The Eastern Contribution to the Universal Church

As a former Orthodox, I'm afraid that the only way they will join with Peter is if they return to the early Eastern belief in the Primacy of Peter.

From Crisis

By Fr Mario Alexis Portella

There is swelling expectation for the reunification of the Orthodox back into the Catholic Church, as Pope Leo XIV begins his Pontificate with a message of unity pointed at the Eastern churches.

“And they conversed there in the church a whole year: and they taught a great multitude, so that at Antioch the disciples were first named Christians” (Acts 11:26).

On May 14, in his “Address to Participants in the Jubilee of Oriental Churches,” Pope Leo XIV not only praised “the unique spiritual and sapiential traditions that they preserve, and for all that they have to say to us about the Christian life, synodality, and the liturgy,” he also highlighted how the Oriental Churches have “a unique and privileged role as the original setting where the Church was born.”

The term “Eastern” or “Oriental” often is interpreted to refer to the churches that grew out of the liturgy and traditions of the ancient Church of Constantinople (the Byzantine Church), capital of the Eastern half of the Roman Empire, as well as those churches that formed in communities from present-day Egypt through Syria, Iraq, Ethiopia, and India. While our Christian faith vis-à-vis the Catholic Church flourished and developed in the West, the doctrinal and juridical structure as we know it today emanated from the East.

It is opportune to remind ourselves that at the inception of the Church, while the first Christian communities bore witness to their religious convictions as transmitted by Apostolic Tradition, they were privy of both a catechetical structure and a proper canonical system—that is, a written body of norms for daily living. These only formed gradually, especially thanks to letters from bishops on the apostolic teaching, notwithstanding the faithful’s ambivalence about law and faith.

In such a context, at least within the first three centuries—prior to the Edict of Milan (313), which granted Christians the freedom to worship among other religions—there arose bodies of catechesis and norms for the faithful. Of notable mention: the Didaché (c. second century), which, probably written in Greek for a Syrian community, established rules governing the liturgy, the sacraments, and lay practices, like fasting; the Traditio Apostolica (Apostolic Tradition) of Hippolytus of Rome (c. 215) that detailed the rites and practices of the Roman Christian community, as well as guidelines for the consecration of bishops, priests, and deacons and for the administering of baptisms; and the Didascalia Apostolorum (c. 230), also known as the Catholic Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles and the Holy Disciples of Our Lord, written in Syriac and incorporated into later compilations. It was a legal treatise on issues like church organization, liturgy, morality, and heresy.

Alongside the tradition that referred to the apostles, or rather sought to attribute to them binding rules for the early Christians, there was also an occasional synodal practice. Already by the second century, qualified representatives of several Christian communities gathered by their own free initiative on a regional or provincial level in assemblies (synods or councils). Their purpose was to deliberate and approve disciplines and tenets that would eventually be part of “the common heritage of the whole Church.”

Incidentally, the term “synod” or “synodality” is not to be equated with the present-day understanding of the subject—vis-à-vis the synod that was initiated by Pope Francis in 2021, in which the hierarchy of the Church was to listen to “experiences and intuitions of Catholics all over the world and [use] them to discern new, better ways to share the Gospel message.”

The term “synod,” which derives from the Ancient Greek σύνοδος (synodos) “assembly, meeting,” is analogous with the Latin word concilium “council.” Originally, synods were meetings of bishops which became the primary vehicles for promulgating norms governing the life of the clergy and the organization of churches—not vice versa, where the laity and non-Catholics alike would set agendas for the synod fathers to digest, as they recently did in Rome.
By the fourth century, bishops had established themselves as administrators of local churches, recognizing their office in managing or settling the affairs of neighboring churches in synods (or councils), especially when such issues—like heresies—affected the interests of the universal Church. It was at this time that the legislative texts produced by these assemblies were generally called “canons,” from the Greek word “κανών,” or “canon” in Latin. In Greek, canon did not mean “law” but simply “straight rod” or “rule.” These were necessary to observe the tenets of Christ.

Initially, the Roman emperors presided over what would become known as ecumenical councils. This practice began in particular with the Emperor Constantine, who, at the Council of Nicaea in 325, attributed to himself the title “epískopos tôn ektôs” (overseer or bishop of the external forum). While it was the Roman pontiff who ultimately had the last word on doctrinal formulas and norms to be observed by the faithful, the Church accepted the emperor’s arbitral function to make up for the lack of an authority capable of enforcing the conciliar decisions.

In the East, this practice continued well into the 15th century, when the Emperor John signed with Pope Eugene IV the Papal Bull Lætentur Cæli on July 6, 1439, thus putting an official end to the Schism of 1054 and uniting the Orthodox Church with the Church of Rome; the Church of Alexandria, along with the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, temporarily rejoined in 1441.

Today, there are a total of 24 churches in the Catholic Church under the authority of the pope—one Latin (Roman), which comprises perhaps 98 percent of all Catholics worldwide, and 23 “Eastern” or “Oriental” churches. Within the parameters of a shared creed, each church has its own forms of liturgy, devotions, and traditions, as well as its own hierarchy under a patriarch or archbishop and distinctive Eastern legal canons.

When John Paul II promulgated the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches in 1990, he did so under the title Sacri Canones (Sacred Canons) not just to highlight that the doctrinal and juridical foundation of the Church was born in the East but that “the Church must breathe with her two lungs!”

In today’s secular and anti-Christian society, both lungs are vital in order to supply enough “oxygen” for our spiritual battle. Indeed, the Eastern dimension expands the arsenal of the Western Church’s theology and prayer life. Let us pray that we incorporate this in our lives, and let us also pray that those Eastern churches that find themselves in places of persecution—as in the Holy Land—can eventually be liberated from such a burden.