publicorthodoxy
In June of 594, Pope Gregory the Great received a letter from
Constantina, the empress, asking him to send the head of St. Paul to
Constantinople so that she and others might benefit from venerating the
bodily remains of such a great saint. St. Gregory denied the request,
noting that it was not the custom of the Roman Church to dismember the
bones of the saints.
A great deal has happened between Rome and Constantinople since the sixth century, but Pope Francis’s decision last week to send the Ecumenical Patriarch an actual portion of the body of St. Peter
should be understood as nothing short of remarkable. More than anything
else, it is a clear indication of the pontiff’s desire to advance the
cause of Christian unity.
A point of clarification might help to demonstrate why Francis’s gift is both so unprecedented and significant.
Since late antiquity, the bishops of Rome have used relics to pursue
diplomatic ends. But the relics they distributed were typically not the
physical remains of the saints. Rather, they were a piece of cloth or
metal that had come into contact with a saint’s body. For most of its
history, the Vatican was a destination for bodily relics, not a
distribution center.
Pope Gregory
was the first pope to write extensively about the miraculous power of
relics; he was also the first pope to use the relics of St. Peter as a
central piece of his international diplomacy. On more than a dozen
occasions, the pontiff sent the filings of the chains that had bound St.
Peter in order to coax secular and ecclesiastical officials to support
one of the pontiff’s initiatives or to thank them for having done so.
In the centuries after Gregory’s tenure, Rome began to accumulate a
large number of bodily relics. Some might say this was done out of
devotion, others might argue that it was a strategy designed to assert
control over popular devotion. Either way, only Constantinople possessed
more relics than Rome…until it didn’t. In the thirteenth century,
Crusaders sacked Constantinople and seized its religious treasure. Some
of the looted relics went to monasteries and cathedrals across Western
Europe; the majority went to Rome.
The 1960s witnessed a remarkable thaw in Orthodox/Catholic relations.
In part, this was achieved by a return of stolen relics: a portion of
St Andrew the Apostle was returned to the Church of Greece; part of St.
Mark the Evangelist was returned to the Coptic Church.
In 2004, Pope John Paul II’s final public act served as a poignant
end to his life-long commitment to Christian unity—he and Ecumenical
Patriarch Bartholomew co-officiated at a prayer service that witnessed
the return of St. Gregory the Theologian and St. John Chrysostom to the
Christians of Constantinople. During their lives, both saints had served
as Archbishop of Constantinople, but their bodies had been in Rome
since the Fourth Crusade.
Pope Francis’s gift of a bodily relic of St. Peter is so remarkable
because, unlike these other recent exchanges, it is not a righting of a
previous wrong, not a return to the Orthodox of something that was
historically theirs. No, Francis’s gift of a Petrine relic to the
Ecumenical Patriarch is significant because it is an unfettered
divestment of portion of what is arguably the Vatican’s most precious
religious treasure—the very foundation of its symbolic authority in the
Christian world.
In the Middle Ages, the popes used the relics of St. Peter and the legacy of St. Peter
as a weapon to assert their authority over other ecclesiastical and
political leaders. But Pope Francis has turned the medieval paradigm on
its head. In his hands, the relics of St. Peter function as a gift of
Christian love. In Bartholomew, Francis sees as a genuine brother. With
this act, Francis is signaling that he is willing to go further than any
of his predecessors—even the sainted Gregory—to pursue reconciliation.
American Christians are so subconsciously formed by a
Protestant/post-Protestant outlook that even US Catholics and Orthodox
typically fail to appreciate the religious and cultural power of the
relics of the saints. On a recent trip to Romania, I was asked about
religious observance in the US—my interlocutor was not very concerned
about Liturgy, personal prayer, or fasting; he wanted to know whether
American Christians had access to the bodies of the saints.
While many Americans may not understand the genuine significance of
the bestowal of a relic of St. Peter, Pope Francis clearly does.
George Demacopoulos is the Fr. John Meyendorff and Patterson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies and Co-Director of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University.
Note: An expanded version of this essay is forthcoming. A link will be provided here when available.
Public Orthodoxy seeks to promote conversation by providing a forum for diverse perspectives on contemporary issues related to Orthodox Christianity. The positions expressed in this essay are solely the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Orthodox Christian Studies Center.