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68 Jurist 460 (2008)
A Diversity of Polities Patriarchal Leadership in the Orthodox Churches

handle is hein.journals/juristcu68 and id is 468 raw text is: THE JURIST 68 (2008) 460-496 A DIVERSITY OF POLITIES PATRIARCHAL LEADERSHIP IN THE ORTHODOX CHURCHES' ADAM A.J. DEVILLE* Introduction Stereotypes abound about the churches of the Christian East. It is, e.g., a commonplace among lazy journalists or tendentious polemicists2 that the Orthodox churches are local churches synodically governed with very little centralized authority, and generally headed by a patriarch with limited powers, whereas the Catholic Church is an international papal monarchy bereft of synodical government and possessed of an extremely centralized and powerful Roman curial bureaucracy inserting itself into all aspects of the Church's life. This commonplace belies, inter alia, the fact of a great deal of diversity among the Orthodox churches. Demon- strating the details of that diversity is the burden of this paper, which ex- amines Orthodox structures and polity as part of the ongoing ecumenical project of searching for new and acceptable models of primacy in the Church. As ecumenists are well aware, the last stumbling block to Orthodox- Catholic unity is of course papal primacy. In seeking a way around that stumbling block, and in response to the famous question posed in 1995 by Pope John Paul II in Ut unum sint, where he asked (§95-96) pastors and theologians of non-Catholic traditions to assist him in coming up with new models for the exercise of the papal ministry so that it could again be an instrument of Christian unity, it seems that the models of ecclesiastical governance in the Christian East may be helpful in illumi- * Assistant Professor of Theology, University of Saint Francis, Ft. Wayne, Indiana. This is a revised version of a paper presented at a meeting of the Peter and Paul Sem- inar in Ottawa in March 2007 The author wishes to register his gratitude to Professor Catherine Clifford of the Faculty of Theology at Saint Paul University, Ottawa, for the in- vitation to deliver the paper to the Seminar and for her feedback on it. 2 See, e.g., Michael Whelton, Popes and Patriarchs: An Orthodox Perspective on Roman Catholic Claims (Ben Lomond, CA: Conciliar Press, 2006). See the author's re- view of this deplorable book in The Canadian Journal of Orthodox Christianity 2 (2007): http://www.cjoc.ca/pdf/Vol2-W-3%20Popes&Patriarchs3.PDF

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