You Will Be Absorbed

I know that Christ prayed that "all would be one," but I get chills when I hear "unifiying" statements like this one from Cardinal Ratzinger.

Rome must not require more from the East with respect to the doctrine of primacy than had been formulated and was lived in the first millennium. When the Patriarch Athenagoras, on July 25, 1967, on the occasion of the Pope’s visit to Phanar, designated him as the successor of St. Peter, as the most esteemed among us, as one also presides in charity, this great Church leader was expressing the essential content of the doctrine of primacy as it was known in the first millennium. Rome need not ask for more. Reunion could take place in this context if, on the one hand, the East would cease to oppose as heretical the developments that took place in the West in the second millennium and would accept the Catholic Church as legitimate and orthodox in the form she had acquired in the course of that development, while, on the other hand, the West would recognize the Church of the East as orthodox and legitimate in the form she has always had.

So what's the big deal? Isn't he giving in on papal primacy? I'm sure that in the depths of his heart, he's making all the allowances he can. But notice the directions: East and West:

. . . the West would recognize the Church of the East as orthodox and legitimate in the form she has always had

That means Russia can still be Russia and Greece Greece and Romania Romania. But --

the East would cease to oppose as heretical the developments that took place in the West in the second millennium and would accept the Catholic Church as legitimate and orthodox in the form she had acquired in the course of that development

My little parish with its 100 or so families and its married priest and its Orthodox hymnography would be folded into the local archdiocese. And rather than influencing the worldview of that great and large body, its worldview would disappear. The building could probably keep its iconography, as a tribute to its "rich history," and if it remained in the archdiocese at all it would probably function as a wedding chapel rather than a parish -- it's just around the corner from a large Catholic parish, and there aren't enough Catholic priests to staff the parishes the archdiocese has. (I'm not referring to the current archdiocesan administration, because this is not a current possibility.)

Or perhaps the parish would be allowed to become part of the Eastern rite of the Catholic Church. The Eastern rite was permitted in America only because the Eastern European immigrants had an alternative. With "unity" as Cardinal Ratzinger envisions it, there will be no alternative, and the Eastern rite in the United States will wither away.

These developments would not stem from ill will. There's no malicious plot in mind to destroy the Orthodox Church as it exists in America. We are, however, weird and incomprehensible to anyone who has not entered the life, and weird and incomprehensible translates to administrative difficulties -- the same difficulties that Archbishop Ireland and St. Alexis Toth faced at the turn of the 20th century.

I'm not worried about this; there's blessed intransigence on both sides. But when people talk about their earnest desire for unity between East and the West, I thank God for my disorganized religion.

H/T: Fr. Joseph