Orthodox Reflections

I taught in a very Catholic country for three years after college. Having been raised Evangelical, Catholic culture, art, and architecture were at once alien and attractive to me. I’ve written about my fascination with beautiful churches and liturgical worship services here. Despite my best efforts to remain Evangelical upon returning to America, I eventually couldn’t do it any more.

My first attempt to connect with the ancient Christian Church was Roman Catholicism. I had been to many churches and services in Europe, plus I had Catholic friends. I started accompanying them to masses, baptisms and weddings. I got to know some of the local priests, and even met a couple of bishops. The Pope was John Paul II, a man for whom I had a great deal of respect. So, really, today I should be celebrating my 20th year as a Roman Catholic.

Only it didn’t happen that way. The liturgies I went to were a mess. Electric guitars, folk music, light shows, barely vested priests, “Eucharistic ministers” handling the host. The fundamental worship of the Roman Church in the United States was completely different from what I had seen in Eastern Europe, and not in a good way. Sitting in Catholic Mass after Catholic Mass, I felt like all I was doing was changing one form of deconstructed Protestant worship for another.

The churches were mostly modern architectural disasters. The oldest in my area was modestly pretty, but it was clear that at some point the Roman Church had lost the ability to inspire divine art and architecture. Some churches were sparsely decorated like community centers, while others were packed full of artistic abstractions that ranged from the merely trite to the outright horrifying.

Many priests I met came across as effeminate, not strong and confident leaders of Christian communities. Many parishioners were nice, but few seemed to really be on a quest for greater spiritual life. They gathered over coffee and whispered about the various rumors of scandals among the bishops and priests. This was the late 1990’s, so the skeletons were still in the closet but they were rattling around loudly.

I had heard about Traditional Latin Mass parishes, but they had little appeal to me. It was clear the hierarchy of the Roman Church was on a quest to extinguish the “extraordinary form,” and I had no wish to convert only to become a target of the bishops of my own church. Plus, there were none local anyway. Looking ahead to children, I had no desire to chain myself to a multi-hour drive just to attend a liturgy that did not make me cringe.

But it was the Papacy that was the last straw. I was told by many Catholics that the centralization of power in the hands of the Pope was necessary to preserve the continuity and unity of the faith. Without the Magisterium, there would be chaos within the Church and heresies would sprout like weeds in the garden of the Lord. The office of the Papacy was essential. I was assured of this over and over again.

But the facts on the ground led me to a different conclusion. After a few months, I had decided that if the preservation of the faith once delivered to the saints was the goal, then the Papacy was a complete failure. Even with a saint in the office like John Paul II, the Roman Church was careening headlong into disaster. What good is a powerful Papacy if it can’t even preserve historical liturgical worship, traditional art, and traditional architecture? If the Pope can’t, or won’t, keep the liturgy holy and dignified, then how can that office be expected to safeguard the moral and theological teachings? Isn’t the rule of prayer also the rule of faith (Lex orandi, lex credendi)? And, worst of all, the Pope could not even, apparently, ensure that the bishops he had appointed himself were good, honest, faithful men.

Far from being the rock on which the Christian Faith is built, I really came to regard the modern Papacy as more of a stumbling block.

I heard all the arguments from my Catholic friends about how I needed to be in communion with Peter for salvation. I looked extensively at the Catholic claims concerning the Papacy and came away unconvinced. Whole books have been written examining the historicity of Papal authority, and I won’t rehash that topic here. What I will say is that I would never have even examined those claims if I hadn’t found the Roman Catholic Church to be such a mess. Had the Roman Catholic Church been the same church it had been 100 years earlier, my kids would probably be cradle Catholics today instead of cradle Orthodox.

I was just an American looking to connect to the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church I had been learning about from books and the nascent Internet. I had no cultural, political, or historical agenda. I just wanted the Church, the Bride of Christ, with the Holy Eucharist at the center of prayerful, authentic Christian worship. I did not find that in the Roman Catholic Church, and so I kept searching.

I found the Orthodox Church by accident. I had brushed up against it some in Europe, but never paid any attention to it. One Sunday morning, I grabbed a coffee at a local bookstore and found a book in the bargain bin about the history and faith of the Orthodox Church. I sat down, read the first five chapters and was intrigued. I bought the book, went home, and began more research.

That lead me to visit a Greek Orthodox parish that was close to my office for a Divine Liturgy. On a crisp Sunday morning in March 2000, I walked into an Orthodox Church for the first time in my life. The Divine Liturgy, the iconography, the traditional architecture, the faith, the tradition, and the morals – everything I had been searching for was right there in front of my eyes. I became a catechumen, and the more I learned, the more I fell in love with God and His Church.

The Orthodox Church is Holy and perfect, but she is administered by imperfect men. As a Divine/Human institution, there will always be issues. There will be unfaithful or simply mistaken priests. There will be unfaithful or simply mistaken bishops. There may even arise bishops whose names end up attached to heresies like Nestorius and Arius. There might be whole synods full of bad or just deluded bishops who make decisions that do great violence to the Faith. In fact, there have been and might be again whole synods controlled by Communist collaborators. For the Faithful under their direct authority, such is a hard and difficult time.

But the genius of the Orthodox Church is that her very decentralization of authority makes it difficult for bad ideas to spread widely. To truly change the Orthodox Faith, one would have to gain the willing cooperation of bishops, priests, and the Faithful from Georgia to Russia to Serbia to the United States and all points in between. The logistics of that are quite daunting. Either a change must be so minor and local that it can escape attention, or it must be so obvious that it can get tens of millions of people across the globe on board.

Which is why all those advocating for substantial changes in the Orthodox Faith are also the same ones who endorse increased centralization. It is a quixotic effort to be sure, as the local churches are highly unlikely to give up their autonomy. Nor, frankly, should they. For those of us intent on preserving the traditional Orthodox Faith in as many places as possible, the current arrangement works just fine.

I still have a great deal of respect for many aspects of the Roman Church’s legacy in the West. I feel that her decline has been the root cause of so much moral and ethical rot in our American society. I have a great deal of sympathy for the Traditional Catholics who seem to be trying to simultaneously oppose and support their own church. But, while I wish them well, I have no interest in joining them today anymore than I did 20 years ago.

Beautiful art, beautiful worship, traditional ethics and morals, a sound Patristic understanding of the Faith – these things are not optional and the Roman Church seems to prove daily that once they are lost, recovering them is nigh unto impossible.

Nicholas, member of the Greek Archdiocese of America