Ecumenism, the Panheresy of Our Age

WHAT ECUMENISM IS

Every age has its storm, and the reader has now been armed in the histories of all the others so that he may see this one clearly. The storm of our age is called ecumenism, and it must first be defined honestly, for the word is used loosely on every side.

Ecumenism, as this book uses the word, is not politeness toward the heterodox. It is not honest dialogue that calls them home. It is not cooperation in feeding the poor. None of these touches the faith, and the Church has never forbidden mercy or truth telling to anyone.

Ecumenism is a teaching about the Church: that the one Church of Christ is presently divided into many "churches," Orthodox and heterodox branches of one tree; that the confessions possess the grace of the Mysteries in their measure; and that unity is to be manufactured among them by mutual recognition, common prayer, and doctrinal minimalism, rather than by the return of the separated to the one Church that never ceased to exist. It is, in other words, a revision of the Creed's article on the Church. And because it gathers into itself the relativizing of dogma, the equalizing of truth and error, and the practical denial of the Church's unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity at once, Saint Justin of Ćelije gave it the name this chapter bears:

The saints of the North had condemned the disposition centuries before it organized itself and took a name. Saint Theodosius of the Kiev Caves, a founding father of Russian monasticism, warned his prince nine hundred years ago:

And in the very years the movement was gathering its councils, Saint John Maximovitch, the wonderworker of Shanghai and San Francisco, read its spirit as a prophet reads weather:

The sweetness of compromise, upheld by an endearing evil: no phrase in this chapter names the air of our age more exactly. The panheresy does not announce itself with horns; it arrives as niceness. And the saint marks the first casualty with precision, straightforwardness of confession, the plain, bareheaded Yes and No upon which the canon, and the Gospel before it, depend.

THE UNITY CHRIST PRAYED FOR

The movement's favourite text must be reclaimed before anything else, for no verse is more often quoted at the Orthodox, and none more carefully cut. On the night He was betrayed, the Lord prayed for His disciples and for all who would believe:

That they all may be one: the ecumenist stops there, and builds upon the fragment a mandate for union without truth. But the prayer does not begin there. It begins: sanctify them through thy truth. The oneness prayed for is the oneness of those sanctified in the truth, as the Father and the Son are one, a unity of being, not of negotiation. And it was answered, not deferred, at Pentecost, in the one Church whose unity this book has described from its second chapter. To read the twenty-first verse without the seventeenth is to pray for the wedding while deleting the bride's fidelity. The Lord's prayer is the charter of unity in the truth, and therefore the standing judgment upon every unity manufactured beside it.

ITS CHARTER AND ITS ACTS

Its history in the Orthodox world can be told in a page. In 1920 an encyclical of the patriarchate of Constantinople, addressed "unto the Churches of Christ everywhere," called the heterodox bodies churches, and proposed a fellowship among them on the model of the League of Nations. It is commonly regarded, by friends and critics alike, as the charter of Orthodox participation in the movement; and its first practical proposal, a common calendar, will concern us in the next chapter.

There followed decades of membership in the councils of the movement; common prayers repeated and defended; the lifting in 1965 of the excommunications of 1054 between Rome and Constantinople, an act performed with no repentance asked or given on either side, and so treating the schism as if it had been a quarrel of persons rather than a division in the faith; agreed statements that spoke of "sister churches"; and at last, in 2016, a council in Crete, styled the Holy and Great Council, whose documents used the name "churches" of the heterodox confessions, and were signed amid protest, several local Churches abstaining, and hierarchs refusing their signatures.

This book, after its own rule, distinguishes. Some acts and documents in this history are open and bareheaded. Others are ambiguous, capable of a better construction; and over the ambiguous the canon gives no warrant, as the next chapter will insist. But that the teaching itself, where it is openly preached, is the teaching described above, its own founding texts declare. And the Apostle saw the season coming: For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears.⁸¹

OLD ERRORS UNDER A NEW NAME

Now comes the question on which the whole application of this book to our age turns, and it deserves its full strength: has ecumenism ever been condemned? For the fifteenth canon protects separation only over a heresy already condemned by Synods or Fathers; and no Ecumenical Council has yet gathered to condemn ecumenism by that name. If the condition fails, every walling off over ecumenism is separation over an uncondemned matter, the very thing the canon's first half punishes.

We answer first from the canon's own words, which the objection quietly narrows: condemned by holy Synods or Fathers. And the Church has never taught that an error escapes its ancient condemnation by changing its name. The test, as Saint Vincent gave it, is whether the old judgment already reaches the new thing. A new label is not a new faith.

Then let the components be weighed one by one against the record. The ecclesiology of the divided Church stands against the Creed itself, one holy catholic and apostolic Church, defined by the Second Ecumenical Council. The practice of common prayer with the heterodox stands condemned by name in the canons of the Apostles and of Laodicea, which suspend and depose for that very act. The recognition of the mysteries of the heterodox stands against the forty-sixth Apostolic canon. And the movement's founding gesture toward the Latin West stands against the whole line of councils that judged the Latin innovations: the council of 879 to 880 under Saint Photios, which forbade every addition to the Creed; Blachernae in 1285; the Palamite councils, whose judgments the Synodikon proclaims every year; the Church's rejection of Florence; and the Encyclicals of the Eastern Patriarchs of 1848 and 1895, which call the papal novelties heresies in the plainest words.

And Saint Photios himself, whose council would forbid every addition to the Creed, had already weighed the chief of those additions in his encyclical to the East:

The bricks of ecumenism are old, condemned bricks. The building is new only in its arrangement. And the man who withdraws from its open preaching applies judgments the Church has already given, which is all the canon ever asked of him.⁸³

THE HONEST CONCESSIONS

And we concede, gladly, what is honestly to be conceded, for the concession is itself part of the confessing tradition. No Ecumenical Council has yet spoken. The faithful rightly long for one. A synodal act of that weight, when God grants it, will do what no book can do; and the confessors themselves have always awaited exactly this, the awaiting being half their posture. A synod of Russian bishops abroad did, in 1983, append an anathema against ecumenism to the Rite of Orthodoxy; and though its scope is debated among the Orthodox, and we flag the dispute plainly, it stands at the least as the witness of a synod of Orthodox bishops naming the error.

Meanwhile the line for the faithful is the canon's own line. Where the teaching is open, where the heterodox bodies are named churches in official texts against the protest of the Orthodox, where common prayer is public, repeated, and defended, there the elements condemned of old are being preached bareheaded under a new name, and the condition of the canon is met. Where the act is ambiguous, capable of an Orthodox reading, the canon gives no warrant; and the zealot who treats suspicion as proof has left the canon on its other side.

The confessor keeps both halves of that sentence, and keeps them with grief. For the panheresy is not an enemy outside the walls, but a sickness among our own fathers and brothers; and the only victory worth praying for is not their defeat, but their healing.⁸⁴