Hi Belloc Fan,
In response to your points:
- St. Constantine moved the imperial capital from Rome to Byzantium (renamed Constantinople). It was a strategic political and military move. It was later Ecumenical Councils (after Constantine died) that raised the status of the archbishopic of Constantinople to Patriarchate, and later to a Patriarchate equal in privileges with Rome. St. Constantine supported the Christian churches and demonstrated desire to be baptized, which was done at the end of his life.
- Most Orthodox do not consider the Ecumenical Patriarch as the “head” of the Orthodox Church. The canons and teachings of the Orthodox Church firmly condemn abortion of any kind, and you will find this condemnation upheld by the vast majority of Orthodox hierarchs.
- None of the first seven Ecumenical Councils was called by the Pope of Rome. Councils are not called to create dogma but to defend the constant teaching of the Church. The Seven Ecumenical Councils involved the interaction of the Patriarchs. For Rome to hold councils without the involvement of the Eastern Patriarchs is not Ecumenical. Struggles have come to both West and East (the Reformation one big struggle for the West; atheistic communism a struggle for the East), so I do not think it fair to say the Eastern Church has encountered struggle since there is no communion with Rome.
- The Holy Spirit eternally proceeds (ekporousis) from the Father alone, but is eternally and temporally manifested through the Son. This is the Orthodox teaching
In Latin Catholicism, procession is from the Father and the Son as from a single principle.
- Nationalism is unfortunate, but much of it is the fruit of secularist philosophies rather than the true fruit of Orthodoxy. Philitism (religious nationalism) is condemned as a heresy in Orthodoxy.
Orthodoxy teaches abortion is wrong and sinful. The Ecumenical Patriarch is not supportive of abortion or pro-choice in the sense of believing women have a right to choose to have an abortion. His rhetoric elsewhere is that abortion does grave harm to a woman’s femininity. In any case, he is not the spiritual head of the Orthodox Church in the same way as Catholics understand the Pope to be head of their church. He does not have “ordinary magisterium” over all Orthodox faithful. Shortly before he made that brief and somewhat unclear 1990 statement, the Holy Orthodox Church in America presented this brief to the Supreme Court:
orthodoxytoday.org/articles/OrthodoxAmicusBrief.php
See footnote 5 after reading.
Madaglan, I apologize if this has been answered elsewhere, but I hope to respond to what you’ve said above:
(1) Definitely, Constantinople was raised to the level of a Patriarchate. It needed to be done by a Council because, unlike Rome and the other original ones, it was not one by right (since it was not founded by an Apostle). And as a Patriarch of his region, the head of the Church at Constantinople possessed the same powers and responsibilities as any other Patriarch, including the Patriarch of the West, the Pope. But this is all about juridical power within specific regions, not leadership of the Church collective. No Council made Constantinople superior to Rome, or the “New Rome.”
(2) The fact that it’s “most” who don’t consider him as the head is the sort of thing that I’m talking about. If you can’t agree on who (if anyone) is in charge, how does this comport with the Petrine model established by Christ? And the fact that the guy who may-or-may-not be in charge disagrees with the official Church doctrine on something as fundamental as abortion is yet more reason to suspect that this was not what Christ intended. One of the Church’s primary roles is to provide clear teaching and eliminate doctrinal confusion.
(3) A Council doesn’t need to be called by the Pope, and the Pope approved all of them. I think you may have misunderstood my earlier point. I don’t deny that both East and West have faced heresies and threats to the Church’s survival. You faced atheistic Communism, we faced the Reformation. But when we faced the Reformation, we responded with a Holy Spirit-protected Council (Trent). Had the Reformation happened on your end, you wouldn’t have been able to do so. You also don’t have anything like Spirit-protected papal infallbility, as the whole to-do about whether or not Patriarch Kyrillos agreed with Calvinism served as an awful reminder.
(4) I think the Union of Brest’s explanation of this is virtually unanswerable. We believe that there is “one origin, from the Father through the Son.” Whatever distinction you see between it being manifested through the Son and proceeding “through the Son” is lost on me. In any case, the Orthodox half of the Church stayed in Communion with Rome for half a millennium after the West added it in 589, so I don’t think it’s a legitimate basis for schism 500 years on. It’s certainly no basis to stay outside of the fullness of the Catholic Church now.
(5) I’m glad that philitism is condemned, but it doesn’t change that the organization of each Church is by country, and really, by ethnicity. By this, I mean that in the US, there isn’t an “American Orthodox” Church, but Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, etc., based upon ethnicity, and made up of many people who’ve never even been in the Church’s country of origin. So while philitism is rightly condemned as a sin, it seems to be practiced and encouraged institutionally. Granted, I’m an outsider, so I don’t want to say more than I can, but that’s certainly how it looks from here.
