Category: Eastern Catholicism

An unexpected flood of new traffic—coupled with numerous e-mails, texts, and social-media messages—seems to indicate that I touched a few nerves (and hopefully a handful of minds) with my reflections on the 21 New Coptic Martyrs and, more recently, St. Gregory of Narek’s elevation as a Doctor of the Church. Some have opined that my explanations on their eternal status are “unsatisfactory,” even “problematic.” The problem is that I do not have any “explanations” in a precise sense, only thoughts on the complex and messy realities of East/West ecclesial affairs. My original intention with both posts was to raise some key points that have to be taken into account before delivering apodictic statements which hold, for example, that the 21 men murdered by the Islamic State just over a week ago are “definitely not martyrs” or that Gregory of Narek is unworthy of both the title “saint” and “doctor.” To be honest, I don’t have a problem with fellow Catholics who want to hold those views as matters of private opinion. Expressing them loudly in public, however, strikes me as temerarious. If, for instance, St. Gregory of Narek is neither a saint nor doctor, do these earthly “keepers of the keys” to Heaven’s gate intend to stroll down (or, more likely, fly over) to the nearest Armenian Catholic parish and strip the insides of any venerated images of St. Gregory? Moreover, do they plan to write Rome protesting the dozens—perhaps hundreds—of openly venerated Eastern saints who lived and died outside of the visible borders of the Catholic Church? The Second Sunday of Lent for Byzantine Catholics using the Gregorian Calendar is just around the corner. Quick, there is no time to lose: stop these misguided souls before they go singing stichera and troparia to St. Gregory Palamas at Saturday Vespers and Sunday Matins. And by no means must you let these lost easterners, dancing haplessly as they do on the devil’s strings, press their erroneous lips against the image of a man who surely died with the sin of heresy and schism on his dirty black soul. If your municipality has a Greek Catholic parish in its vicinity which intends to honor Palamas, then I assure you it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Day of Judgment than for that city.

St. Gregory of Narek, the great Armenian poet and theologian who lived at the turn of the second millennium, was far less of a household name than the Coptic Orthodox Church before yesterday’s official announcement that Pope Francis is elevating St. Gregory as a Doctor of the Universal Church. As Rorate Caeli and other outlets have noted, St. Gregory lived and died during a period of history where the whole of the Armenian Church was out of communion with both Catholics and Orthodox. Although several attempts at healing the Armenian/Catholic divide took place between the time of the Crusades and the Council of Florence, official establishment of the sui iuris Armenian Catholic Church did not occur until 1749—nearly eight centuries after St. Gregory’s birth. This fact has stirred up needless panic in some circles, with various accusations of papal chicanery being hurled at the Holy Father for allegedly breaking down the borders of the “true Church” to let in a “schismatic” who might very well have been a “heretic” because “schism” and “heresy” and “being the worst among sinners” are, in the minds of some, all part of the package deal you receive for not being officially Catholic.

Thus did He manifest His Almightiness, born of the Virgin, preserving the virginity of the Virgin intact, and He was born of God with neither complication, travail, evil nor a separation of forsaking the immutable Divine Essence, born God from God. Since mankind abandoned God, in place of Him worshipping graven images of humans, God the Word thus assumed the image of man, so that in banishing error and restoring truth, He should consign to oblivion the worshipping of idols and for Himself to be accorded Divine honour, since to Him becometh all glory and honour unto ages of ages.

– St. Gregory Thaumatourgos

I had no intention to write so much on “things Eastern” at the start of this week; it just worked out that way. What I had wanted to do was write a few words on St. Josaphat, the great Ukrainian Catholic martyr whose feast day is celebrated this week by Eastern and Western Catholics who are on the Gregorian Calendar. That may be too inflammatory at the moment. While in years past I facetiously wished my Orthodox friends and readers a “Blessed feast of St. Josaphat,” the ongoing tensions in Ukraine lead me to conclude that such well-wishing would be in bad taste. After all, none of the Orthodox sent me a special greeting on August 6, the feast day of Maxim Sandovich. (If there is an objective, non-polemical, account of this Orthodox priest’s life, I’ve never seen it.)

The delightful and insightful Fr. John Hunwicke has posted his thoughts on Metropolitan Hilarion Alfayev’s recent paper on primary which was delivered at St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary. There’s nothing surprising in Hilarion’s paper, which is to say that there’s nothing new in it at all. If you’ve paid even a modicum of attention to the public spat that has been going on between “Second Rome” and “Third Rome” concerning primacy then you already know where Hilarion stands. Hunwicke, not wanting to ignite a fresh round of “First Rome/Second n’ Third Rome” fisticuffs, refrains from critiquing Hilarion’s paper. Instead he draws out two points concerning local particular churches and the true meaning of synodality respectively and applies them to the present situation in the Catholic Church. Hunwicke then goes on to offer a post scriptum on the Metropolitan of Volokolamsk and his recent behavior at the “Extraordinary Synod on the Family”: