Adam A.J. DeVille

This paper touches on some issues having virtually no place in official Catholic-Orthodox dialogue, including moral questions around marriage and divorce; historiographical and liturgical-hagiographical questions centred on the canonization and commemoration of saints in one communion who left and/or were used in conciliar debates and liturgical texts to condemn the sister communion; and questions of synodal organization and structures in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy in the face of centralizing tendencies. It proposes a model of ‘gradual’ and localized sacramental communion inspired in part by the work of several contemporary Orthodox scholars—Staniloae, Bordeianu, Plekon, Arjakovsky, inter alia.

Introduction

I began my official involvement with the ecumenical movement in high-school in 1988, assisting a local chapter of the Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue in south- western Ontario. Then, in 1990, I became involved with the Canadian Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches whose seventh assembly in Canberra, Australia I attended, followed by seven years of working for the WCC during which I crossed the globe to many gatherings on five continents.

I learned immediately after returning from Australia in 1991 that the over- whelming majority of Christians had never even heard of the WCC, and had little clue as to what the word ‘ecumenism’ or its cognates even meant, and, more alarming still, they seemed completely uninterested in learning more. Worse still, those tiny few who actually were aware of the WCC were almost uniformly hostile, picketing our worship tent in Australia every morning with Pauline proof-texts (‘be ye not yoked together with unbelievers!’) or later taking to the pages of that august and venerable journal of theological scholarship, Reader’s Digest, to denounce the WCC as a vehicle for advancing what a contemporary Canadian crank, fondly imagining he has invented the phrase, calls ‘cultural Marxism’.

While depressing, this realization that the vast majority of people knew little and cared even less about ecumenism was sobering and helpful when we would get