As we have already seen, the last reconciliation of the Orthodox Church with the Holy See took place at the Council of Florence in 1439. On this occasion, also, the Coptic, Abyssinian, Jacobite, Maronite, and Armenian Churches were wholly or partially united with the great Mother Church, from which they had so long been separated. It was then that the Uniate Churches already referred to had their origin. But as the reunion of the Orthodox Church had been based on political rather than ecclesiastical grounds it was of short duration, for it was formally repudiated by the Byzantines in 1472, nineteen years after the occupation of Constantinople by the Ottoman army under Mohammed the Conqueror.
But, although the reunions effected at the Councils of Lyons and Florence were so short-lived, the hope of an eventual and enduring reunion has always been cherished not only by the Latins but by an influential body of the Orthodox Church as well. It will suffice here to refer to two recent efforts to secure reunion—one of which was made by the Œcumenical Patriarch, Joachim III, a little less than two decades ago, and one made by Pope Leo XIII a few years earlier.
In a noted encyclical addressed to the divers Orthodox Churches, the Œcumenical Patriarch requested them to consider the question of reunion of Christendom. His courteous and charitable references in this letter to the Latin Church and his expressed hope that it and the Orthodox may again be reunited evince a man of a deeply religious spirit, whose sole object was the cause of Christ, which, as he conceived it, would be immensely advanced by the restoration of Church unity. But the replies which he received from the sister Church—those in communion with the Patriarch of Constantinople—soon convinced him that his efforts in the direction of the proposed reunion were doomed to failure.
In his famous encyclical Præclara—aptly called the “Testament of Leo XIII.”—which was addressed on June 20, 1894, to “Princes and Peoples,” His Holiness speaks to his wayward and error-bound children in words of surpassing tenderness and deepest paternal solicitude. There is not a word of reproach, not a single expression to wound even the most sensitive.[344] He refers lovingly to the East, “whence salvation spread over the whole world”; to the resplendent history of their venerable sees; to the Greeks who had occupied the Chair of Peter and had edified the Church by their learning and virtue. In his plea for reunion he declares: “No great gulf separates us; except for a few smaller points we agree so entirely with you that it is from your teaching, your customs and rites that we often take proofs for Catholic dogma.”[345] And referring to certain unfounded charges that had often been made against the Holy See, he declares in the most positive terms that no Pope has the slightest desire to diminish the dignity and rights of any of the great Patriarchates of the East. And as for their venerable customs “we shall,” he assures them, “provide in a broad and generous spirit.”
Had the occupant of the Patriarchal See of Constantinople been imbued with the spirit of his illustrious countryman, Cardinal Bessarion, who labored so strenuously for Church reunion at the Council of Florence, and had he been actuated by a tithe of the zeal and charity and love of peace that so distinguished the great St. Athanasius of Alexandria, there is reason to believe that the Sovereign Pontiff’s gentle and noble letter would have met a very different reception and that measures would have been taken ere this to terminate a schism which during ten long centuries has been so prolific of evil to untold millions of souls redeemed at an infinite price.
But, unfortunately for the Eastern Churches, as well as for the Church of Rome, Anthimos VII was then Œcumenical Patriarch. His offensive and abusive reply to the gracious and generous appeal of the renowned successor of the Fisherman shows that in character and zeal for souls and ardent love of the Church of Christ he was the very opposite of the great Pontiff whose overtures he so disdainfully and so ignominiously rejected.
Although the efforts to restore union which were made by Joachim III and Leo XIII were, apparently, completely ineffectual, there can be no doubt that they set people—both clergy and laity—to thinking, and that Church unity is now nearer realization than it has been for centuries. Thanks to more frequent communication between the East and the West, as well as to the all-powerful agency of the press, the people of the Eastern Churches are beginning to realize as never before the extent and magnitude of the frightful evils that have been engendered by the Erastianism and the Philetism which so dominate the Churches of Russia and the Balkans. They have learned that most of the hatred, dissensions, and race antagonisms which have so grieved and afflicted them may be traced to their lack of a central ecclesiastical authority and to the fact that their clergy have been forced to become mere tools of the government. Comparing their condition before the Great Schism with what it is now, they find to their sorrow that they are suffering from arrested development; that their boasted conservatism is but an euphemism for fossilization; that they have long ceased to be a living, active force, and that their only hope of regaining their erstwhile power and prestige is to become reunited with the Apostolic See.
Those who were familiar with the history of the past will recall the days when the eminent saints and scholars Athanasius, Clement, and Cyril of Alexandria reflected such honor on the Church in Egypt; when St. John Damascene and St. Ephrem were the glory of Syria and Mesopotamia; when St. Basil, St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Gregory Nazianzen were the great intellectual luminaries of Asia Minor and the revered doctors of the entire Church of Christ. And pondering these facts it may occur to them that had Photius been less ambitious and more religious he might now be numbered not among sowers of scandal and schism—
Seminator di scandalo e di scisma[346]
but among the great Fathers who were ever-zealous promoters of the good name and the sacred union of the Church Universal.