the practical need of ecclesiastical life

The Church is one and has never been divided, but heretics and schismatics fell away from her in the first age, have fallen away since, and will fall away again until the Lord’s Second Coming. Therefore, there can be no question of Union with heretics and schismatics, but only of their restoration to union with the Church from which they fell away.

If Roman Catholics should renounce their imaginations, then their restoration to union with the Church would be a matter for the greatest joy to the faithful and to the Holy Angels, not only for the sake of their soul’s salvation but for the realization of the restored fullness of the Church’s life to which our brethren of the West would bring that corporate ecclesiastical activity which is characteristic to them. In the circumstance of the renunciation by the Roman Catholics of their pseudo-dogmas, and in particular of that absurd one of them which ascribes Infallibility to the Pope in matters of Faith, the Holy Church in restoring them to union with herself, would not only certainly restore to the Roman Primate that primacy which was assigned to him before his falling away into schism, but would probably invest him with such an authority in the Oecumenical Church as had never hitherto been assigned to him – inasmuch as that which he formerly possessed was confined to Western Europe and North-West Africa.

But such authority, assumed as being given to the Pope after his return to Orthodoxy, would be based not on Roman fables about the Apostle Peter as chief over all the Apostles, about the succession of the Popes to the fullness of his imaginary authority, about indulgences, purgatory, etc., but in the practical need of ecclesiastical life by the force of which that life was gradually centralized: first, in the metropolitanates (from the third century) and then in the patriarchates (from the fourth and fifth centuries) with the result that the authority of the metropolitans and patriarchs in their areas was continually and gradually strengthened in proportion to the assimilation of the people to Christian culture. We admit for the future the conception of a single personal supremacy of the Church in consonance with the broadest preservation of the conciliar principle and on that condition that the supremacy does not pretend to be based on such invented traditions as the above, but only on the practical need of ecclesiastical life.

Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky)
Lecture in Belgrade, August 5 / 28 1923
Translated from the Metropolitan’s summary in Tserkovniya Vedemoste, 15/ 28 October (1923)
Source: The Christian East, February 1924, vol V no 1