The Second Great Schism

As part of our Lenten observance, we offer a selection from the correspondence of our friend and spiritual advisor, Dr. Keith Massey.

In addition to his doctorate in the Biblical languages, Dr. Massey graduated from a Lutheran seminary (the confession of his birth and upbringing);  worked for some years for the RCC in the field of canon law; and finally converted to Orthodoxy:  where, however, he retains the wisdom of all he has seen before.  In this respect, he resembles John Henry Cardinal Newman -- one of his spiritual and intellectual heroes.

What follows is a personal and private email, sent to myself,  which he has graciously granted permission to make public.   He has many polished and considered essays, on this site,

http://magnaliadei.blogspot.com/

if you care to consult them.  (This is the “Orthodox Page”  referred to below.)  But there is something to be said as well  for the spontaneous effusion  to a friend.  (Compare Luther’s Tischreden.)

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The Second Great Schism

I have a thought I have been drafting in my mind. The following will be a rough draft of an attempt to put it into words. This may eventually become a blog post I'll produce for the Orthodox Page I'm going to work for.

First off, there are many candidates running for the title "First Great Schism." Western Church Historians, virtually not even considering the break with the East frequently refer to the petty and ultimately unimportant pissing battle between Italian and French Cardinals as "The Great Schism." I'm going to set it aside as the insignificant event it was.

Quite obviously, the Church Universal suffered what must be called the First Great Schism when the East and the West broke Communion. That did not actually happen, contrary to popular belief, in the year 1054. It is known historically that Eastern priests communed Westerners during the First Crusade. But clearly the early centuries of the Second Christian Millennium did crystalize with East and West no longer sharing Sacraments. They made abortive attempts to patch it in the next four hundred years, but it did not hold. And then six hundred more years of separation ensued.

As the Middle Ages drew to a close with the dawn of the Renaissance, a community of Churches in Northern Germany pushed back against only the very worst of the abuses of the Western Church. But they did not just hold to the rest of Tradition. They cherished it. Thus was born the Lutheran Church.

And then they watched in utter dismay, even within the lifetime of the original Reformers, as other portions of the Western Church went, theologically and biblically, totally and utterly off their rockers.

The next several centuries saw the East ossify into communities that maintain the 10th Century as if there were not nine before and have not been any since.

The main body of Western Christianity entrenched and militantly, even admirably, evangelized most of the Western Hemisphere. The descendants of the Renaissance protest movement, also known as Protestantism, mutated into a dizzying array of views. A few bodies of the original protest, the English Church and the Lutheran Communities, held their ground and remained within the orbit of the Tradition from which they were born.

And then came what I am going to call...the Moment.

I am asserting that in the late 50's there was a moment when Western Christianity could very probably have been reunited, but for one thing.

First off, nothing happened in the late 50's. But in the 60's the Western World was engulfed in a momentary spirit of revolution against all the norms that came before it. And it was in that context that the main body of the Western Church made several internal changes. And in fact they changed virtually everything that the original Northern German protest movement pushed back against.

But the main body of the Western Church, even as they did this, said to those Northern European Brethren, through their resolutions, "Don't you ever dare to ask us to admit we were wrong."

And that tone, that arrogance that, even as they silently dropped the errors that prompted the Reformation, would never even whisper regret, is what signaled to the rest of Western Christendom that there was no true dialogue to reconciliation.

And I am saying that on a deep psychological level, the rest of the Protestant world felt a chill sweep through it with this development. In a way, for the main body of the Western Church to suddenly move toward them, while simultaneously snubbing them, produces a revulsive reaction. In a market economy interpretation, what are Churches like the Lutherans and Anglicans supposed to do when suddenly the Catholics are on the market as if New Lutherans? To the extent that they were pushed away by the Catholics, they reacted predictably. They moved off. The left-ward movement of the Lutherans and Anglicans immediately following Vatican II is a reaction to the entrance of that Bear into the Market for the Middle.

And Lutherans and Anglicans shortly after that evolve into one of two things. One group crystalizes into virtual Medievalists. The other group begin to wander into Modernism.

The Eastern Church arrived into the modern age through a series of beleaguered occupations. Where they weren't dominated by Islam, they were then oppressed by Communism. For a brief window the Empire of Russia fostered missionaries who succeeded in evangelizing significant portions of Eastern Asia, to include a thriving Orthodox community in Japan, as well as Alaska. In the post Communist era, the Eastern Church has rebounded dramatically and even found its footing in asserting authority over expatriates in Western lands.

So what I am declaring the Second Great Schism is the ideological break we are now observing between, on the one hand the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, and the remainder of Western Christendom. And I am asserting that the historical schema I present above could and would have been entirely different if the main body of the Western Church had taken a different approach as recently as the late 1950's. In the context of the late 1950's, when Lutheranism worldwide, as well as Anglicanism, was somewhat monolithic in practice and belief, if in that context the Roman Catholic Church had enacted the changes she made at Vatican II but also simultaneously stated to the Lutheran and Anglican bodies that the Roman Catholic Church was in error in the 16th century in not making these changes then, and also stated that she regretted the separation of communion and begged forgiveness and was open to reconciliation, I believe that the next four decades of Christian history would have looked very different.

I believe that the Lutherans and Anglicans would have been much more hesitant in enacting changes as radical as the ordination of women if reconciliation with the Catholics was really a realistic proposition. Because it was not, and because the Catholics were seeming to invade the market of the middle, there was the subconscious impetus to innovate and follow the Zeitgeist.

What I am saying is that a period of potential reconciliation was mainly botched by the Roman Catholics. Now, one could ask, what would have happened if they did what I am suggesting. The system that evangelized the Western Hemisphere, built on the premise that the Pope in Rome was the very voice of God, what would have happened, what would even happen today, if he so much as suggested that they were wrong, truly wrong, at any point in time?

The answer is, they would have forgiven  him. They would forgive themselves. They would forgive all past Popes all their sins. And that is because they have indeed done as good a job as Lutherans in teaching the doctrine that we are all sinners and rely on God's grace for salvation. 

But the leaders instead, fearing a revolution, allowed just a superficial Reformation but would not surrender a meaningful apology.

Sadly, if I'm right about what could have been, we are further away from that point now then we were in 1580.