The Credo Of The People of God . . .
And A Greek Orthodox Response

It is not surprising that within the Church in the United States insufficient attention has been paid to the doctrinal importance of the magnificent The Credo of the People of God published by Servant of God, Pope Paul VI on June 30, 1968. It was issued as a precise condemnation of the revived modernism reflected in the infamous "Dutch Catechism" and a tidal wave of errant theological works that was wreaking havoc with Catholic catechesis throughout the Western world. Their addiction to philosophical subjectivism and to the currents of historical, cultural, and moral relativism was at the origin of the Church's present "Crisis of Faith."

In this Year of Faith announced by Pope Benedict XVI, it is appropriate therefore to recall the words of Paul VI closing in 1968 a previous Year of Faith:

"On this day which is chosen to close the Year of Faith on this Feast of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, we have wished to offer to the Living God the homage of a Profession of Faith. And as once at Caesarea Philippi the Apostle Peter spoke on behalf of the Twelve to make a true confession, beyond human opinion, of Christ as the Son of the Living God, so today, his humble Successor, Pastor of the Universal Church, raises his voice to give, on behalf of all the People of God, a firm witness to the divine Truth entrusted to the Church to be announced to all nations. We have wished our Profession of Faith to be to a high degree complete and explicit, in order that it may respond in a fitting way to the need of light felt by so many faithful souls".
(n. 7)

Writing in 1973, Msgr. Eugene Kevane, who fought heroically for the restoration of authentic catechesis in American dioceses, noted how The Credo [Creed] of the People of God in but a few pages:

"offers to catechists a comprehensively complete (and Christocentric) profession of the Catholic faith… It was distinguished by frankness, intellectual honesty, clearness, authenticity. Thus, it provides the model for all authentic catechesis and religious education. It remedies that unfortunate kind of religious education which leaves youth without exact and precise knowledge of what their heritage, the Catholic Faith, actually teaches. It counters the enemy of the faith where he really is when he penetrates within the Church, unmasking his indifference and perfidy, to the exact and correct formulation of the Catholic Faith.

"This Creed of Pope Paul reminds us that we Catholics have always been ready to die for these formulas of the Faith… To love the words of this Creed is one thing with loving the truth of the Faith… [and loving Christ Himself]".
(The Significance of the Creed of the People of God, Central Bureau Press: St. Louis)

Much has been written concerning the desire of the liberal/modernist elements in the Church to ignore, distort, or defame the historical Creeds of the Church as "outmoded" and irrelevant to "the needs of modern man." But little attention has been paid to Eastern Orthodox reaction to the Credo of the People of God's setting forth what Pope Paul declared to be "the Creed of the immortal Tradition of the Holy Church of God" (n. 3).

It is helpful, therefore, to examine, however briefly, the article "The Credo of the People of God: an Orthodox Response" by Archbishop Athenagoras Kokkinakis of Thyateruba and Great Britain which appeared in the ecumenical journal Diakonia, (vol. 8, n. 2, 1973). He rightly criticized "the slanderous attacks" of those vehement anti-ecumenical Orthodox who "in their wickedness, suspect and criticize the efforts of the Patriarchate [of Constantinople] for rapprochement, for friendship and love between East and West."

Yet, for the Greek Orthodox prelate, Pope Paul VI's Credo was a "sign of contradiction" with:

"Elements that cause distress and make not a few wonder and ask themselves, 'Why has the Pope returned to all the theses that for so many centuries have separated East and West?'"

For Catholics, the answer is obvious. The Chief Pastor of the Church had clearly felt it timely to reaffirm key doctrines defined by the Magisterium of the Church and to be held by its faithful. He has done so in a Solemn Profession of Faith designed to meet post-conciliar errors as well as to declare the doctrinal continuity of that Profession with the Truths contained in the Nicene-Constantinople Creed of 381 which the Eastern Orthodox have particularly upheld as the standard of orthodoxy. The Credo of the People of God was declared by the Successor of Peter to contain an authoritative and explicit development of the Church's Faith in conformity with Scripture and Apostolic Tradition.

Archbishop Athenagoras found "ambiguities" in the teachings of Vatican II reaffirmed in the Credo. This was not surprising, seeing his uncritical reliance on the views of Hans Küng and E. Schillebeeckx. Such dissenters from Catholic teachings have always been experts in finding "ambiguities" where there are none.

One alleged ambiguity, the archbishop claimed, is that:

"non-Catholics seem to be considered as being both within and without the sacred realm of the Assembly of the People of God, that is, they are not among those destined to be saved in Christ."

This is a serious misconception of the Church's teaching that "Outside the Church there is no salvation." It is true that Vatican II does not term Eastern Orthodox and Protestants to be members of the One Church, but as baptized Christians they are certainly "linked" and "joined" to the Catholic Church, and as possessing "elements of sacramental sanctification and truth" are assuredly in a position to be saved (cf. Lumen Gentium, nn. 14 and 15).

Not surprisingly, the archbishop rejected the universal jurisdiction of the Pope over the whole Church and his infallibility, alleging such claims to be "groundless" and finding some satisfaction in the rebellion against Humanae Vitae by some priests and bishops. He even questioned "Peter's supposed episcopal administration in Rome" despite the witness of his own Byzantine Greek Liturgy declaring on the Feast of St. Peter's Chain:

"Supreme foundation of the Apostles… thou didst also become first Bishop of Rome."
In the Office for All Apostles, June 30, one reads:
"Of Rome made first Bishop, Thou wert the praise and glory of the greatest of all cities, And of the Church, O Peter, the foundation, And the gates of Hell Shall never prevail against it, As Christ foretold."

As to his charge of Peter's "legendary jurisdictional administration over the whole Church," the same was repeated recently by the patriarch of Moscow's ecumenical adviser, Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, who expressed sharp disagreement with other Orthodox at the Vienna 2010 Catholic-Orthodox International Theological Commission who appear to have conceded that the Popes in the ancient Church DID exercise a primacy of universal jurisdiction (though, it must be noted, they held it to be of ecclesiastical, not divine, institution). In addition to taking the ecumenical patriarchate of Constantinople to task for expanding in "papist" fashion its jurisdiction over other Orthodox Churches in the diaspora, Hilarion declared bluntly that the primacy of the Bishop of Rome had never been recognized in the East.

The historical facts, however, prove otherwise, as can be noted in the writings of the pre-Schism Popes such as Damasus, Boniface I, Celestine, Leo the Great, Gelasius I, Agatho, and Hadrian I who clearly exercised jurisdiction in the East, quashing pseudo-councils, deposing bishops and patriarchs, restoring others to their Sees, and confirming Councils held in the East to be "Ecumenical."

Interestingly, both Archbishop Athenagoras and Metropolitan Hilarion are found contradicting the view on papal primacy of an earlier important Byzantine dissident, the 15th-century theologian and spiritual writer, Symeon, archbishop of Thessalonica. While fiercely opposed to the Latin heretics, he freely admitted that Peter was a Pope of Rome, that the Popes were exclusive Successors of Peter, that the Popes did exercise a real primacy of universal jurisdiction but that they had lost their primacy of headship because of the "heretical" addition of the "Filioque" to the Creed.

The confusion among contemporary Orthodox prelates and theologians regarding the Petrine primacy of the Pope (and other doctrines, as will be seen) discloses for all to see the fatal flaw in a truncated ecclesiology that has clearly deviated from the Petro-centric structure of the First Millennium Church.

It is astonishing that Archbishop Athenagoras took issue with the Catholic dogma of Transubstantiation. He stated baldly that such is "also a point of dispute," claiming that Orthodox theology has "rejected it" because of its expression in Aristotelian-Thomistic terms.

Here again, the archbishop finds himself at odds with the past of his own Greek Church. The doctrine of Transubstantiation involving an ontological change of the substance of bread and wine into the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ, only the accidents of bread and wine remaining, was precisely maintained by no less than the Patriarch Gennadius of Constantinople who maintained rejection of the Reunion Council of Florence (1439). Gabriel Severus of Philadelphia (c. 1577) similarly used the term Transubstantiation repeatedly to refer to the Eucharist "believed by all orthodox Christians to be properly the Body and Blood of Christ, the substance of it, and the accidents of the substance still remaining."

When the Calvinist patriarch of Alexandria and later Constantinople, Cyril Lucar, blatantly denied Transubstantiation, he suffered condemnation. Moreover, two Confessions of Faith — that of Peter Mohila (1640) and that of Dositheos of Jerusalem (1672) — specifically affirmed the Transubstantiation of bread and wine into the real Body and Blood of the Lord. The latter declared:

"We believe that after the consecration of the bread and the wine the substance of the bread and wine no longer remains, but there is the Body itself and the Blood of the Lord in the species and form of the bread and the wine, that is to say, under their accidents."

In his classic study "The Orthodox Church" (1993), Bishop Kallistos (Ware) admitted that past Greek councils and theologians made frequent use of the term Transubstantiation "together with the Scholastic distinction between substance and accidents."

They did no other than what Pope Paul VI did, namely, use the scholastic theory of matter which distinguished between substance and accidents in order to insist that by virtue of the words of consecration the bread and wine, although their appearances remain, undergo an ontological and intrinsic change, as a result of which they are no longer bread and wine, but become the true Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ.

The archbishop was mistaken, however, to think that the scholastic-philosophical view of the relation of substance and accidents brought to perfection by St. Thomas Aquinas is itself an article of faith. Actually, "The Church does not define any philosophical system as being of faith. Any philosophy may be reconciled with the dogma of Transubstantiation which safeguards the distinction between 'the appearances' of a thing and the thing itself" (Fr. George D. Smith in "The Teaching of the Catholic Church", London: Burns and Oates, 1963).

It is unfortunate that Archbishop Athenagoras' critique of Transubstantiation was based on a faulty grasp of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics. He confused "substance" with "essence" and mistakenly dismissed accidents as "mere notions" with no objective being. The fact remains (whatever the quibbling found among some Orthodox theologians) that the Catholic dogma of Transubstantiation conveys what both Catholics and Orthodox believe concerning the reality of Christ's true, real, and substantial Presence in the Holy Eucharist.

Archbishop Athenagoras Kokkinakis also objected to Purgatory:

"It cannot be found in the Scriptures nor is it expounded clearly in holy tradition."

How he could make such a statement in view of his church's offering daily, at every divine service, prayers for the alleviation of the suffering of souls who have departed for eternity, is baffling. Moreover, there are more than "a very few Fathers who speak about the purgatorial period." In commenting on various texts of Scripture (Matt.12:32; 1 Cor. 3: 3- 15; 2 Macc. 12:46), both Greek and Latin Fathers of the Church gave expression to the common belief of the faithful that there was a state of post-mortem purification for souls before they experience the face-to-face vision of God, and that prayer, almsgiving, and the offering of the Holy Sacrifice for the souls undergoing that post-mortem purification were efficacious for them.

Many Greek and Russian theologians since the Schism can be listed who are in agreement with Catholic doctrine on the existence of a middle state of souls after death, and that Purgatory is not an issue serving to keep Catholics and Orthodox separated.

The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception received a feeble criticism. To Archbishop Athenagoras, it minimized the need for the coming of Christ. He failed to explain, for example, the Byzantine Liturgy and the Greek Church's glorious hymnody heralding the Blessed Virgin's innocence, purity, and sanctity to be greater than that of the Cherubim and Seraphim (who were without original sin), or how She would be conceived in sin and thus under the power of the Devil.

Nor did he appear aware of the declaration of the Greek theologian Christopher Damalas of Athens after the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception:

"We have always sustained and taught that doctrine and this from the first periods of Christian antiquity… The matter is too sacred to excite quarrels and to protest a definition of the See of Rome."

It should be apparent that in taking issue with various Catholic doctrines, Archbishop Athenagoras Kokkinakis was expressing (with the exception of the Petrine supremacy and infallibility of the Bishop of Rome) not the definitive teaching of the Orthodox Churches, but his own opinions, opinions moreover contradicted and opposed by other Orthodox prelates, councils, and theologians. Orthodox theologians have also disagreed with his opinion about the epiklesis as the moment of consecration during the Divine Liturgy and Catholic theologians would dispute his opinion that "the East" never viewed the priest or bishop as acting "in persona Christi."

His article may be said to be instructive as confirming that as the result of the breaking of full communion with the Petrine See of Rome, the separated Orthodox no longer possess unity of faith on doctrines disputed with Catholics. Lacking the supreme authority of the Roman Pontiff, there is no one among them who can be said to speak with Peter's voice for orthodoxy.

There is NO infallible Magisterium in the separated Greco-Slavic Orthodox to issue a Credo evidencing the development of doctrine in the Church, whereas the infallible Magisterium of the Catholic Church has given us that wonderful official summary of Christian doctrines known as The Credo of the People of God. The truths contained in that Credo oblige any professed Catholic theologian to defend and explain them, and every Catholic catechist to teach them.

 

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