Yesterday I went to a lecture sponsored by Fordham's Orthodox Christian Studies Center. The lecture was held in a room on campus housing a reproduction of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. This in itself is remarkable: nothing is more important in Orthodox-Catholic disputes than the issue of the papacy, and what could be more representative of the papacy than the Sistine Chapel? This interesting accident was not mentioned during the lecture, but I certainly noticed.
While I'm Catholic (as is my mom), my dad and his mom are Orthodox. Because of this, I've always been interested in Orthodox-Catholic relations; in their own way, they've always been present in my family. (For example, in having two Easters whenever the Gregorian and Julian dates don't coincide, as they, more often than not, don't.) During my freshman year, I took a theology course called Byzantine Christianity. The issue, admittedly, fascinates me, and, at any rate, its significance for ecumenism is anything but insignificant.
A century ago, an Orthodox Christian Studies Center at a Jesuit, Catholic university would have been an absurd idea. Nevertheless, today it is a reality. Jesuit education is always accused here and there by Catholic traditionalists as being too open to secular influences. As regards the question of interdenominational dialogue, hard-liners on either side might say that the kind of event held at Fordham yesterday was not the uninhibited movement of the Spirit of God or peace or academic inquiry or whatever but rather part of an insidious process of Catholics and Orthodox forgetting that the way to reconciliation is, not compromise, but capitulation. Well, there will always be people who say that, and the people who have absolutely no idea what those people are talking about will likely always outnumber them. The Orthodox-Catholic schism, having existed for so many centuries already, is theologically and culturally complex, and I don't pretend that a solution to it will happen tomorrow because of scholars suddenly being given a space at this point in history to discuss without bigotry.
I do, however, think of reciprocal openness between Catholics and Orthodox as something delightful and beneficial, however hindered and incomplete it is, and, as a Christian, I do think such a phenomenon certainly has a place in the unfolding of providence.