The Great Unifier
BY JAROSLAV PELIKAN, OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

The New York Times
April 4, 2005

New Haven – On June 3, 1979, a few months after Cardinal Karol
Wojtyla became the first Slavic pope, he set out as the vision of his
pontificate “that this Polish pope, this Slav pope, should at this
precise moment manifest the spiritual unity of Christian Europe,”
even though “there are two great traditions, that of the West and
that of the East,” with roots in Old Rome and “in the New Rome,
at Constantinople.”

He spoke these words at a time when all the Slavic peoples, whether
Orthodox or Catholic (or Protestant) were subject to the atheist
tyranny of Marxism-Leninism, and one of his principal contributions
to the realization of that vision was, in his native Poland but
with ripple effects throughout the Soviet empire, to help set in
motion powerful impulses of the mind and spirit – and of the Spirit
-that would bring down the walls and topple the regimes. The relative
importance of that contribution in comparison with Mikhail Gorbachev’s
glasnost and Ronald Reagan’s defiance will continue to be debated by
historians. But he did manage, by a curious form of divine irony,
to answer the question attributed long before to Stalin: “How many
divisions does the pope command?” The spiritual rebirth of all the
churches of Slavic Europe, which is going on even as we speak, is a
major consequence of that revolution.

With several Eastern churches his vision of spiritual unity has
made significant progress. With the Assyrian Church of the East,
traditionally referred to as the Nestorian Church, he signed a
declaration in 1994 in which it was agreed that “the controversies of
the past led to anathemas” and that “the divisions brought about in
this way were due in large part to misunderstandings.” Two years later,
in 1996, he signed a similar declaration with Catholicos Karekin I of
the Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Church, acknowledging that “linguistic,
cultural and political factors have immensely contributed towards the
theological divergences that have found expression in their terminology
of formulating their doctrines” and expressing the shared “hope for
and commitment to recovery of full communion between them.” There have
been several noteworthy expressions of mutual charity and respectful
visits between this pope and Bartholomew, the ecumenical patriarch of
Constantinople, cordial enough to elicit criticism from isolationist
elements in the various Orthodox churches.

The least progress toward reconciliation has occurred in relations
with the Orthodox Church of Russia. The end of Communist rule has
brought with it a rebirth of the rivalry and mutual recrimination that
have been tearing Slavic Europe apart ever since its conversion to
Christianity more than a millennium ago by St. Cyril and St. Methodius
of Thessalonica. The Venerable Bede gave the Gospel credit for unifying
the peoples of Britain, but we Slavs are the only people to have been
divided by the Gospel: whether to follow Cyril and Methodius in their
affiliation with Constantinople (and therefore a Slavonic liturgy and
autonomous national churches), or to follow them in their appeal to
the authority of the bishop of Rome (and therefore a Latin liturgy
and the centralized authority of the papacy).

The Bulgarians, Russians, Serbs and Ukrainians chose the first
alternative; Croats, Czechs, Poles and Slovaks the second. The most
ambitious attempt to heal that schism came in 1596, with the Union of
Brest, in which several dioceses of the Church of Ukraine accepted
the authority of the papacy while retaining their own liturgy and
canon law. But the adherents of this union (disparagingly named
“Uniats”) have also been a major source of hostility between East
and West. Ruthlessly persecuted by Stalin and forcibly reunited to
the Orthodox patriarchate of Moscow, they regained their freedom and
their properties only after the fall of Communism.

But as a consequence of the latter-day struggle over those properties
and, more broadly, of obstreperous tactics from all directions,
everyone’s old suspicions have been confirmed. After decades of
neglect (and worse), churches were in serious disrepair, but whose
responsibility was it to put them back into shape for worship,
the Orthodox or the Greek Catholics? As in any ancient feud, it is
impossible to roll things back to status quo ante and to fix the blame.

For the old pope, this dispute was a major source of heartbreak. As he
said to me at Castel Gandolfo a few months after I had been received
into the Orthodox Church, he always believed that ever since the schism
of 1054, “Western Christendom has been breathing on one lung.” But,
he was implying, so has Eastern Christendom! When so many of the
historic sources of division between them have proved to be negotiable
(even the central doctrinal question of the source of the Holy Spirit)
and when, in the encyclical “Ut Unum Sint” (“That They May Be One”),
this pope opened the question of papal primacy up for discussion, one
cannot escape the feeling that everyone has missed a great opportunity.

Schisms, like divorces, take a long time to develop – and
reconciliations take even longer. It will be a celebration of the
legacy of Pope John Paul II and an answer to his prayers (and to those
of all Christians, beginning with their Lord himself) if the Eastern
and Western churches can produce the necessary mixture of charity and
sincere effort to continue to work toward the time when they all may
be one.

Jaroslav Pelikan, professor emeritus of history at Yale, is the author
of the five-volume history “The Christian Tradition.”

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress