Rome and Constantinople Lift the Anathemas of 1054

In 1054 the legates of the Roman see, led by Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, pronounced a sentence of excommunication against Patriarch Michael Cerularius and two others, and the patriarch and the synod of Constantinople pronounced a like sentence against the legates (Joint Catholic–Orthodox Declaration (1965) 2); see the Schism of 1054.

In January 1964 Pope Paul VI and the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I met in Jerusalem (Paul VI and Athenagoras I, Joint Communiqué (6 January 1964), paragraphs 1–2). Their communiqué called the meeting a fraternal gesture after many centuries of silence and prayed that it would be the sign and prelude of things to come (Paul VI and Athenagoras I, Joint Communiqué (6 January 1964), paragraphs 1–2). The declaration of 1965 begins by recalling that meeting and the resolve each man took there to leave nothing undone that charity might inspire (Joint Catholic–Orthodox Declaration (1965) 1).

The declaration was read on 7 December 1965, at the same time at a public session of the Second Vatican Council in Rome and at a ceremony in Istanbul (Joint Catholic–Orthodox Declaration (1965) introductory note). The council closed the next day (Paul VI, In Spiritu Sancto (8 December 1965)). The text says that the censures of 1054 were aimed at the persons concerned and not at the churches, and were not meant to break communion between the sees of Rome and Constantinople (Joint Catholic–Orthodox Declaration (1965) 3). The pope and the patriarch with his synod then declare three things. They regret the offensive words, the unfounded reproaches and the reprehensible gestures on both sides. They regret the sentences of excommunication and remove them both from memory and from the midst of the church, committing them to oblivion. And they deplore the events before and after which, under various influences, among them a lack of understanding and mutual trust, led in the end to the effective rupture of communion (Joint Catholic–Orthodox Declaration (1965) 4).

Paul VI made the same act in his own name in a brief issued that day. Before the bishops of the council he regretted the words and deeds of 1054 that could not be approved, and removed the sentence of excommunication from the memory of the church. He noted that this was being done in Rome and in Constantinople on the same day, the feast of Ambrose, whom East and West both honour (Paul VI, Ambulate in Dilectione (7 December 1965)).

The declaration states its own limit. The gesture, it says, is not enough to end the differences, old and more recent, between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church; it is an invitation to a dialogue that may lead back to the full communion of faith and sacramental life of the first thousand years (Joint Catholic–Orthodox Declaration (1965) 5). When the patriarch visited Rome in October 1967, he and the pope declared that obstacles remained to be overcome before full communion could be re-established, and spoke of their churches as sister churches (Paul VI and Athenagoras I, Common Declaration (28 October 1967), paragraphs 1–2). Sixty years after the act the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I said the same of it: the act points to the restoration of full communion and does not constitute it (Bartholomew I, Address on the Lifting of the Anathemas (7 December 2025), paragraph 2). A joint international commission for theological dialogue between the two churches was established by John Paul II and Patriarch Dimitrios (Bartholomew I, Greeting at St Peter’s (11 October 2012), paragraph beginning ‘For the Orthodox Church’).