBA, held Nov. 30 to Dec. 2, 1994, at Antiochian Village in Ligonier, Pa.

In Part 3, Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Methodios says: “There’s no question that we all want to be one administratively, and share not only a theological union that we have … but we want to be united administratively. I like to think it can be done soon. I’m not saying in a month or two or three or a year. But I hope that it doesn’t take 50 years to accomplish. It will certainly take some time.”

Antiochian Metropolitan Philip issues an appeal to the Mother Churches to include the American churches in “overseas” Pan-Orthodox synods. “We pray that the mother churches will realize soon that we are no longer little children and that the preparatory commission of the Great Synod will stop discussing the diaspora, quote unquote, in absentia,” he said.

In Part 4, Archbishop Dimitri, of the Orthodox Church in America, says that, “Our perception is that it’s an immediate need. Whether the response to that perception is going to be the same or not, is hard to say. I think at least some of the churches like Constantinople and Antioch are very conscious of our concerns here and perhaps they’ll respond. If those two churches, for example, take the lead, I believe the other churches would follow.”

From “Catholic Consciousness: The Anthropological Implications of the Dogma of the Church” by Vladimir Lossky. English translation (from the French original) in St. Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly, Volume 14, No. 4, 1970.

No differences of created nature — sex, race, social status, language, or culture — can affect the unity of the Church; no divisive reality can enter into the bosom of the Catholica. Therefore one should consider that the expression “national Church” — which is so often used in our day — is erroneous and even heretical, according to the definitions condemning phyletism that were pronounced by the Council of Constantinople in 1872. There is no Church of the Jews or of the Greeks, of the Barbarians or the Scythians, just as there is no Church of slaves or of free men, of male or of female.

There is only the unique and total Christ, the celestial Head of the new creation which is being realized here; the Head to which the members of the one Body are intimately linked. At this point any particular consciousness connecting us with any ethnic or political, social or cultural subgroup must disappear in order to give way to a consciousness “according to the Whole” (kath olon), a consciousness greater than the consciousness which links us with the aggregate of humanity.

In fact, our unity in Christ is not only the primordial unity of the human race, having only one origin, but the final realization of this unity of human nature which is recapitulated by the last Adam (Eschatos Adam).

This eschatological reality is not some kind of ideal “beyond,” but the very condition of the existence of the Church, without which it would be a sacramentalizing organism whose sacraments would have only a figurative sense, instead of being a real participation in the incorruptible life of the Body of Christ.