Many thanks to our friend Anne who pointed me to this article on the Ravenna document published in the London Times under the Ruth Gledhill by-line. Beware. This is the same outfit that reported, entirely mendaciously, that by releasing the CDF document earlier this year, " The Vatican has described the Protestant and Orthodox faiths as “not proper Churches†in a document issued with the full authority of the Pope." Of course, when I was a boy, the Times used to be a "proper" newspaper....
Once again the entire debate about conciliarity and authority is misread through a secular lens. (With a few glaring factual errors along the way: Moscow is not, and will not be, "third" among equals in the patriarchal rankings. Let's say it together: [Rome], Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and then the national patriarchs in order of creation.) Rome will "sacrifice" some of its power-capital to get access to a whole new market. Constantinople is really trying to bolster its position against Islamic structures of domination. Moscow is only concerned about its own hegemonic ambitions. Etc. Etc. Etc. One wonders why the other participants bother showing up to those meetings at all!
I don't really think any secular outlet is going to "get" this problem. Far too few believers do either, at least not intellectually. The whole problem with the primacy is issue is not who has it but what primacy is. It's about how authority works in a Church founded on the ultimate refusal of power, the kenosis of the Son of God. Does there really need to be an "arbiter" whose final word ends all disputes, as the Roman side claims? Or is the real guarantor of Truth the Spirit at work in Scripture, Sacrament and the Saints as the Orthodox aver?
My view is that the final solution, from which we are intellectually, emotionally and culturally very far, will come about only when the notion of "hierarchy" is rescued from the power-political prison into which it has been placed since the cultural triumph of nominalism sealed by the Reformation and Enlightenment. Only then will we be in a position to understand the mystical, sacramental symbolic weight of apostolic authority that witnesses to, without recourse to worldly strategies of domination, what the Areopagite calls "the most conspicuous fact of theology -- the God-formation of Jesus amongst us."
Power and authority are not the same thing. The author of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy has much to teach us still. When the Times starts quoting St. Dionysius, with or without the "pseudo", then I'll really take some notice.
