The Visible Head of the Church

“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!” (Psalm 133:1)

“Can two walk together, unless they are agreed?” (Amos 3:3)

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Apologetics isn’t my thing. However, I’d like to offer an Orthodox perspective on a conversation that took place on my favorite Catholic podcast, Pints with Aquinas. The host, Matt Fradd, is a member of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. He has a great deal of affection for the Orthodox. And I have a great deal of affection for Matt. I was blessed to appear on his show last year to discuss my conversion from Satanism. The video has almost 700,000 views now, glory to God.

In the latest episode of Pints, Fradd interviews Dr. Richard DeClue, a Catholic theologian who works with Bishop Robert Barron at the Word on Fire Institute. It’s a fantastic discussion, centering mostly on the late, great Pope Benedict XVI. If you haven’t watched the episode, you should.

At one point in the episode, Fradd and DeClue discuss how Catholics see the papacy as a “Eucharistic office.” DeClue believes that, if we Orthodox can adopt this perspective, we will develop a deeper appreciation for the papacy. You can watch the clip here:

I’ll also transcribe the relevant bits (edited for clarity):

The Eucharist is the source of our unity as the Church. Even St. Thomas Aquinas says this. The res tantum—the effect of the sacrament of the Eucharist—is the bond of charity of the members of the Church. So, the unity of the church is the res of the sacrament of the Eucharist. That’s the effect that it has. That’s what the Eucharist does. It unifies us as the body of Christ. Which means that it must be celebrated in unity. So, unity is therefore the effect, and that means it can only be properly celebrated in universal communion. . . .

The different celebrations of the Eucharist must be in communion with one another in order to be fully what they are. This is what the Early Church Fathers were saying, right? You don’t go to the table, to the altar, of a schismatic. You need to have communion on a local level; that’s where the bishop comes into play. And you need to have communion on the universal level, to keep all the local churches one church throughout the world and throughout time. And be professing one faith.

So, there must be a means, a structure, by which the Church can maintain her identity throughout the globe and throughout time. This diachronic in synchronic unity. Basically, the argument is that the papacy is the office that serves the universal communion of the church through space and time so that the Eucharist can be celebrated properly and those celebrating the Eucharist can receive that as members of the one Church established by Christ. . . .

To celebrate the Eucharist schismatically is a lie, in a way. It’s the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to be. Because the Eucharist is meant to bring us united as one body, to celebrate it outside of the communion of that body is an aberration. In order to celebrate the Eucharist in a united way, you have to have a means of maintaining universal unity. You can’t just separate off into separate churches, because then you’re separating the Body of Christ from itself.

Now, let me say this about that.

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Viewers (or readers) may notice a contradiction in DeClue’s position.

If unity is the res of the Sacrament—its truth, meaning, or reality—then why do we need this additional “Eucharistic office?” First, he says that the Eucharist itself creates “the bond of charity of the members of the Church.” But then he says that the papacy is necessary to hold the Church together so that “the Eucharist can be celebrated properly.” Well, which is it?

DeClue is absolutely right: the Orthodox do embrace a version of this “Eucharistic ecclesiology.” And I would agree with him that any lasting reunion between Rome and the Eastern patriarchates must be built upon this ecclesiology.

However, his position strikes me as self-refuting. If the res of the Eucharist creates unity within the Church, then what function does the papacy serve? Or, to stand the question on its head: if the Catholic Church needs the papacy to preserve the Church’s unity, then why is the Eucharist not fulfilling its res?

By the way, this isn’t the first time this question has come up. A couple of years ago, Bishop Barron gave an interview to Capturing Christianity in which he talked about the difference between Catholics and the Orthodox. Bishop Barron says:

The main difference there would not be sacramental, would not be the priesthood or the Eucharist. It would be the primacy of the pope. And I see that as a great gift. . . . Are [the Orthodox] exercising certain gifts better than we? Yeah, probably. But we have all the gifts that Christ wants His people to have.

Fr. Peter Heers of Orthodox Ethos made an excellent response video. In it, Fr. Peter simply asks Bishop Barron: “If you have Christ, how could you be lacking anything?”

This is a fair question in general. What do the Orthodox lack if we have valid Orders, valid Sacraments, and valid jurisdictions? Today, the Catholic Church even grants that we possess the true faith, albeit in an “underdeveloped” form. (We’ll talk about the “development of doctrine” a bit later.)

But it’s also a question I would like to pose to Dr. DeClue. Why do we need the Pope if we have Christ in the Eucharist?

In fairness to DeClue, the Catholic Church’s own position on this question has become less clear in recent centuries.

On the one hand, Rome does indeed teach that the papacy is necessary for unity within the Church. For instance, Lumen Gentium famously refers to the papacy as the Church’s “permanent and visible source and foundation of unity of faith and communion.” This is consistent with Pope Boniface VIII’s bull Unam Sanctam, which declared that “it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”

In the 19th and 20th centuries, Rome acknowledged that the Orthodox have valid sacraments, valid orders, etc. However, Rome maintains that Orthodox clergy and laymen enjoy only “partial communion” with the true Church.

So, not only were these schismatics able to smuggle the Sacraments out of the Church: they were able to smuggle the Church out of the Church!

But where did this doctrine come from? It has no precedent in the Early Church or even the Medieval West. It also flies against the teachings of Christ.

In Matthew 12, when the Pharisees accuse Jesus of “casting out demons by Beelzebub,” the Lord responds: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand. If Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand?”

Yet this is precisely what DeClue suggests when he speaks of “separating the Body of Christ from itself.” How is it possible that Satan’s house remains united while Christ’s Body is in “partial communion” with itself?

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A bit later in the episode, DeClue begins to take a different tack. He moves away from this theory of the papacy as an “Eucharistic office” and speaks instead of a “divine primacy.”

DeClue begins this segment by riffing off the work of the Metropolitan John Zizioulas (may his memory be eternal!):

Zizoulas was a great dialogue partner. . . . He was actually very amenable to universal primacy. I mean, he pushed back against some of his fellow Orthodox and said, Trying to claim that synodality or collegiality is of divine right, but primacy is only of ecclesial right, doesn’t make any sense. And the reason it doesn’t make any sense is because you can’t have a synod without a protos. You can’t have a synod without someone who heads it. So if it’s a sine qua non condition for a synod, then it exists by the same right as the synod exists. You can’t have a synod without a head, and that means the head exists, the office of the head exists by the same right, which is divine.

To be frank, the idea that the pope enjoys a divine primacy is a nonstarter for the Orthodox. Yes, the popes did serve as primus inter pares in the Early Church. And they were better primates than the Patriarchs of Constantinople, who took up the role of first-among-equals following the Great Schism. But for the Orthodox, the notion of “divine (Roman) primacy” is a bridge too far.

First of all, no pope ever served as protos at any of the eight Ecumenical Councils. They didn't call the Councils, much less preside at them. You’ll notice that none of the councils met in Rome, either. The popes certainly ratified the councils’ acts—but, then, so did the other members of the Pentarchy. That’s the whole point of a Council: to build consensus.¹

Moreover, canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon explicitly states that Rome’s primacy is of ecclesial right: “The Fathers rightly granted privileges to the throne of old Rome, because it was the royal city.” The Fathers granted privileges to Old Rome, not Christ. There is no reference to the Petrine commission.

Chalcedon also declared Rome and Constantinople were to share primacy over the Church: “The primacy of all and the chief honor according to the canons, is to be kept for the most God-beloved archbishop of Old Rome, but that the most reverend archbishop of the royal city Constantinople, which is new Rome, is to enjoy the honor of the same primacy.”

We could also bring up Vigilius and Honorius, but most of you know those stories already. Far more illustrative, I think, is the so-called Meletian Schism.

In AD 360, a presbyter named Meletius was elected Patriarch of Antioch. His election was contested by a rival named Paulinus, who suspected Meletius of harboring Arian sympathies. A fight breaks out. St. Basil the Great supports Meletius while St. Athtansius supports Paulinus.

Pope Damasus I attempts to resolve the situation by deposing Meletius and installing Paulinus. Yet not only does Meletius refuse to step down: the huge majority of bishops don’t acknowledge his deposition. In fact, he is invited to preside at the First Ecumenical Council of Constantinople. Under Meletius’s protos-ship, the second part of the Nicene Creed (“And in the Holy Spirit…”) was adopted by the majority of the Church. This excludes Rome, which was still feuding with Meletius.

Meletius dies without having patched things over with the Pope. And yet not only does Rome eventually ratify Constantinople I and adopt its Creed: the Latins also canonize Meletius alongside Damasus!²

My point is that, clearly, the position of protos has nothing to do with the Bishop of Rome. This, too, is a dead end for the Orthodox. That is why, as DeClue admits, Zizoulas’s theory was rejected by the Orthodox bishops.

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At the risk of giving offense, I don’t think any this is about the Orthodox at all. Not really. I think it’s about trying to square some circles within modern Roman Catholicism.

Consider these further thoughts from Bishop Barron, from the same interview with Capturing Christianity:

I’m a follower of John Henry Newman: that there’s a living voice of authority to determine and adjudicate disputes that come into the life of the Church. That’s indispensably important. And from a Catholic perspective, the appeal simply to the Bible (a more classically Protestant move) or even an appeal to the Church Fathers (which might be closer to an Orthodox move)—those are appeals to texts or to distant figures. The appeal to a living voice—we can get on a plane, you and I, and I’ll bring you up and say, “Here’s the successor of Peter. Here’s the one who has the final authority to adjudicate these matters in the Body of Christ.” That’s a gift to me, and a grace. And that’s the main point of demarcation between [Orthodox and Catholics].

Bishop Barron is referring to Newman’s theory of the development of doctrine. According to Newman, the Catholic Church’s understanding of theology deepens over time as the Church authoritatively expounds upon Scripture and previous doctrines. The classic image used to illustrate this point is the acorn and the oak tree. They are the same organism; the tree is simply a more evolved form of the acorn.

Frankly, I’m not convinced that right-thinking Catholics really believes in the development of doctrine anymore. They may think they do; as a theory, it’s extremely useful for squaring those circles. For instance, not only did Rome abandon the strict definitions of Unam Sanctam, but several Orthodox saints are now included in the Roman martyrology—men who lived and died outside of the Catholic communion.³ This dissonance is easier to sustain if we have the vague impression that our understanding of divine truth improves over time.

Yet I noticed that, when speaking to Fradd about the problem of heretic bishops in the Catholic Church, DeClue said: “If you can have in the Age of the Fathers heretic bishops, sometimes that were a significant number of the episcopate—the idea that that couldn’t happen now just because we’re, like, in a later time period is absurd.”

Clearly, DeClue is operating off the assumption that the Early Church enjoyed greater clarity than we do. He’s assuming that the Faith gets purer and clearer the closer we get to the source—i.e., Jesus Christ. And that’s fair! Such an assumption is perfectly natural. It’s just not exactly Catholic.

Again, the Catholic position is that which Barron articulated. Thanks to the dogmatic definitions of the infallible popes, the Christian Faith is actually much clearer today than it was in the 400s. They only had the acorn; we have the whole oak tree. That’s what the Catholic Church teaches; I’m just not convinced that it’s what Catholics truly believe.

By the way, this isn’t supposed to be a gotcha moment. On the contrary. I would encourage DeClue to follow his instincts on this one. The Orthodox believe not in the development but in the conservation of doctrine. We simply hand down “the faith which was once, for all, delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).

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As we wrap things up, I’d like to quote from my favorite book by Fr. Seraphim Rose. It’s called God’s Revelation to the Human Heart. In it, the Blessed Seraphim observes:

There are some who look at our Orthodox Church and say, “It’s impossible for people to find truth there. You say you don’t believe in any one pope or bishop, and thus there is no guarantee; you don’t believe in the Scriptures like a Protestant might and say that they are the absolutely ‘infallible’ word. If you have a controversy, where is the final word?” And we say that the Holy Spirit will reveal Himself.

This happens especially when bishops come together in council, but even then there can be a false council.

One might then say, “There’s no hope!” But we say that the Holy Spirit guides the Church, and therefore He will not be false to the Church. If you haven’t got the feeling that this is so, then you devise things like making the Bible infallible, making the Pope infallible. . .

Orthodoxy always emphasizes this spiritual aspect of the relationship of one’s own soul to God; and all the sacraments and discipline of the Church are only a means of getting one’s soul right with God: this is the whole of our Faith.

Seraphim wasn’t responding to this theory of the papacy as a Eucharistic office. But he couldn’t have done a better job if he’d tried.

As I said before, the Orthodox—perhaps with the exception of Zizioulas—not only see the papacy as ahistorical but unnecessary. We don’t see the evidence for the papacy; we also don’t see the need.

Catholics refer to the Pope as the “Vicar of Christ.” Yet the root vicarius means “substitute.” A vicar is a priest who stands in the place of a bishop. Why does Christ need a vicar? Didn’t He say, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age”?

Not to keep picking on Fradd but I remember a (very long!) video he posted last year with Jimmy Akin. Towards the end, when they were taking questions from the audience, one viewer asked Akin why he became Catholic rather than Orthodox. “Fundamentally, it comes down to the issue of the pope,” he says. “If you settle that, everything else falls into place.” Here’s how Akin explained his reasoning on the matter:

I pointed out to myself when I was making this decision, first one is to ask the question, would the disciples have even understood the concept of a “first among equals” that has ceremonial authority but no authority beyond that? We have such positions today, like in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Chief Justice has very limited authority. He has the same vote as everybody else. other than that, he’s able to do a few things for book-keeping purposes, like if he’s in the majority he gets to assign who writes the decision. If he’s not in the majority, then someone else decides who writes the decision. But he’s fundamentally equal to all the rest, and he just has some procedural authority. So, is that how authority worked in the culture that Jesus and the Apostles were living in? Can we think of anybody in that culture who was regarded as having authority that had a purely procedural or ceremonial authority? No. This is not a concept in ancient Israel.

It’s interesting that Akin’s first argument is conjectural. He doesn’t point to any hard evidence in Scripture or the Early Church. He says, essentially, “Orthodox ecclesiology doesn’t seem like it would be true.”

You’ll notice, for instance, that Catholics never point to the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15:1-21) as evidence for the papacy. Here we have St. Peter—the chief of the Apostles, whom Catholics regard as the first pope—meeting with his fellow bishops in a synod. And yet there’s nothing to indicate that Peter has any special authority.

On the contrary. He doesn’t preside at the council; that honor belonged to St. James. Peter’s views on Jewish Christians certainly wasn’t viewed by the other Apostles as infallible, or even authoritative: his position was roundly condemned by St. Paul and rejected by the other Apostles. St. James also handed down the final decision, declaring: “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit…” There’s no suggestion that Peter has any sort of final word, either to ratify or veto the decision—a power which Catholics now consider to be the one sure defense against heresy and schism.

I’m not saying that the Apostles had to put a tiara on Peter’s head and carry him into the council on a gilded litter. But if Akin is right, shouldn’t there be some hint that Peter possessed some unique authority?⁴

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It’s also worth noting that the Jews used a version of Akin’s argument against Christ Himself. They were expecting a political messiah—one who would free Israel from Roman occupation. When it became clear that Jesus didn’t fit the bill, they killed Him. So, I’m not sure why Akin got the idea that our theology or ecclesiology must conform to the expectations of first-century Jews.

In fact, as I point out in my book After Christendom, Israel’s concept of authority was totally wrong. It was formulated in direct defiance to God.

In the First Book of Kings, the Israelites are fighting (and losing) a war against the Philistines. They call upon God to “establish a king for us to judge us like all the other nations.” God is displeased. Since the Lord led the Israelites out of Egypt, they had been ruled directly by God. Israel was a literal theocracy. “They have rejected me,” God laments to the Prophet Samuel, “to bring to naught my reign over them.”

Samuel warns them that, in time, they will come to regret their decision: “Then in that day you will cry out before your king whom you chose for yourselves, and the Lord will not hear you in those days, because you chose a king for yourselves.” Still, they cry: “Then we will be like all the other nations,” they say, “and our king will judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.”

Samuel is distraught. “You have done great wickedness before the Lord in asking a king for yourselves,” he warns. Still, God grants their request. He elects a man named Saul to serve as Israel’s very first king, and he quickly begins fighting Israel’s battles for them.

This is why, when the Pharisees ask Jesus when He—the alleged Messiah—plans to restore Israel, Jesus turns their question on its head. “The Kingdom of God is within you,” He tells them. Christ didn’t come to restore the monarchy. He came to restore theocracy. Once again, God will rule His people directly. There’s no need for a king or a pope, because God reigns within our hearts.

Catholics also refer to the papacy as the “visible head of the Church.” Yet, as DeClue argues beautifully, it is Christ Himself who serves as the Visible Head of the Church. Go to any Orthodox Church on any Sunday and you will see Him there in the chalice.

God is with us; He is and ever shall be!

1. In fact, as Orthodox theologians have long pointed out, it would be much easier to argue for “imperial infallibility” than papal infallibility. It was the Roman (or Byzantine) Emperors who called each of the Ecumenical Councils, chose the time and place of their meeting, promulgated their acts, and enforced their decisions. This is most obvious in the case of Constantinople II. When Pope Vigilius attempted to boycott the council, he was arrested by Emperor St. Justinian and forced to attend.

Obviously, the Orthodox don’t believe in such a doctrine. It’s a thought experiment—one meant demonstrate that the pope is by no means the most important authority-figure in the Early Church. In fact, the Roman Emperor fulfills virtually every function which Catholics now regard as the perpetual, exclusive and divine prerogative of the Pope, including those which they associate with the charism of infallibility.

2. In regard to our discussion about the nature of schism: it’s clear that, when Rome broke with Antioch, neither side “took the Church with them.” It’s true that a schism occurred between these two local churches. Yet by canonizing both Meletius and Damasus (as well as Gregory and Athanasius), the Orthodox and Catholic churches have both acknowledged that neither side was “at fault,” strictly speaking. Both positions were defended by men of great holiness and theological acuity. These canonizations also prove that the existence of schism does not suggest that one or both sides is deprived of sacramental grace.

This is comparable to the current rupture between Constantinople and Moscow. So far from debunking Orthodox ecclesiology, that local schism is what I refer to as an “Early Church problem.” When Catholics argue that such ruptures between patriarchs “prove” the need for a pope, they are unwittingly conceding the point to us. After all, Damasus’s deposition of Meletius and support for Paulinus was not considered authoritative by any of the other bishops. Even St. Athanasius, then patriarch of Alexandria, argued that Meletius was illegitimate because he was (supposedly) an Arian. His support for Paulinus was not contingent upon that of Damasus.

3. Rome has also canonized several non-Chalcedonians (Oriental Orthodox). These include Gregory of Narek, a tenth-century Armenian theologian. In 2015, Pope Francis declared Gregory to be a Doctor of the Church. In 2023, Francis also canonized twenty-one Copts who were killed by ISIS.

4. I’ve heard Catholics argue that Peter’s magisterial authority was unnecessary because he was dealing with his fellow Apostles, who were enlightened by Christ Himself. Yet this, too, simply proves the Orthodox position. In the Catholic system, the bishops are the Successors to the Apostles in exactly the same way that the Pope is the successor to St. Peter. The Apostolic charism is passed down through the laying-on of hands. So, if the first bishops didn’t require an infallible pope, then why should any future generations?