Caution

A word of caution from our good friend, Fr Paul, on Vassula Ryden:
The desire to celebrate Easter in common is a laudable one, whatever the solution adopted. A word of warning seems desirable, however, concerning Vassula and her followers. This lady may be sincerely convinced that she is receiving messages from Christ and that she [...]

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Thomas Merton on East and West

I can unite in myself, in my own spiritual life, the thought of the East and the West, of the Greek and Latin Fathers, I will create in myself a reunion of the divided Church and from that unity in myself can come the exterior and visible unity of the Church. For if we want [...]

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The Desire for Christian Unity

The life of the Church reproduces on a large scale the life of the individual soul. The Christian Church in its two thousand years of existence has gone through the same religious experience as the Christian, the same crises and the same conflict.
I want to touch upon one aspect of this interior and intimate conflict [...]

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Christian Unity involves the whole Church

We speak increasingly of Christian unity but I wonder how many people understand what it means.
Ask a Christian, even an enlightened one, and he will almost always tell you: “If the heads of the churches reach agreement, we shall have union.”
At first sight this appears reasonable. We all have the impression that union would be [...]

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On simplicity of faith

It would have been truly a blessing if the preaching of the Gospel had forever shone brilliantly in Christ’s Church in all its unspeculative simplicity. It would have been genuinely salvific if the seal imprinted by the invocation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit upon those undergoing regeneration through baptism had been seen by all [...]

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The Final Ravenna Document

RAVENNA, Italy, NOV. 15, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Here is the final document of the plenary assembly of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, held Oct. 8-14 in Ravenna. The statement, which was released today, is titled “Ecclesiological and Canonical Consequences of the Sacramental Nature of the Church: [...]

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Archbishop Vsevolod on Primacy and Conciliarity (4)

Part I | Part II | Part III
Canon XXXIV of the Holy Apostles prescribes that the primate shall not “do anything without the advice and consent and approval of all.” But in the “Code of Canons” which John Paul II promulgated in 1990, we find the amazing claim that “Romanus Pontifex a nemine iudicatur” – [...]

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Archbishop Vsevolod on Primacy and Conciliarity (3)

Part I | Part II
A perfect harmony between primacy and conciliarity may be an ideal that is unattainable in this world. But it remains true that each of these true attributes is essential for the Church. Even in our present condition, we must continue to strive to keep both of these attributes, primacy and conciliarity [...]

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Archbishop Vsevolod on Primacy and Conciliarity (2)

Part I
My English colleague, Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia, remarks (perhaps with a degree of frustration) that each time he attempts to explain what an Orthodox understanding of the universal primacy should be, the Catholics in the conversation invariably respond by expressing their complete agreement and affirming that what Bishop Kallistos has said is exactly what [...]

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Archbishop Vsevolod on Primacy and Conciliarity (1)

“It behoves the Bishops of every nation to know the one among them who is the first or chief, and to recognize him as their head, and to refrain from doing anything superfluous without his advice and approval: but, instead, each of them should do only what is necessitated by his own parish and by [...]

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