Christina's recent comment reminded me that the post referring to the brief remarks by John de Fiesole on the Disputations blog has disappeared in our little journey to this new URL.
I'm not sure that the author is quite correct in saying that the CDF document "hoses" the Catholics for being out of communion with the Orthodox in quite the same way it "hoses" the Orthodox for refusing to accept communion with the Pope. The actual paragraph is this:
On the other hand, because of the division between Christians, the fullness of universality, which is proper to the Church governed by the Successor of Peter and the Bishops in communion with him, is not fully realised in history.
I wish the document used the opportunity this point presents of really "hosing" the Catholic Church for its responsibility for the divisions. Of course this responsibility is only partial, but there is plenty of precendent for popes and other Catholic leaders professing sorrow in recent times for the role our Church has played in creating these divisions. But the way this paragraph is formulated, the divisions need not have anything to with actions by Catholics. They could just be an accident of history, or the work of aliens from outer space, or even....those dissident easterners themselves!
Now, I'm sure the authors did not in any way intend to return to the bad old days of non-ecumenical finger pointing. But they sure missed an opportunity to reassure the Orthodox of this. And it is precisely that kind of neglect of the right opportunity that helps prevent the historical realization of universality for which the document calls.
I can certainly accept that, as the Congregation says:
communion with the Catholic Church, the visible head of which is the Bishop of Rome and the Successor of Peter, is not some external complement to a particular Church but rather one of its internal constitutive principles....
Yes. That makes sense to me. But should it not also be one of the "internal constitutive principles" of a particular Church that it should also maintain itself in communion with all other particular Churches? And if this is so with any particular Church, should it not especially be so with respect to that particular Church, namely the Roman Church, to which is granted the special charism of maintaining the universality of the whole Church?
In other words, aren't all the Churches today, whether Catholic or Orthodox, "lacking something"? Perhaps rather than claim for itself sole proprietorial rights to be the visible Church professed in the Creed, we Catholics should begin to reclaim a more patristic kind of language, speaking of a "wounded" Church on the level of history. This disunity between the Churches is nothing knew. The fathers saw plenty of it: the Meletian schism, for example, or the quite long breach between Rome and Constantinople after the deposition of St. John Chrysostom. What makes the current schism different is not, I think, the seriousness of the disagreement, but that it has gone on for so long that it has begun to seem like business as usual. The danger of that is that we no longer feel any urgency to heal it.Â
