Rome, the Director of the Movement: The City of Seven Hills

Behind the assemblies, the dialogues, and the leagues of churches stands a director. The ecumenical movement wears a Protestant face in its origins, but its center of gravity, its destination, and its chief beneficiary is Rome. For toward what “unity” does every dialogue bend? Not toward the faith of the Seven Councils, Rome has never once offered to remove the Filioque from the Creed, to renounce the supremacy, or to return to the conciliar order she abandoned. The unity proposed is always, in the end, communion with the Pope. The confessions are not being gathered back to the Councils; they are being gathered to a throne.

Rome’s own documents confess it. When the movement was young, Pope Pius XI forbade Catholics to join it, declaring in Mortalium Animos (1928) that the union of Christians “can only be promoted by promoting the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it”, return, that is, to Rome. When Rome at last entered the movement at the Second Vatican Council (1962 to 1965), she changed her method, not her goal: the demand for return was clothed in the patience of dialogue, but the destination remained the same see. Thus the milestones of modern ecumenism are Roman milestones: the lifting of the anathemas with Constantinople (1965); the gatherings of the religions at Assisi (1986), convened and presided over by the Pope himself; the language of “sister churches” and “two lungs”; and Ut Unum Sint (1995), in which the Pope offered to seek “a way of exercising the primacy” acceptable to all, a papacy rebranded, never renounced. Rome does not come to the churches as a penitent; she receives them as a center. This is not dialogue among equals. Roman Catholicism is the main director of the movement of ecumenism.

And the Scripture had spoken beforehand of such a city. The Apostle John beheld a woman enthroned upon seven mountains: “And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth” (Revelation 17:9, KJV). One city above all others has borne from antiquity the name of the City of Seven Hills: Rome. Upon the woman’s forehead was written: “MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH” (Revelation 17:5, KJV). And of her cup the Scripture testifies: “all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication” (Revelation 18:3, KJV); and again, “the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication” (Revelation 17:2, KJV). The nations are not merely deceived; they are made drunk, and drunkenness is precisely the loss of discernment, the clouding of the intellect, the merry surrender of judgment. What better description of an age in which contradictory confessions embrace as one, and the faithful are lulled into forgetting where the Church is?

Nor is the identification of this city a novelty of later polemics; the Fathers and the most ancient interpreters knew which city the Apostle meant. Tertullian wrote: Tertullian read Babylon, in St John's Revelation, as a figure of the city of Rome. Victorinus, the earliest commentator on the Apocalypse, stated plainly: Victorinus read the seven heads as the seven hills on which the woman sits, that is, the city of Rome. Saint Jerome, writing from within her walls, did not hesitate to call Rome Babylon; and Blessed Augustine called Rome “a second Babylon” and the daughter of the first (City of God 18.2, 22). Even Saint Peter, writing his epistle from Rome, sent greetings from “The church that is at Babylon, elected together with you, saluteth you; and so doth Marcus my son.” (1 Peter 5:13, KJV), as the ancients understood (Eusebius, Church History 2.15). The Fathers spoke of the Rome of the Caesars, drunken with the blood of the martyrs; yet the Scripture they interpreted is not exhausted by a single age. When the see enthroned upon those same seven hills exalts itself above the Councils, alters the Creed of the Church, sheds the blood of the Orthodox at Constantinople and at Brest, and now gathers the nations and the confessions into her cup, the faithful recognize the portrait. It is for this reason that this writing, in treating the Great Schism, already heard the Scripture speak of “the woman drunken with the blood of the saints” (Revelation 17:6, KJV).

Here, too, the mystery of the cup is laid bare. The woman holds “a golden cup in her hand full of abominations” (Revelation 17:4, KJV), golden without, abomination within: the very image of a union beautiful in appearance and empty of truth. Ecumenism now speaks ceaselessly of “one cup.” But two cups are set before the nations: the Cup of the Lord, which is communion in the one faith, and the golden cup of Babylon, which is union without repentance. They cannot be drunk together: “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils” (1 Corinthians 10:21, KJV).

Therefore the call of the Scripture stands over the whole movement, and it is not an invitation into the league of churches, but a command out of it: “Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues” (Revelation 18:4, KJV). The Holy Spirit gathers the nations into the truth, as at Pentecost; Babylon gathers them into her cup. The one makes men sober and discerning; the other makes them drunk. And the Orthodox who truly follow the tradition know the difference, for they have tasted the true Cup, and will not exchange it.