During his recent trip to the Holy Land, Pope Francis prayed with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the primary leader of Eastern Orthodox Christians, at the Church of Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Afterward, Bartholomew announced that he and Francis were planning an ecumenical gathering in Nicaea in 2025, marking the 1700th anniversary of the Church council that gave Christians the Nicene Creed. Emma Green tries to decipher the news:
That’s a pretty big deal; in 1054, theological disagreements led to a schism in Christianity, which is how Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians became separate faith traditions. This is a call back to a time before the schism, before the fundamental disagreements that kept popes and patriarchs from talking to each other for more than 900 years.
But the specifics are still pretty fuzzy. Will it be a formal ecumenical council, with leaders from the two faiths earnestly trying to reconcile their theological differences? Or will it be just what Bartholomew said—a celebration, full of meaningful dialogue but little actual change? Hard to tell, says Rocco Palmo, the author of the blog Whispers in the Loggia.
“It’s 12 years away,” he pointed out. Trying to predict what will happen in 2025 is like an extreme version of confidently declaring who will be president of the United States in 2016—there’s just no way to know. Plus, Francis and Bartholomew are both in their 70s. Bartholomew said the pair wanted to leave this council “as a legacy to ourselves and our successors,” which seems like an acknowledgment that they could both be dead—or retired—11 years from now.
Michael Peppard adds:
The ongoing Catholic-Orthodox dialogue will be intensified in preparation for the event. What began in Jerusalem in 1964 and was celebrated last week at the Holy Sepulchre will continue in the holy city this fall, when, in Bartholomew’s words, “a meeting of the Catholic-Orthodox Joint Commission will be held hosted by the Greek Orthodox patriarch Theophilos III. It is a long journey in which we all must be committed without hypocrisy.”
In all the attention to the Pope’s gestures toward political peace in the Holy Land last week, the joint event with the Orthodox got a bit lost in the mix. But Francis and Bartholomew didn’t lose focus. And they’ve got a date on the calendar to prove it.
Bart Gingerich, however, downplays what might happen at Nicaea 2025:
[B]efore my fellow Christians of a more traditionalist persuasion get too fired up, they must remember that this is not an ecumenical council itself. There is no heresy at stake. There is no summons from an emperor. Indeed, unless there is a very distinct order of business, Nicaea 2025 could possibly become a tremendous photo-shoot, with little effective action aside from some high-profile handshakes.
We must keep in mind that there is still much theological plaque that church leaders need to deal with in order to achieve a some kind of organic unity. First of all, the East and West have different views of sin and the Trinity. This fundamental disagreement comes in part to the influence of the Cappadocian Fathers on the East and St. Augustine of Hippo on the West. Moreover, both communions have the “OTC syndrome.” The Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches claim to be the exclusive “One True Church (TM)”; both are going to have to admit “We have been wrong for centuries” in order to have actual union. This takes no small amount of humility and may even open the door to the legitimacy of other communions and denominations. However, the more difficult issues may arise at the grassroots and in the local pulpits of the two communions. While Rome has developed and fallen in love with the concept of papal infallibility, outspoken critiques of “western rationalism” have become a homiletical staple in Orthodox circles.
A reminder of the theological issues separating east and west:
The two theological sticking points are the same now as they were in 1054. One is the pope. Orthodox Christians are happy with him as a figurehead, like the Queen, but are alarmed at the idea that he might intervene in their affairs or boss around their patriarchs. Catholic teaching, meanwhile, holds that the pope has “full, supreme and universal power”. The way around this is to define clearly the limited situations in which he might exercise jurisdiction over the east.
The other problem is the filioque. This refers to the words “and the Son” added unilaterally by the western church to the Nicene Creed (the summary of the Christian faith agreed on in the fourth century). This inflamed east-west relations so much that in 867 AD, Patriarch Photius of Constantinople called the pope who approved it a “heretic who ravages the vineyard of the Lord”. The change itself is a subtle one. It annoyed the Orthodox church though, because it believed that any amendment to such a central part of the faith should be agreed by consensus at a council. Most theologians now think the filioque issue is minor – that it is an acceptable variant between east and west. Yet that relaxed approach won’t go down well with many Orthodox Christians, for whom it is still a serious heresy.
The Dish 