07 — Rome, Otherwise

In 1995 John Paul II published the encyclical Ut Unum Sint, in which he invited the pastors and theologians of other churches to help him find “a way of exercising the primacy which, while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission, is nonetheless open to a new situation.” Very few Orthodox answered. Olivier Clément did, in Rome, autrement: une réflexion orthodoxe sur la papauté, Englished as You Are Peter: An Orthodox Theologian’s Reflection on the Exercise of Papal Primacy. This section sets out what he actually argued and what he refused to concede, and tells the story of his personal relation to John Paul II — which culminated in his writing the meditations for the papal Way of the Cross at the Colosseum on Good Friday 1998.

Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)

A necessary statement of standpoint. This repository is written from within the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church does not accept the doctrines defined at the First Vatican Council in 1870 — the universal ordinary jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome and his personal infallibility when defining doctrine ex cathedra — and nothing in this section revises that. The Church’s position is set out in the repository at Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism and Filioque and Papal Primacy, and it stands. What follows is an account of one Orthodox theologian’s proposal about how a primacy might be exercised in a reunited Church — a proposal that is his own, that has no conciliar standing whatever, and that a great many Orthodox reject. Section 08 reports the rejection.

File Focus
Rome, autrement and You Are Peter The book: its occasion in Ut Unum Sint, its historical method, the three-level account of primacy, the specific structural reforms proposed, and the limits Clément set
John Paul II and the Way of the Cross, 1998 The friendship; the invitation to write the Colosseum meditations for Good Friday 1998; Le Chemin de Croix à Rome; what the gesture meant and how it was read

See Also