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52 Jurist 109 (1992)
The Catholicity of the Local Church in the Patriarchate of Antioch after Chalcedon

handle is hein.journals/juristcu52 and id is 115 raw text is: THE JURIST 52 (1992) 109-129

THE CATHOLICITY OF THE LOCAL CHURCH IN THE
PATRIARCHATE OF ANTIOCH AFTER CHALCEDON
ANDRIE DE HALLEUX*
It is to Ignatius of Antioch that we owe the first theology of the
catholicity of the local Church: Wherever the bishop is, there is the
assembly, just as wherever Christ Jesus is, there is the Catholic
Church.' But Antioch, which became the metropolis of the fourth
patriarchate in the ancient pentarchy, today is the (non-residential)
see of several bishops who for historical and dogmatic reasons no
longer consider themselves in full mutual communion.
Besides the patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Chalcedonian and
Maximian Church (fourth and sixth ecumenical councils), there has
been since the sixth century a patriarch of the Syrian Orthodox Church
(the so-called Severian Church, which rejects Chalcedon's christolog-
ical formula). After the permanent separation of the Greek and Latin
Churches, Rome tried to restore the two dissident Antiochian
Churches to its hierarchical communion, but it succeeded only in di-
viding each of them internally, creating two Catholic oriental Churches
each with its own patriarch: the Syrian Catholic Church (since 1677)
and the Melkite Greek Catholic Church (since 1724). Then there is the
Maronite Church which arose from a Syriac monastic community that
immigrated to the mountains of Lebanon and whose patriarch goes
back to the first half of the eighth century. The perpetual communion
with Rome which it claims is disputed by historians who say it had a
monothelite origin.
Five patriarchs for the single local church of Antioch (not to mention
the Latin patriarchate, that offshoot of the Crusades, which no longer
exists): what a denial of the old canonical principle: A single bishop
for each city! Thank God, a climate of dialogue and cooperation has
* Professor of Patristics, Universitd Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve,
Belgium.
Smyrn. 8:2.

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