It cuts that deep, I contemplated that if each held to Jesus teaching about Peter possessor of the keys to the kingdom, and layed aside historical differences of authority, and placed trust in whom Jesus placed his authority, both Orthodox and Roman Catholics both have the right to govern the Catholic Church from the Chair of Peter. If the first century saints were alive here today, they publicly declared the Bishop of Rome to have the Chair of Peter and submitted to the authority of Peter( the Pope)
Just a thought.
I think that you are confusing this dispute over ecclesiology as one of some kind of envy or rivalry or something.
Orthodox do not need to be bribed into accepting your ideas about church governance, they could have that today, this very moment, if that was all it was about. The Ecumenical Patriarchs inherited the mandate of the Bishops of Rome (subsequent to the departure of that august body) as next in line, and they exercise it in just the same way as the Bishops of Rome did in the first millennium.
But Holy Orthodox Catholicism has been present for two thousand years without ever having a Pope as you know it. Not even when we were in communion for the first one thousand years, the bishops of Rome had no such authority as they exercise today. The Papacy as we know it did not begin to take shape until the Gregorian reformation in the eleventh century and the full process took about six centuries. All that time Holy Orthodoxy existed outside of the process, operating in the same manner.
We have no history of anything like the central administration of the church. We don’t admire it, and we don’t envy it. We are very focused upon developing our leadership locally for the local church.
We don’t even develop bishops in the same way, Ours are almost exclusively drawn from the ranks of monastics, and we have no “active” religious orders (twelfth century west). When our novice monastics begin their religious careers they are not even assured of being allowed to rise to the humble office of subdeacon, let alone priest or bishop, and such aspirations are easily mistaken for ambition by their spiritual fathers, so they might be held back for that reason alone. Being cloistered makes it difficult to network among powerful people or politic for favored causes or promotions. These men begin their careers in isolation that they have every reason to expect to be permanent
We simply have a culture that does not aspire to the theoretical administration of large numbers of Christians. It would be totally new to us.
By the way…I am never offended when Orthodox are referred to as Eastern Catholics, for that is what we have always been. We are your Eastern Catholic brethren, although most people have forgotten that.
*
Michael*
