The Papal-Primacy Question

Clément’s proposal in Rome, autrement — that a reformed Roman primacy, understood as a service of communion rather than a universal jurisdiction, could be received in a reunited Church — drew serious Orthodox objection. This file states his argument once more in his own terms, states the objection in its own terms, is explicit about what can and cannot be sourced, and reaffirms what the Orthodox Church herself holds. It adjudicates nothing between Orthodox parties, and it revises nothing of what the Church has defined.

Tradition: Orthodox (Western Europe)

First, the Church’s position

Per METHODOLOGY §4.1, this is stated before anything else, because the intra-Orthodox argument takes place inside it and not around it.

The Orthodox Church does not accept the doctrines defined at the First Vatican Council on 18 July 1870 in the constitution Pastor Aeternus: that the Bishop of Rome possesses “full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church, not only in things pertaining to faith and morals, but also in those which pertain to the discipline and government of the Church throughout the whole world” (Pastor Aeternus, ch. 3), and that he teaches infallibly when he defines doctrine ex cathedra. The Church acknowledges that the see of Rome held a primacy of honour — presbeia timēs — in the first millennium, grounded in apostolic foundation, in the rank of the imperial capital, and in canonical order, and she holds that this is a primacy within the college of bishops and not a power above it. Peter’s confession of faith is the rock; the authority to bind and loose was given to all the apostles. These are the repository’s settled positions and are set out at Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism and Filioque and Papal Primacy.

Nothing in what follows revises this. Clément did not claim to revise it either.

Clément’s argument, in his own terms

Set out as he would set it out (the full account is at Rome, autrement and You Are Peter):

The primacy is a fact of the first millennium, not a Latin invention. The East venerated Peter at Rome and accepted Rome’s first place for more than a thousand years, within a working tension in which primacy and conciliarity corrected one another (Desclée de Brouwer publisher’s description of Rome, autrement).
What went wrong was the contamination of primacy by imperial power. The deformation is historical and therefore, in principle, reversible; it terminates in the definitions of 1870 (Catholic Books Review, review of You Are Peter, 2003; DeVille, First Things, November 2004).
The East deformed in the opposite direction. Autocephaly multiplied until Orthodoxy had no effective organ of universal communion at all (publisher’s description). Clément’s book issues challenges to both churches, not to one.
A recovered primacy would operate at three levels — local, regional, universal — as a service of communion (Hugh-Donovan, The Downside Review 134, no. 3 [2016]: 70–87).
Concretely: bishops elected locally rather than appointed from Rome; the Vatican City state relinquished; the authority of the post-Nicene Western councils clarified; a primacy exercised “with different gears” toward different parts of Christendom, so that the relation of Rome to Orthodoxy would be one of communion between sister churches, not of jurisdiction (DeVille; Catholic Books Review).
He conceded neither universal jurisdiction nor the 1870 infallibility.

The Orthodox case against it, in its own terms

The objection has five distinct strands, and they should not be run together, because they are not all equally strong and not all held by the same people.

1. Rome cannot accept the offer, and the offer therefore misdescribes the situation. This is the structural objection, and it is the most serious. The 1870 definitions are, for the Roman Church, irreformable dogma promulgated by an ecumenical council. A primacy shorn of universal ordinary jurisdiction is not what Rome has defined; a Rome that could accept Clément’s terms would be a Rome that had repudiated Vatican I. To propose reunion on the basis of a first-millennium primacy is therefore either to ask Rome to unsay a dogma — which its own doctrine of development and of conciliar authority forbids — or to leave the actual obstacle untouched while creating the impression that it has been addressed. The repository’s own summary of the state of the dialogue names the same point: the Chieti and Ravenna texts “agree on a universal taxis (order) with Rome as first, but the nature of that primacy — honour and service in synodality (Orthodox) versus jurisdiction by divine institution (Vatican I) — remains the unresolved core of the dispute” (Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism).

2. The historical premise is contested. Clément’s first-millennium narrative — a real primacy, accepted, exercised within conciliarity — is not universally granted by Orthodox historians and theologians. On a stricter reading, the Eastern acceptance of Roman precedence was always precedence in taxis only, never anything that could develop into the thing Rome later claimed, and to describe the first millennium as a working synthesis of primacy and conciliarity is already to concede the Roman framing of the question. The counter-reading holds that Rome’s interventions in the East were always contested when they went beyond honour, and that the Photian crisis and the events of 1054 exposed a disagreement that had been latent from the start (see The Photian Crisis and The Events of 1054).

3. The precedent of Florence. The standing Orthodox memory of union proposals is the Council of Ferrara–Florence of 1438–1439: a union signed by nearly the whole Greek delegation under political pressure, rejected by the faithful, and repudiated within a generation. Its sole non-signer, St Mark of Ephesus, is honoured by the Church precisely for not signing (see St Mark of Ephesus and The Attempted Unions). The lesson drawn is not that dialogue is forbidden but that a formula acceptable to theologians on both sides is not the same thing as unity of faith, and that the Church has been here before.

4. The effect on the faithful, whatever the author’s intent. Books like Rome, autrement, and still more the public gestures that accompanied them, are received by ordinary Christians as signals that the differences are negotiable. The anti-ecumenist argument catalogued in the repository at The Ecumenism Debate — the objection to language that implies a branch theory, the insistence that the Orthodox Church is the Church of Christ and not one Church among several — applies here with full force, and it does not depend on any misreading of what Clément wrote.

5. Uniatism, and the historical charge. Here the criticism runs the other way. DeVille, reviewing the English edition, objected that Clément repeats claims about “the annexation by Rome of vast Orthodox territories under the cover of uniatism” without adequate support and against recent scholarship (DeVille, First Things, November 2004). This is worth recording because it shows that the book was criticized from the Catholic side for being too hard on Rome at points, not only from the Orthodox side for being too soft — which is the ordinary fate of a mediating book.

The sourcing problem, stated plainly

This guide has not been able to locate a named, published Orthodox refutation of Rome, autrement or You Are Peter by an identifiable theologian. That is a real limitation, and it is reported rather than papered over.

What can be documented:

A traditionalist assessment in English. The site Orthodox England carries an article, “The Paris School and the Future,” which places Clément among French ecumenists whose positions it regards as coming as close to Roman Catholicism and Protestantism as is possible without lapsing from Orthodoxy, and which argues that the “Paris School” generates theological problems not found in Lossky. [Disputed: this guide was unable to retrieve the article directly at the time of writing and relies on a secondary summary of it; the wording above is a characterization, not a quotation, and the authorship is not established here.]
A divergence with Jean-Claude Larchet on the Filioque question. Larchet, the French Orthodox patristic scholar, has argued at length against the 1995 Vatican Clarification on the procession of the Holy Spirit; the Clarification drew on the work of the Dominican Jean-Miguel Garrigues, whose first article on the subject Clément had published in Contacts some twenty-five years earlier (bekkos.wordpress.com, “Remarks on Larchet’s critique of the 1995 Vatican Clarification,” 2025). This is a documented divergence of positions between two French Orthodox theologians on a doctrinal question at the heart of the schism. [Disputed: it is not, on the sources consulted here, a documented personal polemic against Clément, and this guide does not present it as one. Larchet's published assessment of Clément's theology of the body was warm (Larchet, review of *Corps de mort et de gloire*, RHPR 77, no. 1 [1997]: 94).]
The general anti-ecumenist current, on Mount Athos and in Greek and Russian traditionalist circles, whose objections to the whole post-1964 rapprochement are documented in the repository at The Ecumenism Debate and whose sharpest institutional expression was the Athonite protest against the Athenagoras–Paul VI meetings (see Mount Athos). Clément falls under this critique as an advocate of that rapprochement, not as its named target.

What the Church has said

Nothing about Olivier Clément. He was never censured, never condemned, never the subject of a synodal act; he taught at an Orthodox theological institute in good standing until the end of his life and was buried from an Orthodox church. Nor, on the other side, has any Orthodox Church adopted his proposals or given them any standing whatever.

The one relevant conciliar act of the period is the Holy and Great Council at Crete in June 2016, seven years after his death, which affirmed Orthodox participation in the ecumenical movement as “witness and responsibility, not compromise” while insisting that “the Orthodox Church’s participation in the WCC does not signify that she accepts the notion of the ‘equality of Confessions,’ and in no way is she able to accept the unity of the Church as an inter-confessional compromise” (Relations of the Orthodox Church with the Rest of the Christian World, §18; see The Crete Council 2016). Four autocephalous Churches did not attend, and the document was itself contested from the anti-ecumenist side. That is the state of the question: open, and argued.

The disposition

[Disputed: whether Clément's proposal on papal primacy is a legitimate theological exploration or a concession of what cannot be conceded. (a) The affirming reading holds that a Pope publicly asked for help, that almost no Orthodox answered, that Clément answered from within the tradition without conceding either universal jurisdiction or the 1870 infallibility, that his historical account is broadly shared by the official Catholic–Orthodox dialogue, and that a Church which refuses even to describe what it could accept has made reunion structurally impossible. (b) The critical reading holds that the terms Clément offers are terms Rome cannot take without repudiating its own dogma, so that the proposal changes nothing while creating an impression that something has changed; that the first-millennium narrative already concedes too much of Rome's framing; that Florence is the standing precedent for what happens when theologians agree ahead of the faithful; and that the cumulative effect of such proposals on ordinary Orthodox is to make the dogmatic difference look negotiable when it is not. Both readings are held by serious Orthodox. This guide states both and adjudicates neither. What is not in dispute, and is not subject to adjudication here, is the Church's own teaching, which stands as stated at the head of this file.]

References

Clément, Olivier. Rome, autrement: une réflexion orthodoxe sur la papauté. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1997. English: You Are Peter: An Orthodox Theologian’s Reflection on the Exercise of Papal Primacy. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2003.
First Vatican Council. Pastor Aeternus, 18 July 1870.
John Paul II. Ut Unum Sint, 25 May 1995.
DeVille, Adam A. J. Review of You Are Peter. First Things, November 2004. (Structural proposals; the uniatism criticism; the postscript; the paucity of Orthodox responses to the encyclical.)
“Olivier CLÉMONT [sic]: You Are Peter.” Catholic Books Review (catholicbooksreview.org), 2003.
Hugh-Donovan, Stefanie. “An Eastern Orthodox Reflection on Papal Primacy: Olivier Clément’s Response to Ut Unum Sint and the Ecclesial Legacy of Patriarch Athenagoras I.” The Downside Review 134, no. 3 (2016): 70–87.
Larchet, Jean-Claude. Review of Olivier Clément, Corps de mort et de gloire. Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 77, no. 1 (1997): 94.
“Remarks on Larchet’s critique of the 1995 Vatican Clarification.” De unione ecclesiarum (bekkos.wordpress.com), 7 May 2025. (Larchet’s critique of the 1995 Clarification; Garrigues’s first article published by Clément in Contacts.)
“The Paris School and the Future.” Orthodox England (orthodoxengland.org.uk). (Traditionalist assessment of the Paris School and of French Orthodox ecumenists including Clément; consulted via secondary summary — see the note in the text.)
Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church. Relations of the Orthodox Church with the Rest of the Christian World, Crete, June 2016, §18.
Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. Synodality and Primacy during the First Millennium (Chieti), 21 September 2016.