During his visit to America last week, Pope Benedict xvi had more on his mind than Vatican-American relations alone.He was also very much concerned about the strained relations between Rome and the Russian Orthodox Church. That is why the pope delivered a 30-minute television broadcast on the “need to restore unity among Christians” over Russian state television on April 16.
“The love of Christ even unto martyrdom, which unites [both Roman Catholics and Russian Orthodox], reminds us of the urgent need to restore unity among Christians, a duty to which the Catholic Church feels herself to be irrevocably committed. Both the Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church are moving in this direction,” Benedict stated during the broadcast.
Even as the pope calls for Christian unity between Rome and Moscow, the Russian Orthodox Church representative to European International Organizations, Bishop Hilarion, is calling for the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches to establish a “strategic alliance” for the protection of Christian values.
“We must realize that Orthodox and Catholic believers are no longer rivals. We are allies. The rivalry must be gone once and for all. If we understand that, proselytism will stop,” he said in an interview with Bulgarian magazine Christianity and Culture.
According to Catholic and Orthodox leaders alike, there is a need to present a united Catholic-Orthodox front to rising problems such as secularism, Islamism, and liberal Christianity. That is why leaders on both side of the Great Schism of 1054 are calling for “unity among Christians.”
That is why Orthodox leaders met with Vatican officials last October to sign a document establishing the primacy of the pope over all Catholic and Orthodox bishops—though there is still disagreement on exactly what authorities that status grants the Catholic leader.
As the Orthodox churches move toward unity with Rome, the Vatican has no intentions of compromising its beliefs. As former Pope John Paul II once wrote, “To believe in Christ means to desire unity; to desire unity means to desire the [Catholic] Church.”
Or, as a Global News Wire article said regarding Catholic “concessions” to other churches, “These concessions represent neither a shift nor a softening of the dogmatic positions long held by the Roman church. Rather, the dogma remains deeply entrenched and the concessions are merely a part of the strategy or means by which ‘other Christians’ will be led to accept and unite under Catholic dogma” (Nov. 27, 2003; emphasis ours).
For over 40 years, until his death in 1986, Plain Truth editor in chief Herbert W. Armstrong predicted that the Roman Catholic Church would pull its Protestant daughters and Eastern Orthodox sisters back into its fold as it rose up to rule over a united Europe.
As the November 1963 Plain Truth stated, “The mighty problem of achieving [Catholic] unity is two-fold. First, it involves reconciliation of the Orthodox Schism that officially commenced in 1054 and divided the churches in the East—Greece, Russia, the Balkans and the Near East—from Rome. Second, it involves the restoration to the Roman Communion all Protestantism which developed from 1517 onward.”
Russian political opposition to a Catholic-dominated European Union may present a future stumbling block to the Vatican’s efforts to reabsorb the Russian Orthodox Church, but we can be assured that Rome will indeed reabsorb the Orthodox Christians of Eastern Europe.
As Herbert Armstrong wrote during the height of the Cold War, “The uprising against Soviet domination in Poland can easily lead to Poland, and such Eastern European nations as Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and even Greece, joining in a union with Roman Catholic nations in Western Europe. The Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church could join with the Roman Catholic. The 10 nations of [a coming United States of Europe] will be Catholic” (co-worker letter, May 20, 1982).
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