Theological Dialogue between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches Catholic and Orthodox Churches: Primacy and Synodality. Common approaches and divergences

Abstract

The article is based on the lecture given by the Greek-Catholic Bishop in Greece, Dimitrios Salachas, given at the Pontifical University of Salamanca, in January 2019. The author is one of the long-standing members of the Joint Commission for Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Churches of Byzantine Tradition. As a professor of canon law in the Eastern Churches during his long academic life and as a theologian, Salachas comments on the Chieti Document, the last of the dialogue cited. Since he himself has been the protagonist of its complicated gestation, this testimony is very qualified when it comes to making a serene evaluation of it. The themes it addresses are: the history of this dialogue, the relationship between synodality and primacy, their interdependence and complementarity, the convergences between East and West on this topic in the first millennium of the Church’s life, the contribution of Vatican II to this dialogue. It ends with some proposals for the future of the examinations that the Joint Commission intends to study, now addressing the above themes in the various developments in the East and West during the second millennium of the Church’s life.