The following notes come from
Erick Ybarra, The Papacy: Revisiting the Debate Between
Catholics and Orthodox (Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Road, 2022)
As the reader can guess, this entire
book is a publication seeking to revisit the debate on the subject of the
papacy between Catholics and Orthodox. Admittedly, when I commenced my studies,
I had thought the case for Catholicism was far more compelling than any case
for Orthodoxy could afford. As of now, I am thoroughly convinced that this
debate is not concluded with a first round knockout for either side. I now sense
that if Catholicism does win this debate, it only wins going the full distance
of twelve rounds and by a remarkably close call. This is because the Byzantine
claims can be well supported by good historical evidence. (p. xvi)
[in summarizing the Pre-Nicene evidence for the Papacy]:
. . . the historical is left with
a number of explanations, none of which needs to be the logic of the First
Vatican Council. This does not mean that they were unaware of a theory of Roman
primacy that accords with the Vatican Council. My observations here are simply
in light of the limited amount of data and documentary evidence that exists
today which we can reconstruct the beliefs of the pre-Nicene era. (p. 157)
. . . there is still criteria of
falsification that would disprove the papacy and therefore Catholicism. And
here is explained why, if Catholicism wins the debates, it is by milligrams and
not a landslide. If it could ever be shown, as St. John H. Newman admitted,
that the magisterium of the Catholic Church has contradicted itself in the
solemn pronouncements on faith or morals, then everything written in this book,
or in any book, in defence of Catholicism would immediately shatter to pieces.
And to be both honest and fair, I have surveyed at least two major instances
that the Orthodox can choose that would make a big problem for Catholics,
namely, the events surrounding both Pope Honorius and Pope Vigilius, especially
their seeming subjection to the authority of ecumenical councils. In
particular, the Fifth Council, as I noted in the relevant chapter, comes very
close to favoring some kind of conciliarism over papalism by its eighth
session, rejecting that one person, the pope in particular, can determine the
faith of the whole Church by his own individual decrees. On the contrary, they
look to the Apostles and the Fathers and see the tradition, which says that
final decisions must be made altogether with the brethren in councils.
There is this, and there is also
the hypothetical situation that the Orthodox can pose about what happens when
the pope himself becomes a source of disunity? I have provided my reflections
on this, but I must be candid in saying the Orthodox have many solid punches
that land clean in this debate over primacy. This calls to mind the relatively simple
yet profound criticisms levelled against papal infallibility by the late French
Cistercian monk who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy from Catholicism,
Archimandrite Placide (Deseille) Simonopetritis, in his Stages of a
Pilgrimage. On the sentence of the Sixth Council against Honorius, he
wrote: “In any case, a similar condemnation of a pope would be unthinkable
today. One must thus admit that there has been an evolution” (“Stages of a
Pilgrimage,” in The Living Witness of the Holy Mountain, ed. Hieromonk
Alexander Golitzin [South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon’s Seminary, 1996] 81). Who can
deny the force of that? On top of this, each and every time the pope was
suspected of being guilty of heresy in the first millennium, even the bishops
of the West, not to mention the East, felt no anxiety over removing the pope’s
name from the diptychs of communion. Could we picture something like this
happening today? (Perhaps further light on this will be shed when the Church
looks more upon what to do in the case of an overtly heretical pope) What these
actions show is that sizable portions of the Church were not convinced of an
invincible rule that one had to be in communion with the pope of Rome for their
eternal salvation. Otherwise, they would have avoided severance from unity with
the Apostolic See just like one would avoid denying the name of Christ before
his persecutors. And with that single element gone, potentially the whole
doctrine of the papacy is ground to powder. We also saw the peculiar case of
St. Maximum the Confessor who originally pressed hard on the a priori infallibility
of Rome, but when pushed under trial, perhaps against his will, he seems to
indicate that he was willing to sever his unity with the See of Rome if the
latter caved in to union with heretics.
These are powerful points to
consider, and Catholics should not wave them off. On the other hand, the
Orthodox might have good points to make on Vigilius and Honorius but then there
is an issue with their wholesale rejection of something their Fathers and
saints held to be traditional orthodoxy, namely, the essential Petrine-Roman
constitution of universal primacy. (pp. 689-91)
