Q: Pope Benedict XVI has made this ecumenical dialogue – particularly with the Russian Orthodox Church – a priority of his pontificate. Why is this a priority for this Pope?
Bishop Farrell: Well, let me start by saying yes there is a certain priority [with the Russian Orthodox] because that is the biggest of all the Orthodox Churches. But, this interest and desire for greater communion with the Orthodox embraces the entire Orthodox world to the point where our theological dialogue with the Orthodox cannot be with individual Orthodox Churches. We have agreed from the very beginning that it has to be with all of them together because all of them together form a unity. They have the same principals, they have the same structures and they have the same tradition, the same liturgical values and beauty. So they work as one in the theological dialogue.
Now, in the meantime we also have bilateral or direct relationships with each one of these individual Orthodox Churches and since the Second Vatican Council, these relationships have developed enormously. With some Churches it has been faster than with others, with some it is deeper than with others, but we can say that with all of the Orthodox Churches, without exclusion, we have at this point very friendly, very open and very constant contact and collaboration in many ways. When Pope Benedict XVI says that yes, the dialogue with the Orthodox Churches is a priority, this is clear and if you ask me why I will simply say because they are so close to us. We have the same faith, we have the same sacraments, we have the same apostolic succession; therefore we absolutely consider that every one of their bishops and their priests are true bishops and true priests. In that we have a closeness that we do not have with any other Christian community.
“In that we have a closeness that we do not have with any other Christian community.”
Yes and no. There is a similar closeness, and similar attitude on Rome’s part, towards the “Oriental Orthodox” (or “Non-Chalcedonian” or “Miaphysite”) churches — the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the Malankara Syriac Church of South India, and the Syriac Orthodox Church — and towards the “Church of the East and of the Assyrians,” the last remnant of the so-called “Nestorian” Church, which once extended from Mesopotamia to Mongolia and from China to the Crimea. In fact, a long tripartite “theological dialogue” between Rome, the Assyrian Church and the Chaldean Catholic Church (an Eastern Catholic Church in communion with Rome which originated in the 17th Century and eventually brought the majority of these so-called Nestorians into communion with Rome) by 2005 had settled all outstanding theological and practical differences between the Assyrians and Rome, save on the papacy (and the difficulties for the Assyrians even there proved to be more practical and “nationalistic” than theoretical) — whereupon the parties to the dialogue agreed to take a “breather” from the conversations. Still, there is open and official “eucharistic hospitality” between the Latin and Chaldean Catholics, on the one hand, and the Assyrians, on the other. Catholic and Assyrian clergy cannot “concelebrate” the Eucharist, however, for the schism has not yet been healed.
There is a similar situation between the Catholic Church and the Polish National Catholic Church in the United States and Canada (the PNCC originated as a schism over parochial property ownership in Scranton, Pa, in 1898), although it is complicated by the fact that a substantial portion of the PNCC’s clergy are former Catholic priests (often immigrants from Poland), who left the Catholic Church in order to get married.