Adrian Henry Timothy Knottesford Fortescue

“ Our millions joined to theirs would form indeed a mighty and compact world-Church, before which the new sects would count as almost nothing. One conceives the union of the five Patriarchs stretching across Europe as the most glorious realization of the City of God on earth; and if one remembers all the sheep that are not of this fold regretfully, if one prays that all some day may be brought back to the one fold and the one Shepherd, one thinks then of none with so much sympathy as our brothers across the Adriatic. For with them practically nothing is wrong but the schism. ”

“ Shapur II spent his life fighting Rome; could he allow his own subjects to profess the Roman religion? The cross was the Roman standard; could he let it stand on his side of the frontier? These Christians prayed with his enemies, no doubt they prayed for them. How could he tolerate such disloyalty behind him when he went out to war? It is the tragic situation often repeated in history: Christianity was treason against the State. Without any particular wish to trouble people's consciences, a country at war can hardly allow what seems treason at home. ”

“ They think it better to be Byzantine than Roman; but they think it atrocious to be a schismatic. It would be a great pity if what is left of so ancient a tradition as the Byzantine rite in Italy were ever to disappear. The Roman rite, extended over vast continents in unquestioned predominance, cannot fear the rivalry of this little remnant; no Latin could possibly be jealous of any other rite. May the Byzantine rite remain ever in this ancient home, and may it flourish always as the memory of so great a past. ”

“ The only reason for giving the name of a race or a nation to a religious body is that the religion is or has been that of the race or nation. The Assyrian Empire came to an end centuries before Christ. No doubt the Nestorians have some of the blood of its old subjects, but so have equally all the other sects which abound in Mesopotamia. Why should this one little sect in its remote corner inherit the name of the whole mighty and long-vanished Empire? And, of course, "Assyrian Church" is emphatically not its old, accepted, or common name. ”

“ And we can imagine what their own Fathers would say to the Orthodox if they came back. We have seen what Athanasius, Basil, Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria, and Theodore of Studium have to say about the primacy of Old Rome. We have heard what the Fathers of Chalcedon cried out, and we have seen the Roman legates preside over other councils. If the great Fathers whom they honour could come back and see the troubles that beset their children now, what could they suggest except that a council should be summoned and that the successor of St. Peter should send his legates to make peace among them? ”

“ That an army, gathered together to defend the Christians against the Mohammedans, should, instead of doing so, destroy the very State that for five centuries had been the one bulwark of Christendom, is an unheard-of outrage. And when one remembers, too, the horrible cruelty and destruction of the sack of Constantinople, one is not surprised that even after many centuries the Greeks have not yet forgotten the day when a horde of Latin robbers so wantonly attacked their State, plundered their city, and massacred thousands of their forefathers. ”

“ It would hardly be possible to find an accusation that would offend them more, or be more unjust, than to say that they are not purest of the pure Byzantines, in their rites, habits, rule, and everything. At the same time Leo XIII founded, in the monastery, a college for Italo-Greeks, youths who are to become priests of their rite. These boys serve the church and sing the offices with the monks most beautifully. Any traveller who goes out from Rome on a Sunday morning may assist here at the Byzantine Liturgy, celebrated perfectly and sung exquisitely. ”

“ We want the communion of the Christians to whom St. Paul brought the faith at Ephesus and Corinth, the children of the men of Antioch who first were called by the name in which we all glory. And we need, too, the righter balance that would be restored by reunion with the Orthodox. In spite of our loyalty to our own rite, and in spite of our natural pride in being not only Catholics but Latins and members of the greatest Patriarchate, we have to realize that the Latin Church is not, has never been, the whole Body of Christ. ”

“ In any society the test of unity is the mutual acknowledgement of all the members. Where there are separate groups, which do not recognize one another, we have not one, but several societies. In this way we speak of separate Churches, such as the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, the Nestorian Church, and so on. These are really separate Churches, because there is no mutual recognition between their members; they are not in communion with one another. When we distinguish between the Roman (or Latin) Church and the Uniate Churches, we make a distinction of quite another kind. ”

“ Even infallibility can be no great stumbling-block to people who have a very definite idea of an infallible Church, of which Patriarchs are the authentic mouthpiece. They do not admit the Immaculate Conception of our Lady, because the Pope has defined it. If he had not done so, they probably would. Nestorians, of course, will not call her Mother of God. But they have unbounded veneration for the all-holy, most pure and sinless Virgin; they keep her feasts, and their liturgies surpass ours in glowing praise of her. If they do not all go to confession, they all know they ought to. ”

“ It is an unpardonable error, which ought never to be made by educated people, to imagine that all Catholics are Latins, or that there is any inherent reason why a Catholic should use the Roman rite. Nor is there any superiority, any more Catholic quality in the use of the Roman rite than in the use of any other. In this matter we stand exactly where we always have stood. ”

“ The Orthodox Church is the heir of all the Greek traditions. The old glories of the free Greek States, vague memories of Marathon and Salamis, the majesty of the Roman Empire, their cause against Persian and Arab, Frank and Turk—it is all gathered together and still lives in the Holy Apostolic Orthodox Catholic Church of the Seven Councils. So one can understand how they feel about a renegade from that Church: he betrays the true faith of Christ, and he betrays the cause of the Fatherland. And one can understand, too, how the Church resents attempts at seducing her children. ”

“ Heresy is wrong because it causes schism. The schism which results is the root evil of heresy. If there were no schism it would be not heresy but a harmless theological mistake. And the schism is what lasts and is deplorable for centuries. No one now gets hot over prosopon and hypostasis; but the Nestorians suffer still from their tragic isolation, their schism from the rest of Christendom. A convert gives up his heresy because it involves schism: he wants not to be in schism, and for that reason he accepts all that is a condition of communion with the Catholic Church. ”

“ Really he is obeying the Canon Law of his Patriarchate, to which he has just as much right as we have to our laws.
Does anyone think St Athanasius, St Basil, St John Chrysostom imperfect Catholics? The modern Uniate stands exactly where they stood. Like them he is in communion with the chief of all Patriarchs at Rome; like them he acknowledges the primacy of the Pope and obeys him as Primate. But like them he is not bound by local Western Patriarchal laws; like them he thinks his laws and rite and customs just as good as ours. ”

“ But for all of us, for the children of dead New Rome as well as for us who stand around the fisherman's throne in the eternal Old Rome, there is a cause that does not die, there is a great city of God on earth whose foundations are laid too deep, whose towers are built too high for any change to destroy her ”

“ So our Lord's divinity and humanity both would cease to be, forming some new impossible thing that is neither divinity nor humanity. Instead of having both, he would have neither; he would be neither God nor man. The Monophysite rather conceived one as absorbed, not both. The divinity in this idea remained unchanged, but the humanity was absorbed into it, the human nature was, so to speak, swamped, lost in the infinite ocean of divinity. Then our Lord would have no true humanity; he would not be really man. ”

“ That is always the attitude of the Holy See. The Popes understand very well that rite is not of the essence of religion. They tolerate no variety in the Faith, since there can be only one true revelation from God. But in the matter of rite they know that different customs suit different people; they know that God will judge men according to the lives they lead, not according to the rites they use.
So, not only does the Catholic Church allow diversities of rites; as a matter of fact, she is the only religious body that does so. ”

“ Peter the Great was tolerant to every sect except to the Raskolniks; he had them hunted down in the forests and massacred, shut up in their churches and burnt, tortured, flogged, and exiled. The whole Raskolnik movement forms the weirdest and most unsavoury story of religious mania in the world; not even the maddest Mohammedan sects have gone to such an extreme of lunacy as these Old Believers. When a Slav peasant gets religious mania he gets it very badly indeed. ”

“ It is strange that anyone can forget the Persian martyrs. Not in the worst time of Roman persecution was there so cruel a time for Christians as under Shapur II of Persia. In proportion to its extent and the time the persecution lasted, Persia has more martyrs than any other part of the Christian world. The cause of the persecution may easily be understood. As long as the Roman Empire was pagan the Persian king had no particular prejudice against Christians. Indeed, while Rome persecuted them, Christians found an asylum under the protection of her enemy. ”

“ The very fact that they keep and cherish their union with Rome, although the schismatics are never tired of calling them slaves, of boasting of their own liberty, shows how real this ideal must be to the Uniates. It requires some strength of conviction to acknowledge as your chief a bishop of a foreign rite, to submit the rules of your own liturgy to the supervision of men who themselves use another. They draw this strength from their unswerving belief in the Catholic ideal of one universal, united Church of God. ”

“ The old Greek builders had been content with the more reticent beauty of white marble. Justinian wanted a dazzling gorgeousness of gold, coloured marble, mosaic, precious stones. So from every corner of the Empire the governors had to send columns taken from old temples, marble, jewels, and incredible sums of money. Eight pillars of verde antico came from Ephesus, as many of porphyry from Rome. Egypt was the richest province of the Empire, and a year's taxes from the whole of Egypt went to pay for one ambo. The altar was of solid gold, gleaming with emeralds. ”

“ Indeed, from my experience I am inclined to think that the pride of the Uniates in their communion with Rome is sometimes even excessive, that they look with too much scorn on their non-uniate neighbours. Any Latin in the Levant will see with what pride the Uniates he meets remember that they belong to the same body as he does, that they have a right to the same consciousness of citizenship in the great Church as he. They are conscious, too, that they are better educated, more strict in their laws, more edifying in the lives of their clergy than the other Eastern Christians. ”

“ The Orthodox hate any attempt at proselytizing among their people above measure. In the first place, like Catholics, they hold their communion to be the whole and only true Church. So to be an apostate from it is to them, as to us in our case, an infinitely greater calamity than the loss of members to the Protestant bodies, who all claim to be only a branch of the Church, although, of course, always the best and purest branch. And then, to the Easterns their communion is not only the true Church, it is their nation as well. ”

“ It is much stranger to find sometimes even Catholics who do real injustice to their fellow-Catholics of Eastern rites. One can understand that Protestants are unjust to them. The existence and particularly the superiority of the Uniate Churches is a fact most damaging to their theories of the Papacy as only recognized in the West, to that identification of "Roman Catholic" with "Latin," which is the great point of their branch theory. But of all people we Western Catholics should glory in the Uniate Churches. They are an exceedingly important factor in our concept of the universal Church ”

“ The most significant development among the Eastern Churches, indeed the connecting link of the unity of their history, is the evolution of the See of Constantinople from being the smallest of local dioceses to the position of first Church of all Eastern Christendom, so great that her bishops even ventured to think themselves the rivals of the Roman Pope, so influential that when at last they fell into formal schism they dragged all the other Eastern bishops with them. ”