In a remarkable speech in Budapest, at the close of the proceedings of the 27th International Congress of the Society for the Law of the Eastern Churches, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew expresses his desire for restoration of full communion with the Church of Rome.
Focusing on the theme, “The Bishop of Rome: Future Horizons from Ancient Traditions for Catholics and Orthodox,” Bartholomew recalled then Professor Joseph Ratzinger’s principle that “Rome cannot demand from the East more of a doctrine of primacy than what was formulated and lived in the first millennium.”
He further highlighted Patriarch Athenagoras’s description of the Pope of Rome as “the one presiding in love,” explaining that Orthodox tradition understands Roman primacy as a form of loving service exercised “within, and never above, the communion of sister Churches.”
“This felicitous phrase of Patriarch Athenagoras — ‘the one presiding in love,’ an expression drawn from the ancient salutation of Saint Ignatius of Antioch to the Church of Rome — encapsulates, in a few words, the entire Orthodox understanding of the Roman primacy: a primacy of loving service, exercised within, and never above, the communion of sister Churches”, he said.
“Patriarch Athenagoras’ understanding of this primacy was, in fact, inseparably linked to the ancient institution of the Pentarchy of the Patriarchs, within which the Pope of Rome was recognized as “first among equals” — primus inter pares — precisely as the “Patriarch of the West.”
“The institution of the Pentarchy — the five great ancient Sees of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem — constituted, during the first Christian millennium, the very framework within which the unity of the universal Church found its most visible ecclesial expression.
The Ecumenical Patriarch welcomed the restoration of the papal title “Patriarch of the West” in 2024, calling it “a small but far from insignificant step” towards Christian unity. He reaffirmed his hope for “the restoration of full communion with the Church of Rome,” so that the Pentarchy might once again be complete.
“It is with no small sorrow that we acknowledge how, deprived for now a full millennium of the fellow-journeying of the Church of Rome — on account of the rupture of communion, which, would that it had never occurred, tore asunder the seamless tunic of the Lord …
“Yet we wish equally to affirm, … that this sorrow is inseparable from hope. We await, by grace and help from on high, the restoration of full communion with the Church of Rome within the one Body of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, so that the Pentarchy may once again be whole, and … the universal Church may again resound in the fullness of its ancient harmony.
Source: Orthodox Times