We respect him as a bishop and Christian leader, but we don’t accept his claim to universal authority over the whole Church or the doctrine of papal infallibility.
That’s the short answer. The longer one requires some history.
For the first thousand years of Christianity, the Bishop of Rome held a place of honor among the five major patriarchs, Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Rome was first in honor. Nobody disputed that. The city had been the capital of the empire, and both Peter and Paul had been martyred there. But “first in honor” didn’t mean what it came to mean later in the West.
The ancient Church made decisions through councils. Bishops gathered, debated, prayed, and decided together. The Bishop of Rome participated in this process, and his voice carried weight. But he couldn’t unilaterally define doctrine or override other bishops. When controversies arose about the Trinity or the nature of Christ, the Church called ecumenical councils. Not one bishop deciding alone.
By 1054, things had fractured. Theological disputes, political tensions, and competing claims about authority led to the Great Schism. The split wasn’t just about the Pope. The West had added the filioque to the Creed without an ecumenical council. There were differences in liturgical practice, in how we understood the Eucharist, in canonical discipline. But the question of papal authority sat at the heart of it.
What We Believe About Authority
Orthodox ecclesiology is conciliar. That’s the key word. Authority in the Church belongs to the bishops together, gathered in council, guided by the Holy Spirit. Not to one man sitting in one city making pronouncements for everyone else.
We use the phrase “first among equals” to describe how primacy works. In every Orthodox jurisdiction, there’s a primate, a first bishop. The Patriarch of Antioch is first among the bishops of the Antiochian Archdiocese. The Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople holds a primacy of honor among Orthodox patriarchs worldwide. But these primates don’t govern like monarchs. They can’t define dogma on their own. They serve unity, they coordinate, they represent the Church in certain contexts. They don’t rule it.
Rome developed differently. By the time of Vatican I in 1870, the Roman Catholic Church formally defined papal infallibility, the teaching that when the Pope speaks ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals, he’s protected from error. For Orthodox Christians, that’s a problem. We believe the Church is infallible when the bishops gather in council with the faithful and the Holy Spirit guides them to truth. But one bishop acting alone? No. That’s not how the undivided Church functioned.
Where We Stand Today
Relations have warmed considerably since 1054. In 1964, Patriarch Athenagoras and Pope Paul VI met in Jerusalem and prayed together. In 1965, both sides lifted the mutual excommunications from 1054. Orthodox and Catholic theologians have been in dialogue for decades now. There’s genuine respect, genuine affection in many cases.
But the theological differences remain. We can’t simply agree to disagree about the nature of the Church. If you’re Catholic and becoming Orthodox, you’re not just switching teams. You’re accepting a fundamentally different understanding of how Christ structured his Church. If you’re coming from a Protestant background, you might find the whole debate strange. You’re used to congregational autonomy or denominational structures. We’re talking about something else entirely, an ancient model of unity through councils rather than through a single office.
When I talk to inquirers here in Beaumont, I often hear, “So you think the Pope is wrong about everything?” No. That’s not it. We share the Nicene Creed (minus the filioque). We share belief in the real presence in the Eucharist. We share apostolic succession. We venerate many of the same saints, the Church wasn’t divided for the first millennium, after all. But we can’t accept that one bishop has universal jurisdiction or that he can define doctrine independently of a council.
It’s not personal. Many Orthodox admire individual popes for their pastoral work, their moral witness, their efforts toward Christian unity. But admiring a man and accepting his ecclesiological claims are different things.
What This Means Practically
If you’re exploring Orthodoxy and you’ve got Catholic family, this can be tender territory. Your grandmother might ask why you’re leaving “the one true Church.” The honest Orthodox answer is that we believe the Orthodox Church is the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church that Christ founded. We’re not being arrogant when we say that. We’re being truthful about what we actually believe. But we say it without malice. Catholics are our closest relatives in the Christian family. The disagreements are real, but so is the kinship.
For those coming from Protestant backgrounds, the whole question might seem academic at first. But it matters because it shapes how you understand authority and truth. Orthodoxy doesn’t locate final authority in an individual leader or in private interpretation of Scripture. We locate it in the Church’s conciliar life, in the consensus of the bishops, in the faith once delivered to the saints and preserved through the centuries.
The dialogue continues. We pray for unity. But unity can’t mean one side simply capitulating. It has to mean recovering the conciliar model of the ancient Church, before East and West went separate ways. That’s what we’re after.
