by Walter Ray

Created on: September 24, 2009   Last Updated: September 28, 2009

Hope for Reunion between Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics

Will the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches ever reunite? I believe the chances are good that they will. More progress has been made in the last fifty years than in the previous five hundred.

The main obstacle to reunion is the two sides' different understanding of power in the church. While in the Roman church power is invested in church leaders, and in particular, in the Pope, the Eastern Orthodox churches believe that power resides in the Church as a whole, that is, in the Holy Spirit who animates the Church.

The difference can be illustrated by the disagreement over the moment when the bread and wine of the Eucharist become the Body and Blood of Christ, which is really a dispute not over when this happens but how. The Roman Church has held that the change happens when the priest repeats the words of Christ at the Last Supper: This is my body; this is my blood. The Eastern Orthodox hold that the change occurs when the priest prays that the Holy Spirit will come and change the gifts. The Roman view is that the priest has the power to effect the change by saying the proper words. The Eastern Orthodox view is that the Holy Spirit alone has this power, and that this will happen in response to the Church's prayer.

In the Eastern Orthodox view, there is no source of authority outside of or different from the Church in its entirety. No one person or group of people within the Church, no bishop or council of bishops, can be said to be over the Church in the way that the Pope is over the Roman Catholic Church. That is at the heart of the dispute between these churches. The Orthodox churches do recognize the authority of councils, e.g., the seven ecumenical councils, but even these were seen to be authoritative only in retrospect, after their decisions had been found by the whole Church to be consistent with its experience of truth.

Local churches speak through their bishops and bishops strive for unity among themselves. This is the older view of church structure, as can be seen from Cyprian's statement to a council in Carthage in the third century: No one of us sets himself up as a bishop of bishops, or, by tyrannical terror, forces his colleagues to a necessity of obeying, inasmuch as every bishop, in the free use of his liberty and power, has the right of forming his own judgment, and can no more be judged by another than he can himself judge another (cited by Augustine, On Baptism, Against the Donatists,

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