Weigel on Mount Athos

Well, not actually standing anywhere on the mountain itself. He might not be allowed, even though he is not a woman or a "female animal". Speaking of, I got to meet Mr. Weigel last Friday at the GCC conference. He's a very friendly chap, as funny as he is smart. He didn't remind me of Gandalf, but you can't have everything. (Inside joke, sorry....)

He penned this recently, commenting upon the hopeful reunification of East and West that Pope Benedict and his predecessor both share with many Catholic and Orthodox Christians. Snippet:

To be sure, Athonite monasticism, “the non-negotiable guardian of the Holy Tradition,” is a particularly stringent form of Orthodoxy. And if the monks of Mount Athos have their dubieties about the ecumenical openness of Patriarch Bartholomew, it is, perhaps, not surprising that they imagine Benedict XVI as a usurper and a teacher of heresies. Yet this Athonite intransigence reflects a hard truth about Catholic-Orthodox relations after a millennium of division: namely, that, for many Orthodox Christians, the statement “I am not in communion with the Bishop of Rome” has become an integral part of the statement, “I am an Orthodox Christian.”

The obverse is not true. I very much doubt that there are more than a handful of Catholics around the world whose confession of Catholic faith includes, as a key component, “I am not in communion with the Patriarch of Constantinople.” The truth of the matter is that, outside historically Orthodox countries and certain ethnic communities, the thought of how one stands vis-à-vis the Patriarch of Constantinople simply doesn’t enter Catholic heads. Perhaps that’s a problem, but it’s nowhere near as great an obstacle to ecumenical progress as the conviction in some Orthodox quarters that non-communion with Rome is a defining characteristic of what it means to be “Orthodox.”

I imagine some people, Orthodox and Catholic alike, might be bothered by this article. It would be interesting to see which parts bothered them the most; I'd especially like to know what they would think of the mention of the Islamic threat at the end.