I know this sounds unfeeling, but how can you separate churches based on the calculation for Easter Sunday. Especially when the calculation is days apart?
This can’t be the reason.
And I never knew that didn’t accept our Sacraments. If that is true, the gulf is a lot wider than I ever thought.
peace
peace
I doubt very much that the Catholic Church would resist unity based on things like the calculation of the date of Easter.
And no, the Orthodox do not consider Catholic sacraments valid, though some consider Baptism valid.
The gulf is extremely wide. In the old forum, EOs pretty much said whatever they wanted, documented it to their Church documents, and they made it crystal clear that:
a. The Pope would have to be relegated to being the bishop of an area around Rome, nothing more. Not even Western Europe. Likely this Pope would not be the one, since he is, in their eyes, a “heretic” and not validly ordained anyway.
b. The Catholic Church would have to give up every development in doctrine since about a thousand years ago, as well as all Catholic saints since then, all revelations (e.g. Lourdes). It is unclear whether we would be allowed to keep our Liturgies. Infallibility would have to be abandoned, along with all doctrines declared infallibly.
c. Catholic clergy MIGHT be somehow allowed to become Orthodox clergy, but only if they convincingly converted to Orthodoxy straight down the line.
d. Catholic marriages MIGHT be recognized under some kind of counciliar decree. Might not.
e. The Catholic Church would have to give up any thought of worldwide presence. Africa, for example, would be given to the Orthodox partriarch of Alexandria. Asia would be given to the Moscow Patriarchate. I’m not sure what they want to do with the Americas, though the ancient Russian presence in Alaska and the Northwest is sufficient basis for some to claim the Americas for Moscow. Since there is an Orthodox bishop of Vienna, who is under Moscow, one assumes Europe would go to Russia.
f. The relationship between Eastern Catholics (e.g., Maronites) and Rome would have to be severed.
Now, I will say that most of the EOs of the old forum were faithful to the Patriarch of Moscow, not the Patriarch of Constantinople, who seems different. But then, the EOs regard the Monks of Athos, an island off Greece as pretty much the final authority in all things. The Athos Monks generally seem to side with Moscow and against Constantinople, and criticized the Patriarch of Constantinople bitterly for even meeting with the Pope in Istanbul. There is also a battle between Constantinople and Moscow over the Ukraine. Some Orthodox there claim to be subject to Constantinople, but Moscow claims jurisdiction over the entire Ukraine. Moscow’s representative walked out of the Ravenna conference because of it. There are other places like that in contention. Orthodoxy is extremely territorial, and absolutely opposes Catholic Church presence worldwide.
The EO have some problems of their own, and unity is one of them.
Now, the situation with the Oriental Orthodox is more complicated still. That’s not a small thing, because nobody really knows how many EOs there are vs OOs. The EOs count national populations in their membership, not who actually goes to church, so it’s hard to know. Russia, for example, is far and away the biggest part of EO “membership”, but only about 1-3% of them ever go to Church, and nobody knows how many Russians believe in anything. But there are definitely a lot of OOs in the world, the largest single concentration, seemingly, being in Ethiopia. The EO consider the OO “heretics” and I’m pretty sure the feeling is mutual. So, its definitely not a matter of some negotiation between Rome and Constantinople over things like the date of Easter. Far from it.
I’m not putting Orthodoxy down here, though I am sure this post will draw lots of argument, mostly not addressing what I am really saying. My point, and my ONLY point is that unity will be an exceedingly difficult undertaking, and Catholics generally are not aware of how difficult it will be.
