That was the working title of this post yesterday, since the front page of the
Democrat & Chronicle featured a beautiful, full color photograph of an Orthodox priest celebrating the Divine liturgy facing the altar. Unfortunately, the picture isn't online. The three related stories are, however. You can read them
here,
here, and
here. The
last of these gives biographical snapshots of four Orthodox Christians. One is a young Egyptian immigrant who teaches at my high school alma mater and belongs to the community that took over my father's boyhood parish, Ss. Peter & Paul. The other three are converts. This observation, from a former Lutheran, is worth pondering:
The Orthodox church understands that our worship, both corporate and private, is directed toward theosis (the process of becoming one with God, of sharing in the life of the Trinity). All churches stress that a Christian becomes a new person, but the idea is central to Orthodoxy.
"The Christian experience is not just discovering Christ as a teacher or a good person who wants us all to become good. Orthodoxy believes that the spirit of God is in every one of us and that worship, the rites of the church, and confession, all help us get closer to God.
Mike at DOR Catholic
zeroes-in on one of the stories and asks, "What's wrong with this picture?":
Accompanying his story is a second article by Hare attempting to show the relationship between Catholicism and the various Orthodox churches:
Orthodoxy's roots trace to early Christianity
As Christianity spread across the Roman Empire in the first three centuries after the death of Christ, leadership was invested in the bishops of five major cities: Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Rome and finally, Constantinople (today Istanbul).
Known as patriarchs (or in Rome, the pope), these bishops worked together to govern the church. The teaching, doctrines and traditions of the church were developed and defended with no single patriarch exercising primal authority.
Following the legal recognition of Christianity by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine in 312, the church began to clarify and express its beliefs at Ecumenical Councils. In the fifth century, disagreement over these issues led the Assyrian Church of the East and the Oriental Orthodox Churches to leave the original union of the church. They are still separated from the Orthodox Church.
In the aftermath of the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in 476, the patriarch (pope) of Rome began, of necessity, to exercise more civil authority. But in doing so, he also began to assert his position as the primal leader of the Christian Church. Such a claim was unacceptable to the other patriarchs.
The final break, known as the Great Schism, came in 1054, when each side excommunicated the other ...
As sources for the above Hare cites, "Joseph Kelly, professor emeritus of religious studies at Nazareth College and liaison from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rochester to the Orthodox community; and Rev. Ken James Stavrevsky, rector of St. John the Baptist Orthodox Church in Rochester."
This is a somewhat interesting retelling of Church history which, I believe, would come as something of a surprise to such folks as Irenaeus, Ignatius of Antioch and Augustine of Hippo, to name but a few of the early Church leaders - both from the East and the West - who looked to the Bishop of Rome for leadership in faith and morals.
Mike is right to ask the question. Pope Benedict's
lead address in his recent cycle of catecheses on the Church Fathers concerned St. Clement, third successor to St. Peter as bishop of Rome:
The authority and prestige of this Bishop of Rome were such that various writings were attributed to him, but the only one that is certainly his is the Letter to the Corinthians. Eusebius of Caesarea, the great "archivist" of Christian beginnings, presents it in these terms: "There is extant an Epistle of this Clement which is acknowledged to be genuine and is of considerable length and of remarkable merit. He wrote it in the name of the Church of Rome to the Church of Corinth, when a sedition had arisen in the latter Church. We know that this Epistle also has been publicly used in a great many Churches both in former times and in our own" (Hist. Eccl. 3, 16).
An almost canonical character was attributed to this Letter. At the beginning of this text — written in Greek —Clement expressed his regret that "the sudden and successive calamitous events which have happened to ourselves" (1, 1) had prevented him from intervening sooner. These "calamitous events" can be identified with Domitian's persecution: therefore, the Letter must have been written just after the Emperor's death and at the end of the persecution, that is, immediately after the year 96.
Clement's intervention — we are still in the first century — was prompted by the serious problems besetting the Church in Corinth: the elders of the community, in fact, had been deposed by some young contestants. The sorrowful event was recalled once again by St. Irenaeus who wrote: "In the time of this Clement, no small dissension having occurred among the brethren in Corinth, the Church in Rome dispatched a most powerful Letter to the Corinthians exhorting them to peace, renewing their faith and declaring the tradition which it had lately received from the Apostles" (Adv. Haer. 3, 3, 3).
Thus, we could say that this Letter was a first exercise of the Roman primacy after St. Peter's death. Clement's Letter touches on topics that were dear to St Paul, who had written two important Letters to the Corinthians, in particular the theological dialectic, perennially current, between the indicative of salvation and the imperative of moral commitment.
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