Vatican II and its implementation is still controversial among Catholics. Today on Crisis Point we’re going to consider an Eastern Orthodox perspective to the Council, particularly its ecclesiology.
Guest: Archpriest Peter Heers was raised as the son of an Anglican priest, who, in 1992, together with much of his parish, converted to the Orthodox Church. Then, in 1996 Fr. Heers came to Thessaloniki, Greece, in order to visit Mt. Athos, returning again in 1998 to begin studies at the Theological School of the University of Thessaloniki, where he earned undergraduate, masters and doctoral degrees in Dogmatic Theology. He is the founder and current head of Uncut Mountain Press, the founder and first editor of “Divine Ascent, A Journal of Orthodox Faith,” the host of the online podcast, Postcards from Greece, hosted by Ancient Faith Radio, and a regular speaker to parish groups in the United States and Canada.
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Eric Sammons:
Vatican II and its implementation is quite controversial among Catholics, especially among traditionalist Catholics. I thought today it would be a good idea to have a different perspective, an Eastern Orthodox perspective, on Vatican II, particularly Vatican II ecclesiology.
Hello, I’m Eric Sammons, the host of Crisis Point and editor-in-chief of Crisis Magazine. Welcome to the program. Before we get started, I just want to encourage people to like this episode, subscribe to the channel, let other people know about it. I always appreciate that. Also you can follow Crisis Magazine on all the different social platforms, @CrisisMag.
Let’s get right into it. I want to introduce our guest. A little bit of a long introduction, but I think it’s important because I think most of our audience probably is not familiar with Father, so I will go ahead and get started with that. Archpriest Peter Heers was raised as the son of an Anglican priest, who in 1992 together with much of his parish converted to the Orthodox Church. In 1996, Father Heers went to Greece in order to visit Mount Athos, returning again in 1998 to begin studies at the Theological School of the University of Thessaloniki, where he earned undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degrees in Dogmatic Theology. He then served as director and spiritual father of a small parish church in a village in the mountains outside of Thessaloniki, Greece from 2006 to 2017.
He is the founder and current head of Uncut Mountain Press, the founder and the first editor of Divine Ascent, a Journal of Orthodox Faith, the host of the online podcast, Postcards from Greece hosted by Ancient Faith Radio, and a regular speaker to parish groups in the United States and Canada. He’s also the author of the Ecclesiological Renovation of Vatican II: an Orthodox Examination of Rome’s Ecumenical Theology Regarding Baptism in the Church, which that’s light. There it is right there, which I own a copy of. Welcome to the program, Father.
Fr. Peter Heers:
Thank you, Eric. It’s good to see you again after many, many years of not seeing you. It’s nice to be here. Thanks for having me.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. For those who don’t know, actually, Father and I go way back. Almost 30 years ago, we were both involved in pro-life work together. Just before we get started on the actual topic at hand, I do have to ask you, what was your reaction to Dobbs when Roe v. Wade was overturned?
Fr. Peter Heers:
Well, we were, of course, thrilled. I don’t think back in 1990, when we were in college sitting in front of abortion clinics, we thought that this day would come. I don’t know, most people thought it was pretty far away. So thank God. Of course, it is a little bit deceptive because now it’s going back to the states. And so the real struggle among Christians on the ground is just beginning in many ways. But thanks be to God. We were all grateful to God.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. I just didn’t think it would happen in my lifetime, so I’m glad it did in the courts, like you said. We still have a lot of work to do. In fact, I’m going to a fundraiser tonight for a crisis pregnancy center because a lot of work needs to be done there. I need to support them to help out the women who we’ll meet and their babies.
Fr. Peter Heers:
Yes. I think you will see this country divide even more and you’ll see states there going to infanticide, unfortunately, like California. But it’s a trend that’s been going on for a long time, of separating the sheep from the goats, so it’s happening more and more.
Eric Sammons:
That’s right. Exactly. Okay, so we won’t bore everybody with stories about going to jail together or anything like that here. Instead, we’ll focus on the topic at hand which is Vatican II. It’s commonly thought in Catholic circles and I think probably in many Orthodox circles, that Vatican II, particularly the ecclesiology of Vatican II, brought the Catholic Church, in a sense, closer to Orthodoxy. Because the common narrative is that Vatican I, of course, with the definition of papal primacy, papal universal jurisdiction, papal infallibility, that of course brought us further away from Orthodoxy, whereas the more collegial aspects of Vatican II perhaps brought us a little bit closer to Orthodoxy. But I think both you and I would have some problems with that narrative and so that’s why I wanted to bring you on. I just want to tell people ahead of time, this is not intended as a debate. This is really more of a discussion.
I think it’s good to get an actual Orthodox priest on to talk about it from the perspective of Orthodoxy of Vatican II, because as Catholics, we tend to just assume Vatican II is good for ecumenical relations, good for bringing us closer to our Orthodox brothers and sisters. So let’s actually talk to an Orthodox priest about what he thinks about that.
So what we’re doing here is we’re mostly going to focus on Lumen Gentium, particularly Lumen Gentium, chapters one through three, which talk about the church. Chapter one talks about basically the mystery of the church. Chapter two is the people of God, basically membership in the church. And then chapter three is how the church is organized, the hierarchy of the church. I don’t know how much of this we’re going to actually cover, but we’ll at least get a high level perspective. We could have a graduate level discussion course on this, of course, but we’ll stick to the high level.
First, chapter one of Lumen Gentium, what is the church, the mystery of the church? It talks about the church in Christ is in the nature of a sacrament. It’s a sign and instrument that is of communion with God and unity among all men. It talks a lot about imagery for the church. I just want to ask you, how would an Orthodox answer, “What is the church?”
Fr. Peter Heers:
Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. Just to lead into that before I get to that direct answer. I think that on a surface level, many people do think that it was, obviously, an opening of Vatican II toward not only Orthodox, but Protestants and all the shades of Christianity outside Catholicism. An interest in research was the dogma of the church, ecclesiology. What does Vatican II say is the church? It’s not how they feel about orthodoxy or the rhetoric or the political stance or the pastoral stance, but do we have a new dogma, a new ecclesiology? What is it? How has it changed from the previous ecclesiology that we heard in the previous centuries and how does it compare to the patristical ecclesiology? That was my mission in my doctoral thesis, which is what this book originally was.
What was at stake was what are they saying about the nature of the church and the mysteries of the church? What I found was something, I don’t think I expected it to this degree, but what I found from my perspective as an Orthodox priest and scholar is that I found a approach and understanding of the unity of the church and the mission of the church which is very different, quite different from the Orthodox perspective. What is the church is the question. Of course, the church is the body of Christ and we are members of the body of Christ.
One of the things that jumped off the page to me when I was reading, especially Yves Congar and others who really formed theologically the Second Vatican Council’s understanding of the church, is that they intentionally did not want to use that language to describe the church. They wanted to go to the people of God, they wanted to use other language because, as they say in the writings in which I document in the book, is that they said, “This is going to be difficult for ecumenical relations.”
They intentionally strove to not think about the church in that organic way, in which there’s really no room for degrees of churchliness. There’s no room for a partial communion when you talk about members. And that’s exactly what somebody like Congar or Joseph Ratzinger discussed in their discussions. I don’t have the quotes in front of me, but they’re in my book.
So we are very much Pauline, the Orthodox. That’s the core. It’s an organic unity in the Eucharist. All the mysteries are one. All the mysteries are the one mystery of the incarnation. The continuation of the incarnation is the church.
Another point which they seem to get away from in Vatican II, is they don’t want to talk about it as the continuation of the incarnation, which is very much front and center in somebody like say St. Justin Popovich, a great 20th century saint of the Orthodox church. And so they’re moving away toward a definition of understanding the church which allows for incremental or partial communion, and therefore opens up the way for ecumenical dialogue and relations. We could talk about many aspects of that, how they get away from the patristic ecclesiology, from the Orthodox perspective.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, this is very fascinating to me because my most recent book, Deadly Indifference, I talk about this issue of partial and full communion, and how it’s an innovative terminology, frankly, this idea that there is partial or full communion. And so from Orthodox perspective, how is one in communion with the church? And is there any type of a gray area of people who perhaps are not fully members of the church or are somehow connected to the Orthodox church?
Fr. Peter Heers:
Well, I think we need to talk positively about the church first, before we talk about what the church is not. Because that’s the way the patristic understanding would go and that’s going to properly put things in the right perspective. Usually where people start is at the end. In other words, they look at their own experiences. They look at the pastoral reality on the ground. And then they go back and they try to do ecclesiology. And that’s not going to work. You have to start with revelation, Christology, Pauline patristic ecclesiology. And then in that context, try to understand these fuzzy, these areas of, “Well, what about this? What about that? And what about the reality of those not in communion with the church?”
So you go to St. Maximus the Confessor, for instance. It’s very clear in his understanding of the church that for every member of the church, there is no degrees of participation. What opens up to them is the same, the one and the same Christ. How that is appropriated and assimilated of course is going to be a thousand differences. That’s on a personal level of assimilation. That’s not on the level of Christ and His offering and who He is.
So when we are baptized, chrismated and communed in the Orthodox church…. And those three mysteries are united in terms of its initiation. That might seem minor, but it’s massively important in understanding the differences between the Orthodox and the medieval Catholic, let alone the Vatican II ecclesiology. And there’s a lot of practical historical things that one could discuss, as how could they get to the point where they talked about in Vatican II, someone being baptized alone and being a part of the body of Christ? Like a Protestant is baptized and he is, according to Unitatis Redintegratio, he is fully participating in the mysteries and the grace of Christ. Maybe not full communion, he wouldn’t say that, but he is participating in church.
In the Orthodox church initiation means baptism, chrismation and communion for infants or every single person who becomes an Orthodox Christian. So here practically and theologically, you can’t be a member of the church in the Orthodox church if you’re not communing. Whereas Vatican II ecclesiology allows you to be a part of the church if you’re not chrismated and you’re not communing. And that has to do with the medieval understanding of what happened in the West, which did not happen in East, which was there was a separation first in time between baptism and chrismation and communion, as well as confession. And that led to essentially a different understanding of the mysteries and their unity and what it means to be a Christian in the West.
It must seem minor, but it’s really important. Because you can’t get to the point where you talk about every baptized person on the face of the earth, whoever they are, outside, inside of Catholicism being somehow participants in the one mystery of the church, in the ancient practice of initiation. So there’s no incremental, partial degrees of communion in that vision of initiation and that vision of the participation in the church. It is all or nothing.
People like Father George Florovsky, well-known patristic scholar or Kallistos Ware said exactly that in the 1970s when they were talking about ecclesiology in relation to Vatican II. And they make very clear… Let me just actually quote Florovsky. I think it’s very helpful. He says, “There was simply the question of full communion, that is of membership in the church. There were identical terms of membership for all.” And Kallistos Ware says, “The Bible, the Fathers, or the canons know of only two possibilities, communion and non-communion. It is all or nothing. Did not envision any third alternative such as partial intercommunion.”
Father Dumitru Staniloae, the great Romanian patristic scholar, who is likely going to be glorified by the Romanian church here as a saint, he says much of the same, talking about the question of intercommunion in terms of the Eucharist. But it’s applicable to all the mysteries because the mysteries are one. Christ is one. The church is one.
From the Orthodox perspective, there was a breakdown probably long before Vatican II in the vision of baptism and its initiation. They talk about, for instance, I believe it’s in Trent, they talk about a non-Christian, could be even an atheist or a Jew or a Muslim, if he’s doing what the church intends and what the church says is a baptism, he could theoretically initiate somebody into the church. From an Orthodox perspective, that’s just impossible. That’s not conceivable, we couldn’t have imagined that to happen. So that’s pretty huge in the whole development of doctrine in the West, that kind of perception.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, just to be clear on the Catholic perspective. So basically the Catholic church teaches that anybody, theoretically, anybody could baptize somebody.
Fr. Peter Heers:
Right.
Eric Sammons:
So an atheist could administer baptism.
Fr. Peter Heers:
Right.
Eric Sammons:
If for example you’re driving by somebody in a car wreck and says, “I want to be baptized as a Catholic.” And the atheist is there. He could pour water over the head and say, “Okay, I’ll do what you want me to do and what you intend this to happen.” And we would consider that a valid baptism.
Fr. Peter Heers:
Right. It’s an extreme example, but it’s interesting. That points to a perspective on what the mystery is and how one’s initiated. I think that’s important.
Eric Sammons:
Right, because I think from the Catholic’s perspective, it is that the baptism is so important, that obviously baptism is our entrance into the body of Christ. And so we don’t want to have any barriers to that. It’s also interesting. For example, Mormon baptism is not considered valid by the Catholic church because their views of the Trinity are so wrong. They don’t believe in the Trinity. That doing it in the Father, Son, Holy Spirit is a fundamentally ontologically different thing for them. So there is some-
Fr. Peter Heers:
Yes.
Eric Sammons:
…. limitations on baptisms that can be done in the Catholic church. But so what you’re saying though, is from an Orthodox perspective, it needs to be an Orthodox… Can a Orthodox lay person baptize validly?
Fr. Peter Heers:
Yeah. Theoretically one who is baptized can baptize in extreme economy. We would call it an oikonomia which would be exception to the rule. But if somebody was in a hospital and did a baptism in the air, for instance, and that baby lived, we would baptize them in the Orthodox church. We would consider that to be the proper path. But I don’t want to get in the weeds because that gets off topic.
But I think the organic unity of the mysteries, as one with the mystery of the church, how these are inseparable in both our understanding of communion and initiation, I think that’s really at the heart where there’s a different vision of that in Vatican II. That’s really fleshed out. I don’t think it was all fleshed out in the Middle Ages. I think it really is fleshed out-
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, to make it clear, kind of what you’re saying here is in the West, of course, we separated baptism from confirmation from communion. In the East, it’s always been at the same time. And it’s pretty much understood that in the early church, the first days, it was all
