The mixed results of the ecumenical dialogue since the Second Vatican Council have made it clear that the primacy of the Bishop of Rome remains the single most serious obstacle on the path of ecumenism.
In his landmark 1995 encyclical Ut unum sint, Pope John Paul II reiterated the constant teaching that the Catholic Church “has preserved the ministry of the Successor of the Apostle Peter, the Bishop of Rome”. He also invited leaders and theologians of other Christian communities to engage in a “patient and fraternal dialogue on this subject…to find a way of exercising the primacy which, while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission, is nonetheless open to a new situation”.
This book explores in depth the discussion of papal primacy in the Catholic-Orthodox, Catholic-Lutheran and Catholic Anglican dialogues, along with an appendix on the concept of “Sister Churches”. Each chapter describes how the primacy is viewed in the respective churches or ecclesial communities, then it analyzes the documents of the official ecumenical dialogue and realistically evaluates the results achieved thus far.
Father Adriano Garuti, O.F.M., since 1975, has served with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith while continuing to teach ecclesiology and ecumenism at the Antonianum.
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Reviews
Average rating for Reviews: 3. Based on: 1 Review.
Review By: Anonymous From Ottawa, Canada 3.0/5A Good Handbook but a Tendentious Commentary, 12/13/2004
Adriano Garuti’s book is a detailed summary and analysis of the topic of the papacy in the official Orthodox-Catholic, Anglican-Catholic, and Lutheran-Catholic international dialogues. The seventeen-page bibliography and copious footnotes are themselves worth the price of the book. It does provide some analysis—-this, however, is the weakest part of the book—-but it should be read primarily as an ecumenically useful reference work. Garuti begins by trying to be terminologically precise. Thus, he demonstrates that papal primacy (and especially jurisdiction) has not been systematically treated in the ecumenical dialogues but has been an issue running more or less alongside related ecumenical discussions—about ecclesiology, episcopacy, or primacy in general. Garuti’s book, therefore, simply sums up what has been done thus far and demonstrates just how much work remains to be done on papal primacy per se. After a thin introductory chapter, “The Primacy as an Ecumenical Problem,” Garuti turns to Orthodox arguments about primacy. A failure to account for primacy in the Church still bedevils Orthodoxy internally as well as in its external relations with the Catholic Church: “insufficient attention has been paid in the Catholic-Orthodox dialogue to the problem of the primacy of the Bishop of Rome.” After two more sections, one on Catholic-Lutheran and one on Catholic-Anglican dialogues on primacy and the papacy, Garuti ends the book by appending to it his lengthy article, “Sister Churches: Reality and Questions,” originally published in 1996. It is a penetrating and sobering analysis of a term that, he suggests, has been taken up with understandable enthusiasm in Orthodox-Catholic ecumenism but has been used somewhat carelessly, functioning like a talisman whose frequent invocation could, as if by magic, bring about the unity we seek. Garuti debunks such wishful thinking, demonstrating that “sister church” is often used to paper over otherwise glaring chasms. For all his terminological exactitude, there are problems with this book’s lack of precision in two ways. The first is that the apparatus of the book is very cumbersome: rare is the page that is not overwhelmed with quotes and therefore footnotes. (Many of Garuti’s sources, of course, are Italian while a few are in French and German; he evidences only a passing familiarity with much of the recent ecumenical work published in English.) While an abundance of notation is often thought to be a sign of serious scholarship, in this case their sheer number make for very disjointed reading, not least because more than a few of them are tangential to the topic at hand. The editor should have pruned more rigorously. The second, more serious and certainly more irritating flaw with the book is that the line is never clear between sober, objective presentation of documents (as in a reference manual) and a more tendentious presentation of them (as in an argumentative treatise). Thus are the boundaries in this book blurred, and one is sometimes starkly confronted with two Fr. Adriano Garuttis at work: the sober and balanced reporter of material in one sentence, and in the very next sentence an old-fashioned hardcore apologist-—not to say polemicist-—capable of astonishing assertions that “the Bishop of Rome as the visible principle of the unity of the universal Church” will remain since he is “by divine mandate the supreme authority over all the Churches, including the Orthodox Churches, which derive their ecclesial character from and in the universal Church, and precisely because they do not acknowledge this authority they find themselves in an ecclesial condition that is wounded, that is to say, irregular”! Such statements are few and far between, but when they do occur, the reader is unnerved into thinking of the book as a thinly veiled apologia pro ecclesiae sua. Indeed, Garuti often chides the Catholic members of the various dialogues for being insufficiently clear and rigorous in their upholding the Catholic side of things: the “documents [of the Orthodox-Catholic Dialogue] seem to be composed predominantly—if not exclusively—in an Orthodox key or, to put it more precisely, they reflect the theses of several present-day Orthodox theologians, who are joined by some Catholic theologians as well.” In the end, however, such a thing should not be a criticism but a source and sign of the genuinely universal nature of Catholicism properly so called: as one member of the North American Orthodox-Catholic dialogue to whom I spoke put it, everything that is good in Orthodoxy can find a home within a genuinely Catholic Church—and vice versa. Garuti at times operates from the idea that if “Orthodox” ideas are advanced, it is at the expense of “Catholic” ones. Such an approach to ecumenism as a zero-sum game needs to be abandoned forever. As Garuti’s otherwise very substantial achievement shows, we have, here as elsewhere—and nowhere more clearly than on the papacy—a very great deal of work ahead of us in abandoning old ideas, dealing directly with a new situation and its difficult issues, and in all things seeking that unity which Christ wills for His Church. This book, sometimes in spite of itself, shows us where we have come from and how much more work we have to do.
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