Towards A Papacy In Communion

This balanced interpretation of the two Vatican councils points the way beyond a centralist understanding of the papacy.

For a full list of entries and contributors, a generous selection of sample entries, and more, visit the Papacy: An Encyclopedia website. Routledge is pleased to publish this acclaimed resource in a revised, expanded, and updated English language edition, translated by a team of experts in papal history. This comprehensive three-volume reference not only covers all of the popes (and anti-popes) from St. Peter to John Paul II, but also explores the papacy as an institution. Articles cover the inner workings--both contemporary and historical--of the Holy See, and encompass religious orders, papal encyclicals, historical events, papal controversies, the arts, and more. This set is destined to be the standard English-language reference for all issues concerning the papacy. Also inlcludes five maps.

Micheal Buckley argues that a theology of papal primacy, as opposed to an idealogy, must focus on its nature as a unique relationship whose term or purpose is the unity of bishops amond themselves and through them the unity of the entire Church.

The Papacy and the Orthodox examines the centuries-long debate over the primacy and authority of the Bishop of Rome, especially in relation to the Christian East, and offers a comprehensive history of the debate and its underlying theological issues. Siecienski masterfully brings together all of the biblical, patristic, and historical material necessary to understand this longstanding debate. This book is an invaluable resource as both Catholics and Orthodox continue to reexamine the sources and history of the debate.

Examines the implications of the consensus reached by the AnglicanRoman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) on universal primacy for the further development of the Catholic Church’s doctrines of papal primacy, in order that a reformed and renewed Petrine ministry may be received by all Christians .

Among the issues that continue to divide the Catholic Church from the Orthodox Church—the two largest Christian bodies in the world, together comprising well over a billion faithful—the question of the papacy is widely acknowledged to be the most significant stumbling block to their unification. For nearly forty years, commentators, theologians, and hierarchs, from popes and patriarchs to ordinary believers of both churches, have acknowledged the problems posed by the papacy. In Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity, Adam A. J. DeVille offers the first comprehensive examination of the papacy from an Orthodox perspective that also seeks to find a way beyond this impasse, toward full Orthodox-Catholic unity. He first surveys the major postwar Orthodox and Catholic theological perspectives on the Roman papacy and on patriarchates, enumerating Orthodox problems with the papacy and reviewing how Orthodox patriarchates function and are structured. In response to Pope John Paul II’s 1995 request for a dialogue on Christian unity, set forth in the encyclical letter Ut Unum Sint, DeVille proposes a new model for the exercise of papal primacy. DeVille suggests the establishment of a permanent ecumenical synod consisting of all the patriarchal heads of Churches under a papal presidency, and discusses how the pope qua pope would function in a reunited Church of both East and West, in full communion. His analysis, involving the most detailed plan for Orthodox-Catholic unity yet offered by an Orthodox theologian, could not be more timely.

Papal primacy has grown with the Church, and it remains a reality embedded in the Church as a living community begins to change.