Category: Eastern Orthodox Church

Despite many requests, I have never finished drafting a piece concentrating on why I chose to leave Eastern Orthodoxy for the Catholic Church four years ago. Some of my reasons have been woven into various blog posts, comboxes, e-mail exchanges, and Facebook threads, though I have kept several things to myself. When asked, either in person or privately online, to say a few words on the topic, I am usually willing to do so unless I get the sense that it’s nothing more than an invitation to a pointless back-and-forth. There may come a time when it is appropriate to write in more detail on what happened during Lent 2011, just as there may come a time to engage the more complicated questions about why I fell away from Catholicism in college, how I came back to Christianity, and what brought me to the Orthodox Church in the first place. The only reason to discuss those matters at all is if it might be of benefit to someone who is struggling to hold on to their faith amidst a storm of understandable, though ultimately unpersuasive, doubts. As for the question of choosing Rome over Constantinople (or Moscow), that’s harder to engage in a fair-minded manner. Most conversions occur for reasons which are neither easily explained nor objectively clear. Some compensate by peppering their tales with store-bought piety. Others opt for boldness, claiming that their intellectual rigor has brought them to the indisputable truth of Catholicism (or Orthodoxy). Maybe that’s happened a few times since the Great Schism, but I have my doubts.

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.