The East or the Easts?

“If someone does not hold fast to this unity of Peter, can he imagine that he still holds the faith? If he deserts the chair of Peter upon whom the Church was built, can he still be confident that he is in the Church?” — St. Cyprian of Carthage, De Ecclesiae Catholicae Unitate

It is a small thing, the difference between a singular and a plural — but in matters of the Church, small grammatical questions tend to disclose enormous theological ones. When we speak of “the East” in Christian discourse, we use a singular noun for what has not, in fact, been a single thing for nearly sixteen hundred years. The plural is more accurate. There are Easts. There have been Easts since the fifth century. And the question of why the East fractures, and keeps fracturing, is not a polemical question but a diagnostic one — and the diagnosis was given by a Western father in the third century, before any of the Eastern ruptures had even begun.

This is not written to score points. The Christian East has produced saints, theology, and liturgy of staggering depth: Athanasius and the Cappadocians, Maximus the Confessor and John Damascene, the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the iconographic tradition, the desert fathers, the long witness of martyrdom under Persians, Arabs, Mongols, Ottomans, and Soviets. To the riches of the East, every Western Christian owes a debt that cannot be calculated. But love of a thing does not require us to misdescribe it, and the honest description of Eastern Christianity from the fifth century forward is a description of fragmentation — fragmentation that the West, for all its own faults, has not undergone in the same way and on anything like the same terms.

The First Fractures

The popular timeline of Christian history gives 1054 as the year of “the schism” — as if a single, unified East stood facing a single, unified West, and the two parted ways with the slamming of a door in Hagia Sophia. The truth is more sobering. By the time Cardinal Humbert and Patriarch Cerularius traded their excommunications, the East had already broken with itself twice, and what remained in communion with Constantinople was not “the East” but a remnant of it.

The first rupture came after the Council of Ephesus in 431. The Church of the East — the great Persian and East Syriac church that traced its apostolic founding to Thomas and Addai, that sent missionaries as far as China and India — did not accept the council, and went its own way. An entire ancient apostolic communion, with its own patriarchate at Seleucia-Ctesiphon, its own liturgical tradition, its own martyrs by the tens of thousands under the Sassanids, was simply outside the imperial communion from that point forward. The label “Nestorian” was attached to them by their opponents and they would dispute it; what is not disputed is that they were no longer in communion with Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, or Constantinople. The first great Eastern body to leave was already gone six hundred years before 1054.

The second and far larger rupture came after Chalcedon in 451. The Copts of Egypt, the Syriac Christians of Antioch’s hinterland, the Armenians, and eventually the Ethiopians rejected the two-natures formula. What is now the Oriental Orthodox communion — Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Malankara — became a distinct world, encompassing entire patriarchates and ancient sees. Egypt, which had given the Church Athanasius and Cyril, was no longer in the same communion as the rest of the Christian Mediterranean. Modern theological dialogue has demonstrated, beautifully and at considerable length, that the Christological dispute was largely terminological — that what the non-Chalcedonians meant by physis and what Chalcedon meant by physis were not, in the final analysis, contradictory. But the dialogues that have shown this took fifteen centuries to bear fruit, and full communion has still not been restored. Whatever the linguistic confusion, the schism was real, and it has lasted.

By the late fifth century, then, “the East” was already three things: the Church of the East to the east of the empire, the Oriental Orthodox in Egypt and Syria and Armenia, and the Greek-speaking Chalcedonian church that occupied what remained of imperial territory. The Arab conquests of the seventh century would seal these geographic separations and add another wound, with the rise of the Maronites — eventually reconciled to Rome, but a further sign that even Chalcedonian Christianity in the East was not a single body.

The Byzantine Pattern

What is striking about the Greek-speaking Chalcedonian East from the fifth century forward is how often it required Rome to rescue it from its own disorders. This is not a triumphalist claim; it is a chronicle.

The Acacian Schism (484–519) saw Constantinople fall into communion with the Monophysite party under imperial pressure, and it was the firmness of Pope Hormisdas — and the famous formula bearing his name, signed by the emperor and the Eastern bishops to end the schism — that restored unity. The Monothelite controversy of the seventh century saw four Constantinopolitan patriarchs in succession teach a heresy ratified by an imperial Ekthesis, and it was Rome, under Pope St. Martin I, that condemned it at the Lateran Synod of 649 — for which Martin was arrested by imperial agents, tried in Constantinople, and exiled to die in Crimea. St. Maximus the Confessor, the greatest Greek theologian of his age, defended Rome’s authority against his own patriarch and emperor, and was tortured and mutilated for it. He had his right hand cut off and his tongue torn out, the better to silence his pen and his voice; he died in exile shortly after. When the Sixth Ecumenical Council finally vindicated his position in 681, it was vindicating what Rome had taught all along.

The iconoclast crises of the eighth and ninth centuries again saw imperial Constantinople embrace error — this time the destruction of icons — while Rome held firm. Popes Gregory II, Gregory III, Hadrian I, and others resisted the imperial line; the Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 787 restored orthodoxy on Roman terms, and a second iconoclast outbreak was again resolved with Western witness as a stabilizing element. The Photian disputes of the ninth century rehearsed the dynamics that would issue in 1054. And then 1054 itself, which was less a clean break than the formal name given to a long estrangement, hardening over the next four centuries through the catastrophe of the Fourth Crusade in 1204 — for which the West owes penitence and has rightly offered it — and the failed reunions at Lyon (1274) and Florence (1439).

The pattern is consistent enough to ask what it means. In nearly every major doctrinal crisis of the first millennium, the imperial church of Constantinople was prone to capture — by emperors, by court factions, by majorities of bishops who had political reasons to follow imperial theology. The Roman see was not infallibly preserved from every error in every age, but it was structurally distinct from the imperial apparatus in a way Constantinople was not. And Rome, again and again, was the see that did not bend.

The Modern Hour

The temptation is to consign all of this to ancient history, as though the patterns of the patristic and Byzantine periods had nothing to say about the present. But the most striking thing about the contemporary East is that the same fissiparous tendency is operating right now, in real time, in front of our eyes.

The Eastern Orthodox communion — the Greek-Slavic Chalcedonian church, the largest of the Easts at perhaps 220 million — is presently in the worst internal rupture of its modern history. In 2018 the Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, granted autocephaly to a new Orthodox Church of Ukraine. The Patriarch of Moscow, Kirill, broke communion with Constantinople in response. When Alexandria, Greece, and Cyprus subsequently recognized the Ukrainian autocephaly, Moscow broke with them as well. The Russian Orthodox Church then established a Patriarchal Exarchate of Africa in 2021, in flagrant violation of Alexandria’s canonical territory — a kind of intra-Orthodox uniatism in reverse, with Russian bishops planting altars on Coptic and Greek Orthodox soil. Antioch, Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Poland, and others have taken varying positions; the Pan-Orthodox Council of Crete in 2016, intended to be the first such council in over a thousand years, was boycotted by Antioch, Russia, Bulgaria, and Georgia before it even began.

This is not a polemical caricature. It is the situation as Orthodox theologians themselves describe it. There is presently no mechanism within Eastern Orthodoxy capable of resolving the dispute, because the dispute is precisely about who has the authority to resolve disputes. Constantinople claims a primacy of honor that includes the right to grant autocephaly; Moscow denies that this primacy carries any such jurisdictional weight; the other autocephalous churches are sovereign and answer to no one. The result is exactly what Cyprian foresaw: each particular church, holding fast to its own legitimacy, finds itself uncertain whether it is in communion with the church next door.

This is layered atop the heresy of phyletism — the elevation of national or ethnic identity above ecclesial unity — which was formally condemned by a synod at Constantinople in 1872 and which has nonetheless become, in practice, one of the operating principles of modern Orthodoxy. The autocephalous national church is the basic unit of Orthodox organization in a way that the patriarchal church was not in antiquity. When the Russian church casts the Ukrainian war as a sacred struggle and the Ukrainian church repudiates Moscow’s spiritual authority, when Greek and Russian parishes in the diaspora maintain separate jurisdictions in the same city, when an African Christian must choose between a Greek and a Russian altar — the ecclesiology is not Cyprian’s. It is something else.

The Defenses Offered

An honest article must anticipate the responses these arguments will draw. Eastern Orthodox theologians and apologists have a set of practiced replies, several of them genuinely substantive, and Christian charity requires that we engage them on their strongest form rather than the weakest. There are perhaps six that matter most. Each contains a real insight; none, in the end, can bear the ecclesiological weight placed upon it.

The first is the appeal to ground-level unity. The dispute, we are told, is among hierarchs. On the ground, in the parish, the faithful still receive the same Eucharist, confess the same Creed, venerate the same icons. A Greek layman traveling in Serbia will commune at a Serbian altar; priests concelebrate across many of these lines. The “schisms” Catholics point to are bureaucratic disputes among bishops, not real ruptures in the Body of Christ. The Church is mystically one even when its administrators quarrel.

There is a real pastoral truth here that we should not dismiss. But several things must be said. The descriptive claim is, first of all, partly false. Moscow has explicitly forbidden its faithful from communing in churches under Constantinople, Alexandria, Greece, or Cyprus. The Holy Synod’s directives, the practical instructions to Russian clergy abroad — these are not theoretical. A Russian Orthodox layman in London is not supposed to commune at the Greek cathedral down the street. In the diaspora, where these jurisdictions overlap geographically, the prohibition is operative parish by parish. And in Africa, where the Russian Patriarchal Exarchate established in 2021 has planted altars in canonical Alexandrian territory, you have the spectacle of two Orthodox bishops claiming jurisdiction over the same city — which is not a “patriarch-level dispute” but a structural impossibility that touches every parish involved.

More fundamentally, even where the claim is descriptively true, it concedes the Catholic point rather than refuting it. What the argument really says is: visible, hierarchical, canonical communion is not essential to the Church’s unity; what matters is sacramental sharing on the ground. But this is precisely the ecclesiology Catholic theology has always identified as the problem. The Church Christ founded was visibly one — one body, one bishop in each city, one communion of bishops with Peter. To say that the Church can remain “really” united while its bishops are in formal schism is to relocate the Church’s unity from the visible structure Christ established to an invisible communion of well-disposed laity. That is, structurally, a Protestant move. It is the same logic by which a Lutheran and a Methodist can claim to be in the “true church” together despite their hierarchical separation: the unity that matters is spiritual; the divisions are merely institutional. Orthodoxy historically has rejected exactly this ecclesiology when Protestants advance it. To deploy it now in self-defense is to undermine the Orthodox account of the Church itself.

The argument also proves too much. If sacramental sharing on the ground constitutes ecclesial unity and patriarchal-level breaks are merely administrative, then 1054 itself was not a schism — for centuries afterward, ordinary Greek and Latin Christians continued to commune in each other’s churches in many places, sailors and merchants and pilgrims crossing freely. The hardening came slowly. By the logic of the ground-level defense, the East-West schism did not really happen until popular practice caught up with hierarchical rupture, which would push the “real” schism to the thirteenth or fourteenth century at the earliest. Few Orthodox theologians wish to say this, because it makes the entire Orthodox case against Rome dependent on the very kind of slow institutional hardening they minimize when it happens among themselves now. One cannot have it both ways. Either hierarchical communion matters, and 1054 was a real rupture and so is 2018; or it does not matter, and neither was.

The argument cannot account for the Oriental Orthodox case at all. The Copts and the Eastern Orthodox have not been in sacramental communion for over fifteen hundred years. There is no ground-level unity between a Coptic parish in Cairo and a Greek Orthodox parish across town. The Christological dialogues have shown that the doctrinal substance is essentially shared, the Christology compatible, the spiritual patrimony deeply common — and yet they cannot commune together, because the hierarchical rupture has hardened into a real and lived separation. If “ground-level unity” is what matters, why has fifteen centuries of essentially shared faith not produced it? The answer the Oriental Orthodox themselves give is that visible communion requires hierarchical communion, which requires conciliar resolution — exactly the criterion the Eastern Orthodox now wave away when describing their own internal divisions.

And the appeal to invisible unity is precisely what Cyprian was writing against. Cyprian was not addressing Christians who had stopped sharing the Creed; he was addressing Christians who had stopped sharing the bishop. His whole point in the De Unitate is that one cannot have a unity of faith and sacrament that bypasses the hierarchical communion Christ established. The Novatianists against whom he wrote had valid sacraments and a learned clergy and a serious devotional life. They were nonetheless, in his judgment, outside the Church because outside the unity of the episcopate. The “ground-level” defense saves the Orthodox phenomenon at the cost of Orthodox ecclesiology. It would, if pressed, dissolve 1054 and make Protestants of all of us.

The second defense is the appeal to the primacy of honor. Rome, we are told, was first among equals — a primacy of honor (primus inter pares) within the Pentarchy of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, with no jurisdictional authority outside its own patriarchate. Peter founded multiple sees; the chair at Antioch was his before the chair at Rome. The papacy as Catholics now describe it is a later Roman accretion onto a more modest historical reality.

The Pentarchy is itself a clue here, not an answer. The five-patriarchate system did not exist in the apostolic age; it crystallized in the sixth century, after Ephesus and Chalcedon had already removed two of the original major sees from the imperial communion. The Pentarchy is a system that emerged from disorder, not the original constitution of the Church — a Byzantine theological convention developed when the eastern half of Christendom needed a new framework for organizing what remained. To project it backward as the apostolic norm is anachronism.

The “primacy of honor” formula, meanwhile, requires explanation rather than supplying one. What does honor entail? In the actual practice of the first millennium, Rome’s primacy was operative in ways that go well beyond ceremonial precedence. The Acacian Schism was resolved by the Formula of Hormisdas, signed by the emperor and the Eastern bishops, which professed that the Roman see “has always kept the Catholic religion inviolate.” The Council of Chalcedon, on receiving the Tome of Leo, acclaimed: “Peter has spoken through Leo.” Pope St. Martin I called the Lateran Synod of 649 to condemn Monothelitism while sitting Eastern patriarchs were teaching it; he was arrested by imperial agents, tried, and exiled to die for the offense — and the Sixth Ecumenical Council later vindicated him. Maximus the Confessor, the greatest Greek theologian of his age, defended Roman authority against his own emperor and patriarch, was tortured and mutilated, and is now a saint in both East and West. These are not the actions of Christians who believed Rome held a merely honorific position. They are the actions of Christians who believed that, when the imperial church had failed, Rome was where one went to find the Catholic faith preserved.

The honest historical claim is that Rome’s primacy was contested in its precise extent and disputed in particular cases — but its reality, as something more than ceremonial, is written across the first-millennium record by Eastern hands as well as Western. The reduction of that record to “honor only” is a polemical retrojection.

The third defense is the appeal to conciliar authority. The principle of unity, on this account, is not the Roman bishop but the ecumenical council. The seven councils settle the faith; conciliarism, not Petrine primacy, is the authentic patristic ecclesiology.

This is the strongest of the Orthodox positions philosophically, and it is also the one that most cleanly fails empirically. Begin with the obvious questions: Who calls a council? Who ratifies it? Who recognizes which councils are ecumenical and which are not? The Orthodox canon of seven councils is itself a theological convention — there is nothing in the early Church specifying that there must be exactly seven, and councils called “ecumenical” by emperors at the time (Hieria in 754, for instance, the iconoclast council attended by 338 bishops) were rejected after the fact. The criteria of genuine ecumenicity, when pressed, turn out to include reception by the whole Church — but reception by the whole Church requires some principle of recognition, and conciliarism cannot supply it. The fathers of Chalcedon themselves wrote to Pope Leo asking him to ratify their decrees. They did not regard themselves as a self-sufficient organ of unity.

The empirical failure is starker still. No pan-Orthodox council has been held in over a thousand years. The 2016 Council of Crete, which was supposed to be the long-awaited gathering of the autocephalous churches, was boycotted before it began by Antioch, Russia, Bulgaria, and Georgia — four major churches, including the largest. A conciliarism that cannot in fact convene a council across an entire millennium is a conciliarism in name only. It functions, in practice, as a justification for not having any operative principle of unity at all — a permanent invocation of an authority that is permanently in absentia.

When the council fails, who calls it back to itself? When bishops disagree, who decides? Cyprian saw that there must be an answer to these questions if the Church is to remain visibly one, and Christ supplied the answer when He gave the keys to one man. Conciliarism without a Petrine principle is a chair with three legs.

The fourth defense is the doctrine of “sister churches” with valid sacraments. We and Rome, Orthodox apologists often say, are sister churches with the same essential faith, valid orders, true sacraments — separated by historical misunderstandings and political accidents but not by anything ultimately serious. We are in temporary disagreement, not real schism.

The “sister churches” language is itself recent — a diplomatic phrase of the post-Vatican II ecumenical era, not a patristic ecclesiology. It is useful as a gesture of charity, and Catholic theology has accepted it in qualified senses, but it cannot bear the weight Orthodox apologists sometimes place on it. The deeper question is what it means to call a “temporary disagreement” something that has lasted a thousand years and shows no sign of resolution. At what point does an enduring rupture cease to be temporary? At what point does the absence of communion become evidence that we are not, in fact, the same body?

Validity of sacraments, moreover, is necessary but not sufficient for ecclesial unity. Catholic theology recognizes the validity of Orthodox orders and Eucharist precisely because they preserve apostolic succession and the right form. But validity is a sacramental category; communion is an ecclesial one. The Donatists had valid sacraments and were schismatics. The Novatianists had valid sacraments and were schismatics. The very fact that Orthodox and Catholics cannot, on Orthodox principles, commune at one another’s altars is itself the disproof of the “same faith” claim. If the faith were the same, the communion would follow. The continued impossibility of the communion is the lived testimony that the faith is not, in fact, regarded as the same — and that what is missing is precisely the Petrine bond that would make sacramental sharing possible.

The fifth defense is the tu quoque. Rome, we are told, has its own divisions, its own crises, its own scandals. The Reformation produced thousands of Protestant denominations from a Western Church that was supposed to be unified by Peter. Vatican II has produced a Catholic crisis that, by some measures, is larger than anything in Eastern Christianity. Catholics are in no position to lecture Orthodox about ecclesial unity.

This deserves a careful answer because it contains real content. Yes, the Reformation was a catastrophe. Yes, Catholics have their own internal crises in our own day, which any honest Catholic will acknowledge. But the structural distinction holds. The Protestant Reformation was a separation from Rome, not a fragmentation within Rome. Those who broke unity are by definition no longer in the Catholic Church; they constitute a different category of separated brethren, whose multiplication is precisely the predictable consequence of having abandoned Petrine unity. The Reformation, far from refuting the Catholic claim, illustrates it: when the chair of Peter is rejected, the Church does not become more unified by some other principle. It fragments — and goes on fragmenting, into thousands of denominations, each claiming to read Scripture rightly.

The Catholic Church, with all its internal disputes, remains a single visible communion. There are not eight Catholic churches presently in or out of communion with each other depending on which bishop one asks. The Pope in Rome is in communion with every Catholic bishop in the world, and they with one another through him. Catholic disorders are crises within a single body that can be addressed by that body’s authority. Orthodox disorders are crises about whether the body even exists as one. These are not equivalent situations, and the tu quoque obscures rather than illuminates the difference.

The sixth defense is the charge that Rome itself broke the faith — most famously by inserting the Filioque into the Creed, but also more generally by developing the papacy beyond its first-millennium form. On this account, Rome is the schismatic, and the East merely held the line.

The Filioque deserves a careful treatment in its own right, but a few observations are owed here. The substance of the doctrine — that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son — has solid patristic warrant in both East and West. Augustine and Hilary in Latin, but also Cyril of Alexandria, and notably Maximus the Confessor himself, who in his Letter to Marinus explicitly defended the Western use of the Filioque against Greek critics, distinguishing it from the heretical sense the East feared. The procedural objection — that Rome added it without an ecumenical council — is more serious, and Catholics should grant that the manner of its insertion was not ideal. But if Rome cannot in principle teach the truth without convening a council that may or may not assemble, the Petrine office is reduced to nothing, and the conciliarism we have already considered becomes the operative principle. The two objections cannot both be pressed at once: either Rome has authority to teach with the council, in which case the question becomes whether the doctrine is true; or it has none without the council, in which case Rome cannot teach anything until the East agrees, and the Petrine office is gutted.

The broader claim — that the papacy is a Roman development beyond its first-millennium form — has truth in it that Catholic theology readily acknowledges. Doctrine develops, and the explicit articulation of papal primacy at Vatican I was a development. But development is not corruption, and the seeds of what was later articulated are present in the first-millennium record: in Leo at Chalcedon, in the Formula of Hormisdas, in the appeals of Maximus and Theodore the Studite and innumerable others to Rome as the see whose communion guarantees catholicity. The Catholic claim is not that the medieval papacy fell from the sky onto the apostolic Church; it is that what was implicit in the apostolic deposit became explicit through the centuries, as such things always do. The Trinity itself was articulated in fourth-century terms that the apostles did not speak; we do not on that account call Nicaea an innovation.

None of these defenses, taken individually or together, can finally explain why the East has fractured and continues to fracture. Each saves a piece of the phenomenon at the cost of another. The ground-level defense saves contemporary practice at the cost of Orthodox ecclesiology. The primacy-of-honor defense saves Orthodox autocephaly at the cost of the patristic record. The conciliar defense saves a theoretical principle of unity at the cost of any actual mechanism for unity. The sister-churches defense saves the appearance of catholicity at the cost of what catholicity must mean. The tu quoque saves Orthodoxy by changing the subject. The Filioque defense saves Eastern resistance to development at the cost of the Eastern fathers themselves. The defenses, taken together, do not amount to an ecclesiology. They amount to a series of explanations for why the absence of an ecclesiology is acceptable.

The Diagnosis Cyprian Gave

The Cyprianic principle is not a piece of high papal triumphalism imposed on the early Church by later Roman ambition. It was articulated by a North African bishop in the third century, before any of the Eastern ruptures, before Chalcedon, before Cerularius, before Vatican I. Cyprian saw something true: that the Church’s unity is not merely a matter of agreement among equals, because agreement among equals can fail, and when it fails there must be a principle by which the Church remains one. That principle, Christ Himself gave to one man. Tu es Petrus. The chair of Peter is not the source of the Church’s holiness, nor of its theology, nor of its liturgy — the East is rich in all three quite apart from Rome. But the chair of Peter is the source of its visible unity, and where that chair is rejected, the Church does not become unified by some other means. It fragments.

This is what the East has demonstrated, charitably and tragically, for sixteen centuries. The Church of the East refused Ephesus and went its own way. The Oriental Orthodox refused Chalcedon and went their own way. The Byzantine Chalcedonians, having found in conciliarism and imperial authority their substitutes for Petrine primacy, fell repeatedly into errors that Rome had to correct, and then in 1054 walked away from the corrector. The Orthodox communion that resulted, lacking any final principle of unity, has continued to fracture along national, political, and personal lines, down to the present moment when Moscow and Constantinople cannot agree on whether they are in communion with each other.

None of this is to deny the wounds the West has inflicted, or to pretend that Catholicism is unscarred. The sack of Constantinople, the Latinization of Eastern Catholic traditions, the cultural condescension of which Eastern Christians have often and rightly complained — these are real, and Catholic charity requires acknowledging them. Nor is it to deny that the Catholic Church has its own internal dissensions and disorders, which any honest Catholic will admit. The point is structural rather than moral. The Catholic Church, for all its faults, has not split into eight national bodies presently in or out of communion with one another. It cannot, because the principle of its unity is not conciliar consensus or ethnic tradition or imperial backing, but the chair of Peter.

A Charitable Forthrightness

The Eastern Catholic Churches — twenty-three sui iuris bodies in communion with Rome — are the standing proof that union with the chair of Peter and the preservation of Eastern patrimony are not opposed. But the proof is not as clean as a Catholic apologist might wish, and Christian honesty requires saying why. The Eastern Catholics did not arrive at this proof through a smooth historical course. They arrived at it through generations of mistreatment by Roman authorities who often could not distinguish between catholicity and Latinity, and they held on through it. The wound was real, and the proof is real, and the proof is real partly because the wound was.

The Synod of Diamper in 1599, under Archbishop Aleixo de Menezes, imposed the Latin Mass on the Saint Thomas Christians of India in Syriac translation, burned Syriac books deemed heretical, suppressed local customs, and effectively dismantled the East Syriac patrimony of one of the most ancient apostolic churches in the world. The full restoration of the Syro-Malabar liturgy is a project still under way in our own decade. The Maronites saw their Antiochene liturgy reshaped along Roman lines over centuries; the iconostasis was lost, vestments and ceremonial took on Latin features, and only in recent generations has a serious restoration movement gathered force. The Ukrainian Greek Catholics and other Slavic and Romanian Greek Catholics absorbed Latin impositions of varying severity from the Union of Brest (1596) forward — clerical celibacy imposed where it had not been the rule, the Filioque inserted into the Creed in some uses, Latin devotions adopted wholesale, native customs suppressed as insufficiently Catholic. The Melkites in the nineteenth century mounted some of the most articulate resistance to Latinization in Catholic history; Patriarch Maximos IV’s interventions at Vatican II in defense of Eastern integrity remain a high-water mark.

The sharpest single wound was inflicted on the Eastern Catholics of North America. The decree Cum Data Fuerit in 1929, reaffirming the earlier Ea Semper of 1907, forbade the ordination of married men to the priesthood for Eastern Catholics in the United States and Canada, and required that married Eastern priests not even be sent there. This was a direct violation of a discipline the Eastern churches had observed since apostolic times and that the Council of Trullo had explicitly defended. The pastoral consequences were catastrophic. When Father Alexis Toth, a widowed Carpatho-Rusyn priest, presented himself to Archbishop John Ireland of Saint Paul in 1889, he was refused faculties on account of his prior marriage. Toth eventually led somewhere between one and two hundred thousand Eastern Catholics out of communion with Rome and into the Russian Orthodox Church. He was canonized by the Orthodox Church in America in 1994 as a confessor. The married-clergy restriction in North America was not formally lifted until 2014 — eighty-five years of a Latin discipline imposed in violation of Eastern canonical tradition, with an entire ethnic Catholic population lost as its immediate fruit.

None of this can be glossed over and none of this should be. The Latinizations were wrong, and Rome has now said so on its own authority. The Second Vatican Council’s Orientalium Ecclesiarum directed the Eastern Catholic churches to recover their authentic patrimony and condemned the assumption that uniformity with the Latin rite is itself a mark of catholicity. John Paul II’s apostolic letter Orientale Lumen in 1995 declared that the Church must breathe with both her lungs and called for the active restoration of Eastern theology, liturgy, and spirituality. The 1990 Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches was designed precisely to protect Eastern autonomy from further Latin encroachment. The 2014 decision restoring married clergy in the diaspora was the formal repudiation of Cum Data Fuerit. Across the Eastern Catholic world, restoration movements are now under way with active Roman support — recovering iconostases, married priests, authentic liturgical traditions, theological vocabulary, and devotional practices that had been displaced.

This is precisely what makes the Eastern Catholic witness a proof rather than a counter-example. They held on through real abuse. They did not abandon communion with Peter even when the men acting in his name were treating their patrimony with contempt. And now, because they held on, the patrimony is being restored from within the Church rather than preserved outside her. The recovery is happening with the support of their Western brothers, not against them. The same papal authority that once permitted Latinization is now actively undoing it. This is the Petrine principle vindicating itself: the office contains within itself the mechanism for its own self-correction. Roman administrative excesses can be repented of by Rome, and have been.

The Orthodox alternative has no such mechanism. Phyletism was condemned by a synod at Constantinople in 1872 and is more entrenched today than at any point in modern Orthodox history. The Moscow-Constantinople rupture cannot be resolved because there is no authority capable of resolving it. The Pan-Orthodox Council of 2016 did not happen as planned, and there is no procedure for trying again. The Eastern Catholics, having weathered a bad relationship, are now in one Church with each other and with Rome — a Maronite, a Melkite, a Ukrainian, a Syro-Malabarese, and a Latin Roman Catholic can all commune at one another’s altars. The Orthodox, having preserved their liturgies intact from Roman interference, cannot say the same about themselves.

This is what hope can look like when it is honest. The dialogues with the Oriental Orthodox have shown that ancient Christological disputes can be reduced, by patient and prayerful work, to the terminological misunderstandings they always were. The 1994 Christological declaration with the Assyrian Church of the East effectively dissolved the Nestorian question. The mutual lifting of the 1054 anathemas by Paul VI and Athenagoras in 1965 was a real and beautiful thing. The path is open, and the path requires nothing of the East that Rome has not already given the Eastern Catholics — protection of patrimony, recovery of patrimony, full sui iuris autonomy, and communion with the chair of Peter.

But hope is not the same as pretense, and Christian charity does not require us to pretend. The East has been fracturing since the fifth century and is fracturing now, and the reason is not bad temper or imperial politics or Latin arrogance, though all of these have played their part. The reason is the one Cyprian named. Where the chair of Peter is held fast, the Church remains one. Where it is rejected — politely, theologically, with the highest motives — the Church does not become one by some other route. It becomes Easts.

The path back is the one it has always been: not the abandonment of Eastern patrimony, which Rome has now solemnly committed to protect, but the recovery of what Cyprian taught and what the first Eastern fathers themselves confessed when they wrote to Rome, appealed to Rome, and looked to Rome in their crises. The chair is still there. The bishop who sits in it still extends his hand. The Eastern Catholics took that hand and were wounded by it and held on, and the wounds are now being healed. The question is whether the rest of the East, which has so much to give the universal Church, can take that same hand and trust that what was suffered for can also be restored.