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Cardinal Kurt Koch, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting
Christian Unity, gave a public lecture at the Orthodox Center of the
Ecumenical Patriarchate in Chambésy (Geneva, Switzerland) on 16 December
2019. The title of his lecture was: “Towards the unity of the Church in
East and West: Paths to overcome the divisions between the Roman
Catholic Church, the Oriental Orthodox Churches and the Orthodox
Church”. The lecture gathered a large audience of professors and
students from the Universities of Fribourg and Geneva, the Ecumenical
Institute of Bossey and of the Institute of Post-Graduate Studies in
Orthodox Theology, as well as people interested in ecumenism. The
speaker, well known to the Swiss audience since he was the previous
bishop of Basel and a former student and colleague of the late
Metropolitan Damaskinos Papandreou, was welcomed by the director of the
Orthodox Center of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, Metropolitan Maximos of
Switzerland.
The first part of the lecture of Cardinal Koch dealt with overcoming
the first divisions that appeared in the Church after the Ecumenical
Councils of Ephesus (431) and of Chalcedon (451), because certain
ecclesial communities refused to accept the doctrinal christological
decisions of these Councils and therefore separated from the Church of
the Empire. The cardinal reminded that already in 1971, the first
consultation of Pro-Oriente in Vienna, which was attended by
representatives of the Oriental Orthodox Churches, set itself the task
of dealing with the issue of the Council of Chalcedon. Thus, the
ecumenical conversations between the Roman Catholic Church and the
Eastern Orthodox Churches have mainly focused on Christological issues.
These important preliminary ecumenical works prepared and made possible
the subsequent official dialogues and Christological declarations which
were then signed by the Pope of Rome and the heads of various Oriental
Orthodox Churches. An International Joint Commission for Theological
Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches,
co-chaired today by Cardinal Koch, was able to start its activity in
2003 on the basis of the theological work carried out to date. Since
then, two documents were adopted, one on “The nature, constitution and
mission of the Church” and the other on “The exercise of communion in
the life of the early Church and its repercussions on our quest for
communion today”.
The second part of the lecture dealt with the so-called great schism
in the Church between East and West, generally linked to the year 1054,
when the mutual excommunications between Rome and Constantinople were
pronounced. Koch underlined that “this is less of a historical date than
a symbolic one.” He reminded that fifty years ago, the historic meeting
between the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras and Pope Paul VI in
Jerusalem in 1964 expressed the reciprocal desire to restore love
between the two Churches. It was followed by another historic event in
December 1965, when the highest representatives of the two Churches
“removed from memory and from the middle of the Church” the reciprocal
anathemas of 1054. These events initiated a two-folded dialogue, since,
as the Cardinal pointed out, “The dialogue of charity and the dialogue
of truth go together, just as love and truth cannot be separated.” This
led to the creation of the International Joint Commission for
Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox
Church, whose co-president is Cardinal Koch today, to deal with
controversial issues inherited from the past.
The first two plenary sessions of the International Joint Commission
at Patmos and Rhodes in 1980 prepared the methodology of the dialogue
and the themes to be addressed during the first phase of the dialogue.
From 1980 to 1990, broad convergences on fundamental questions of faith
and important theological themes were identified between Orthodox and
Catholics. However, problems arose in the second decade from 1990 to
2000, since events of that period rekindled on the Orthodox side the old
controversies concerning uniatism and proselytism, which weighed
heavily on the atmosphere of dialogue and led to a change in the
ecumenical agenda. In 2006, the plenary meeting in Belgrade examined a
document on “Ecclesiological and canonical consequences of the
sacramental nature of the Church. Ecclesial communion, conciliarity and
authority” which was finalized at the next plenary meeting in Ravenna in
2007. Koch noted that the Ravenna document represents an important
advance in the Orthodox-Catholic dialogue since, for the first time, the
two partners in dialogue were able to declare together that the Church
needs a primacy at all her levels, including at the universal level.
Subsequently, the plenary meeting in Chieti in 2016 produced another
document entitled “Synodality and primacy in the first millennium.
Towards a common understanding at the service of the unity of the
Church”. The next step will be studying “Primacy and synodality in the
second millennium and today”. It is not easy to reach a common reading
of history and this difficulty is naturally accentuated due to the
different developments that have undergone in the doctrine and practice
of the Church on both sides during the second millennium, the period
during which Christians in the East and in the West lived for the most
part separated from each other.
The future work of the Commission will deal with the theme: “Towards
the unity of faith. Theological and canonical questions.” It shall
recapitulate what has already been done in the theological dialogue in
order to identify, in a second step, the theological and canonical
questions which still have to be resolved in order to restore communion
between the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Church. “It is an urgent
duty to make a contribution so that this path, which started with so
rich promises in Jerusalem fifty years ago, finds its goal in the
Eucharistic agape” concluded the Cardinal.
The public lecture was concluded by a discussion chaired by
Archbishop Job of Telmessos, the Rector of the Institute of
Post-Graduate Studies in Orthodox Theology of Chambesy and the Orthodox
co-president of the International Joint Commission for Theological
Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.
