For an in-depth comparison of Orthodoxy versus Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, visit our 11 part series on Orthodoxy vs. Western Christianity.
By Walt Garlington, an Orthodox Christian living in Dixieland. His writings have appeared on several web sites, and he maintains a site of his own, Confiteri: A Southern Perspective.
Orthodox Catholic Saints of France
With the arrival of Pope Leo in France, quite a few folks are noting the enthusiasm among fervent young Roman Catholics there. An example:
‘Over 80,000 young people raised their voices and hearts to sing the Salve Regina in Latin with Pope Leo XIV during a prayer vigil at the French national stadium outside Paris.
‘The powerful moment occurred at the Stade de France, France’s largest stadium, normally reserved for international soccer and rugby games.
‘The beautiful scene in France follows on the heels of an equally moving display in St. Louis, where 50,000 Catholics — including 1,000 priests, 90 bishops, and 800 seminarians — gathered for the beatification of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.
‘“Two of the biggest, most cinematic displays of Catholic vigor just took place in the last 24 hours, in the U.S. and in France, and people need to pay attention to this,” conservative commentator Peachy Keenan noted.
‘“A religious reawakening, and behind it, the green shoots of a cultural movement,” she suggested.
‘The young people’s prayer vigil offered proud reenactments of the history of the Catholic Church in France,’ Catholic Sat reported:
“At the Prayer Vigil with the young people of France, they reenact the incredible history of the Church of France, from the arrival of Lazarus and his sister Mary Magdalene, the martyrdom of St. Denis, the baptism of Clovis, the purchase of the Crown of Thorns of Our Lord by St. Louis IX, St. Joan of Arc, the countless Saints of the eldest daughter of the Church, the martyrs of the French Revolution, all the way to the great St. Thérèse of Lisieux.”’
It is wonderful to see a hunger in so many people for authentic Christianity and national life, but they will not find them in the Roman Catholic Church. Roman Catholicism is a distortion of authentic Christianity that warps the things it comes in contact with. The appearance of Roman Catholicism is the reason France and the other Western countries have gotten to the sorrowful place they now occupy.
We will let a Frenchman of the 19th century, Abbé Guettée, a Roman Catholic, who through diligent historical studies discovered the falseness of Catholicism and then entered into the Paradise of the Orthodox Church, fire the opening volley. In the introduction to his book on papal errors, The Papacy: Its Historic Origin and Primitive Relations with the Eastern Churches, he gives a brief summary of the problems with the Roman Catholic papal system:
‘The Pope is a king, and pretends to be sovereign pontiff of the Christian Church.
‘We do not propose to occupy ourselves with his royalty. To what advantage? It will soon fall. Its ruin is decreed by Providence. Foreign bayonets will no more save it than the sophisms of its defenders. If, as is affirmed, these are necessary to uphold the sovereign pontificate, it is but another reason for desiring its fall—because this pontificate is an usurpation. This we proceed to demonstrate in the present work. To reach this end we shall have recourse neither to questionable arguments nor to declamation. Facts drawn from original sources are summoned as witnesses. We take the Roman episcopate at the origin of Christianity, follow it through centuries, and are able to prove incontestably, that during eight centuries the spiritual Papacy, as we understand it at the present day, had no existence; that the bishop of Rome was during three centuries only a bishop, with the same rank as the others; that in the fourth century he received a primacy of honor without universal jurisdiction; that this honor has no other foundation than the decrees of the Church; that his restricted jurisdiction over certain neighboring churches is supported only upon a custom legalized by Councils.
‘As for the universal sovereignty, absolute, of divine right—in other words, the Papacy—facts and catholic testimony of the first eight centuries condemn instead of sustaining it.
‘History reveals to us the Papacy, after several fruitless attempts, taking its birth from circumstances and establishing itself in the ninth century, with its double political and ecclesiastical character. Its real founder was Adrian I. Nicholas I chiefly contributed to its development; Gregory VII raised it to its loftiest pitch.’
Fr John Romanides, in his astute work, Franks, Romans, Feudalism, and Doctrine, delves further into the issues that caused France/the Franks to break communion with the Orthodox Church of which they were formerly a part:
‘In the background of dialogue and the Ecumenical Movement for the reunion of Christendom lies the generally recognized fact that there is an interplay between theology and society, which may lead to a dogmatic formulation and become the cause of doctrinal differences.
‘Within the Roman Empire doctrinal conflicts took place usually among Roman citizens in an atmosphere of religious and philosophical pluralism. With the official recognition of Orthodox Christianity, we witness the beginning of the use of doctrinal differences in support of nationalistic movements of separate identity and secession from Roman rule, both political and ecclesiastical. Both Nestorianism and so-called Monophysitism, although initially promoted by Roman nationals, were finally supported by separatist tendencies among such ethnic groups as Syrians, Copts, and Armenians. Indeed, both Persians and Arabs took care to keep Christians separated.
‘By the eighth century, we meet for the first time the beginning of a split in Christianity which, from the start, took on ethnic names instead of names designating the heresy itself or its leader. Thus in West European sources we find a separation between a Greek East and a Latin West. In Roman sources this same separation constitutes a schism between Franks and Romans.’
Charlemagne was a hammer that helped break the bond between France and the Orthodox Church:
‘ . . . Thus at the Council of Frankfurt (794), the Franks condemned the ‘Greeks’ and their Seventh Ecumenical Synod in the presence of the legates of the Roman Pope Hadrian II, an aggressive promoter of this same Seventh Ecumenical Synod.
‘Hadrian had already excommunicated all those who had not accepted the Seventh Ecumenical Synod. Technically the Franks were in a state of excommunication. But to implement this would have brought down upon Papal Romania and her citizens the wrath of Frankish feudalism, as had been the fate of the Romans in the rest of Francia (Gallia, Germania, and Italia).
‘Charlemagne had also caused the Filioque to be added to the Frankish Creed, without consulting the pope. When the controversy over this addition broke out in Jerusalem, Charlemagne convoked the Council of Aachen in 809 and decreed that this addition was a dogma necessary for salvation. With this fait accomplit under his belt, he tried to pressure Pope Leo III into accepting it.
‘Leo rejected the Filioque not only as an addition to the Creed, but also as dogma, claiming that the Fathers left it out of the Creed neither out of ignorance, nor out of negligence, nor out of oversight, but on purpose and by divine inspiration.
‘What Leo is clearly saying, but in diplomatic terms, is that the addition of the Filioque to the Creed is a heresy. . . .
‘In any event, Charlemagne cared very little about the pope’s thoughts on icons and the Filioque. He needed the condemnation of the East Romans as heretics in order to prove that they were no longer Romans, but Greeks, and he succeeded in getting this in the only way the Frankish mind at this time could devise. Believing that the Franks would eventually take over the Papacy, he knew that future Frankish popes would accept what Roman popes of his day had rejected.’
Fr John concludes,
‘Because it is impossible to believe that four Roman Patriarchates broke away from a Frankish Papacy, the Franks were forced to forge the somewhat more believable myth that four “Greek” Patriarchates broke away from a so-called Roman but, in reality, Frankish Papacy. European and American historians continue to teach and support this.
‘The schism began when Charlemagne ignored both Popes Hadrian I and Leo III on doctrinal questions and decided that the East Romans were neither Orthodox nor Roman. Officially, this Frankish challenge was answered at the Eighth Ecumenical Synod in 879 by all five Roman Patriarchates, including that of Old Rome.
‘There was no schism between the Romans of Old and New Rome during the two and a half centuries of Frankish and German control over Papal Romania.
‘The so-called split between East and West was, in reality, the importation into Old Rome of the schism provoked by Charlemagne and carried there by the Franks and Germans who took over the papacy.’
A fervent lover of the pre-Schism Orthodox Church of the West and her saints, Fr Seraphim Rose of blessed memory (+1982), writes in an early chapter of his translation of St Gregory of Tours’s Vita Patrum, about the characteristic marks of Orthodoxy in pre-Schism France:
‘THE 20TH-CENTURY Orthodox Christian will find little that is strange in the Christianity of 6th-century Gaul; in fact, if he himself has entered deeply into the piety and spirit of Orthodoxy as it has come down even to our days, he will find himself very much at home in the Christian world of St. Gregory of Tours. The externals of Christian worship – church structures and decoration, iconography, vestments, services – after centuries of development, had attained essentially the form they retain today in the Orthodox Church. In the West, especially after the final Schism of the Church of Rome in 1054, all these things changed. The more tradition-minded East, by the very fact that it has changed so little over the centuries even in outward forms, is naturally much closer to the early Christian West than is the Catholic-Protestant West of recent centuries, which had departed far from its Orthodox roots even before the present-day “post-Christian” era arrived.
‘ . . . One might cite numerous manifestations of this remarkable change in the West: the beginnings of Scholasticism or the academic-analytical approach to knowledge as opposed to the traditional-synthetic approach of Orthodoxy; the beginning of the “age of romance,” when fables and legends were introduced into Christian texts; the new naturalism in art (Giotto) which destroyed iconography; the new “personal” concept of sanctity (Francis of Assisi), unacceptable to Orthodoxy, which gave rise to later Western “mysticism” and eventually to the innumerable sects and pseudo-religious movements of modern times; and so forth. The cause of this change is something that cannot be evident to a Roman Catholic scholar: it is the loss of grace which follows on separation from the Church of Christ and which puts one at the mercy of the “spirit of the times” and of purely logical and human ways of life and thought. When the Crusaders sacked and desecrated Constantinople in 1204 (an act unthinkable in earlier centuries of the Christian West), they only revealed that they had become total strangers to Orthodoxy, and therefore to the Eastern Christians, and that they had irretrievably lost what their own ancestors in 6th-century Gaul had preserved as the apple of their eye: the unbroken tradition of true Christianity’ (pgs. 69, 70).
Once again, we rejoice with the young men and women of France who want to experience real Christianity, but we weep for them because they are putting their hope in an institution, Roman Catholicism, that is a betrayal of true Christianity – the Orthodox Christianity of their forefathers and mothers of Gaul, as Fr Seraphim, Fr John, and Abbé Guettée have shown above. Roman Catholicism, no matter how ‘traditional’, will never bring healing to the West because it has separated itself from the Orthodox Church, the source of Grace in this world.
But there are glimmers of light in this darkness. The Orthodox Church is growing in France, as OrthoChristian reported at the end 2025:
‘The number of Orthodox churches in France has increased by 36% between 2010 and 2024, rising from 235 to 320 locations, according to a new study based on data from the Assembly of Orthodox Bishops of France (AEOF).
‘The Orthodox clergy also grew by 40% during this period, from 290 to 406 members, with the number of priests increasing by 37% and deacons by 57%, reports Orthodoxie:
‘The growth has been driven primarily by massive immigration following Romania’s entry into the EU in 2007. The Romanian jurisdiction now accounts for 37.5% of all Orthodox structures in France, having nearly doubled its presence with a 94% increase from 62 to 120 places of worship. The Romanian Orthodox also maintain 12 of the 28 monasteries in France, representing 43% of the total monastic communities.
‘ . . . The study, conducted by Fr. Jivko Panev using the AEOF directory published by Cantauque Monastery, estimates that there are now approximately 700,000 Orthodox faithful in France as of 2025. Alongside demographic growth, a progressive Francization is occurring, with French-language parishes increasing by 52% from 92 to 140 during the study period. By 2024, 44% of parishes were francophone, up from 39% in 2010, while 81% of all parishes now use French either exclusively or bilingually.’
French descendants in North America are also re-embracing the Orthodoxy of their pre-Schism ancestors, as pilgrimages and other celebrations in honor of Orthodox French saints like St Martin of Tours are occurring each year in places like Louisiana.
The Lord offered the children of Israel a choice of life (love God and obey the Law) or death (worship false gods and break the Law) (Deuteronomy 30:19) before they entered the Promised Land. France today is being offered a similar choice: life in the Orthodox Church or death in Roman Catholicism. That will strike some as being overly harsh and simplistic, but the history of the last 1,000 years bears out the general truth of it.
There is a time for nuance; we seem to have passed that. France and all the Western countries are dying. If they want to live, they must grasp hold of life – Orthodoxy – and do it now. The Orthodox saints of France and the other Western countries will gladly help us do that. If we would only ask them.
Sources:
https://www.oodegr.com/english/biblia/Abbe%20Guettee/Author_Introduction.htm
https://www.romanity.org/htm/rom.03.en.franks_romans_feudalism_and_doctrine.01.htm
Fr Seraphim Rose’s translation of Vita Patrum:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zu5VYWp6cgUIlF2z4CKoCPWCCBbXYW4V/view
