CLOSING SPEECH

PETER RAEDTS

The topic of our meeting betrays a deeply Western concern; ques- tions about the ministry have always bothered the Latin half of the Church far more than our Greek brethren. In the churches that we now usually call Eastern or Orthodox, the structure of the Church in general and the place of its ministry in particular have never really been a matter of much discussion. At the local level there are the priests whose main task it is to celebrate the Divine Liturgy and to minister the Sacraments to the faithful, at the diocesan level we have the Metropolitan and his Council, and at the top is the Holy Synod, presided by the , the Katholikos, the Great-arch- bishop, or whatever his name is. It is a relatively simple structure that all Eastern Churches, whether they arc Chaldean, Coptic, or Greek Orthodox, have always agreed upon from roughly the third century up till now. How different this relaxed attitude is from the constant discus- sions in the West. From the earliest times the shape of the Church and of Church government, and of the place of the ministry within it, have been the subject of fierce and often acrimonious debate. One of the first to discuss the role of the ministry was St in his treatise on the preservation of unity in the Church, written about 260. His main thesis in that essay is that Church unity is fos- tered and preserved not so much by common doctrine, nor by the voice of charismatic prophets or martyred members of the commu- nity, but by properly appointed and ordained ministers. They are the voice of the Holy Spirit within the Church, not because of their personal qualities, but because of their hierarchical status, in short: Ubi episcopus, ibi Ecclesia. In St Cyprian's conception of the Church, the minister is more important than the message. How important ministers were in the West even in those early centuries is equally apparent from the quarrel about the validity of holy orders. Soon after Constantine made peace between the Empire and the Church, it arose in Carthage between the followers of Donatus and the majority of the Christian Church. Was personal 480 holiness a requirement for the priestly ministry or was it sufficient to be officially ordained, and holiness to be a desirable but optional extra? Because the towering personality of St Augustine looms so largely in later Christian imagination, it is easy to forget that most African Christians thought that Donatus was right, that no priest could validly administer the Sacraments if he was not pure in his personal life. Although three centuries later St Gregory the Great wholeheartedly agreed with St Augustine with what by then had become Christian orthodoxy, that the administration of the Sacraments constituted an opus operatum and not an opu.s operantis, he nevertheless felt called upon to write a book on pastoral care in which he clearly explained, in 's words: "What sort of persons should be chosen to rule the Church and how these rulers ought to live and how earnestly they ought each day to reflect on their own frailty" (Hi.storia ecclesiastica, it, I). Gregory's advice to priests became one of the most studied and commented texts of the Middle Ages. I only have to remind you of the Anglo-Saxon translation made in the court of Alfred the Great. Both Peter Brown and Robert Markus in their brilliant surveys of in Late Antiquity have wondered about this funda- mental difference, soon to become an unbridgeable gap, between the Greek East and the Latin West. Their conclusion was that, contrary to the Greek-speaking half of the Empire, in the West, Christian communities remained embattled minorities far into the fourth cen- tury. In their struggle against a world that did not accept them, they developed a strong minority ethos. In order to survive they had to keep the ranks closed, they could not afford internal divisions, and to achieve that they needed strong, even authoritarian leadership (St Cyprian!). It was from that initial minority position that Western Church leaders developed such a strong sense of their own high call- ing, and from that they derived their firm conviction that the author- ity of the bishops, and of the in general, was far above that of worldly powers, even that of the Emperor. It was theoretically expressed in the famous letter of Gelasius I to the Emperor Anastasius, in which the Pope explained that the auctoritas sacrata pontijicum ranked high above the regalis pote.stas, because priests had to account for the deeds of Kings at the day of judgment. It was put into practice by bishops such as St , who, without any hes- itation, excommunicated the Emperor Theodosius after the massacre