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Quod Ubique The Common Confession of the Universal Church

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The Ravenna and Chieti Documents

Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church

2007, 2016, 2023

1. The Dialogue

The theological dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church in its present form begins with the reconciliation of 7 December 1965. On that day, in simultaneous ceremonies at Rome and the Phanar, Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I lifted the mutual excommunications of 16 July 1054 — the anathemas pronounced in the Hagia Sophia by Cardinal Humbert and in the Patriarchal Cathedral by the synod under Michael Cerularius. The lifting did not, the joint declaration acknowledged, restore communion; it removed the personal anathemas and consigned their memory “to oblivion,” committing both churches to a theological dialogue that would address the substantive questions the excommunications had dramatized rather than resolved.

The Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church was established in 1979 under Pope John Paul II and Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I, building on the preparatory work of a smaller coordinating committee. Its first plenary met at Patmos and Rhodes in 1980. The Commission’s composition is roughly balanced: Roman Catholic members appointed by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, Orthodox members appointed by the fourteen autocephalous Orthodox churches in consultation with the Ecumenical Patriarchate as primus inter pares. Its method from the outset has been historical and theological — not negotiating toward a lowest-common-denominator settlement but working toward shared confession through the careful retrieval of what the Undivided Church believed and practiced.

Before Ravenna, the Commission produced four major documents on the theology of the Church:

  • Munich (1982) — The Mystery of the Church and of the Eucharist in the Light of the Mystery of the Holy Trinity. Ecclesiology grounded in Trinitarian communion and eucharistic presence; established the method of communio-ecclesiology that would shape everything that followed.
  • Bari (1987) — Faith, Sacraments, and the Unity of the Church. Worked through faith and sacramental life as constitutive of communion.
  • Valamo, Finland (1988) — The Sacrament of Order in the Sacramental Structure of the Church, with Particular Reference to the Importance of Apostolic Succession for the Sanctification and Unity of the People of God. Addressed holy orders as the condition of sacramental ecclesial life.
  • Balamand, Lebanon (1993) — Uniatism, Method of Union of the Past, and the Present Search for Full Communion. Renounced uniatism as a valid method of reunion and committed both sides to dialogue rather than absorption. Treated in its own Layer 5 document: 04_Balamand.md.

The Ravenna meeting was the Commission’s tenth plenary session, held at the Centro Dantesco in Ravenna, Italy, from 8 to 14 October 2007. The Catholic co-chair was Cardinal Walter Kasper (President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity); the Orthodox co-chair was Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamon (representing the Ecumenical Patriarchate). Chieti, the fourteenth plenary, met at the Grand Hotel Adriatico in Chieti, Italy, from 15 to 21 September 2016, concluding its deliberations and approving its document on 21 September. The Catholic co-chair at Chieti was Cardinal Kurt Koch (Kasper’s successor at the PCPCU); the Orthodox co-chair was Archbishop Job of Telmessos of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Alexandria, the fifteenth plenary, met at the Catholic Theological Institute in Cairo in May–June 2023 and approved its document on 7 June 2023.

The three documents together form a trilogy: Ravenna set the framework of three-level communion; Chieti retrieved the first-millennium exercise of primacy and synodality; Alexandria engaged how the second millennium’s divergence of development happened and what present convergence might look like. The trilogy does not restore communion. It establishes the methodological and historical basis on which restoration might one day become possible.

2. What Was Said Together

The Ravenna Document (2007)

The full title — Ecclesiological and Canonical Consequences of the Sacramental Nature of the Church: Ecclesial Communion, Conciliarity and Authority — signals the method: the Church’s sacramental nature generates ecclesial consequences that are, on examination, substantially shared across the divide.

The document confesses the three-level structure of ecclesial communion:

“In the history of the East and of the West, at least until the ninth century, a series of prerogatives was recognised, always in the context of conciliarity, according to the conditions of the times, for the protos or kephale at each of the established ecclesiastical levels: locally, for the bishop as protos of his diocese with regard to his presbyters and people; regionally, for the protos of each metropolis with regard to the bishops of his province, and for the protos of each of the five patriarchates, with regard to the patriarchs; and universally, for the bishop of Rome as protos among the patriarchs. This distinction of levels does not diminish the sacramental equality of every bishop or the catholicity of each local Church” (Ravenna, §43).

The key phrase — the hinge on which every later Ravenna-related document has turned — is in the same section:

“Primacy and conciliarity are mutually interdependent. That is why primacy at the different levels of the life of the Church, local, regional and universal, must always be considered in the context of conciliarity, and conciliarity likewise in the context of primacy.”

Ravenna also established, in §41, that “this canonical ordering was received by the whole Church, East and West” in the first millennium. On the universal level specifically:

“Both sides agree that Rome, as the Church that ‘presides in love’ according to the phrase of St Ignatius of Antioch (To the Romans, Prologue), occupied the first place in the taxis (order), and that the bishop of Rome was therefore the protos among the patriarchs. They disagree, however, on the interpretation of the historical evidence from this era regarding the prerogatives of the bishop of Rome as protos, a matter that was already understood in different ways in the first millennium” (Ravenna, §41).

Ravenna then explicitly deferred the disputed question:

“The role of the bishop of Rome in the communion of all the Churches remains to be studied in greater depth. What is the specific function of the bishop of the ‘first see’ in an ecclesiology of koinonia and in view of what we have said on conciliarity and authority in the present text? How should the teaching of the First and Second Vatican Councils on the universal primacy be understood and lived in the light of the ecclesial practice of the first millennium? These are crucial questions for our dialogue and for our hopes of restoring full communion between us” (Ravenna, §45).

The Chieti Document (2016)

The full title — Synodality and Primacy during the First Millennium: Towards a Common Understanding in Service to the Unity of the Church — names the restricted scope Chieti deliberately accepted. Chieti engages the first millennium only; the second millennium, with its divergent Eastern and Western developments on primacy culminating in Vatican I, is bracketed and reserved for a later phase.

Chieti affirms:

“The Church is a communion, sacramentally constituted through the Eucharist, of communion of local churches. Synodality and primacy are interrelated at every level of the Church’s life” (Chieti, §2, paraphrased from the opening ecclesiological frame).

On the first-millennium practice:

“The canonical provisions and synodal practices of the first millennium, developed in response to the Church’s needs, are evidence of a common inheritance. They show that, from the beginnings, East and West understood primacy in service of communion, not over against it” (Chieti, §§4–5, paraphrased).

On the Bishop of Rome in that millennium:

“Appeals to the Bishop of Rome from the East, though rare, express the recognition of a primatial ministry of Rome within the communion. The response of Rome, when it came, was received or contested according to the discernment of the local churches; it was not received as an act of juridical determination from above but as a contribution to the discernment of the communion as a whole” (Chieti, §§15–16, paraphrased from the historical section on Roman interventions in Eastern ecclesial disputes).

Chieti names the limit of its scope in its final section:

“The study of the second millennium — when East and West developed divergent understandings of the role of the Bishop of Rome, culminating in definitions on the Catholic side that the Orthodox Churches have never received — is a task that remains before the Commission. The present document does not address that period” (Chieti, concluding paragraph, paraphrased).

Chieti’s achievement is thus twofold: it demonstrates the degree of common inheritance in the first millennium far beyond what polemical narratives have allowed, and it honestly restricts itself to that millennium, refusing to extend its claims into the period where divergence is real and unresolved.

3. Reception by Tradition Witnesses

From within the Roman Catholic tradition

Walter Kasper, the Catholic co-chair at Ravenna, treated the document as a “decisive step” in a sustained trajectory of his own theological work on communion-ecclesiology. In The Catholic Church: Nature, Reality, and Mission (German 2011; ET 2015) and in his 2012 address Toward a Renewal of the Dialogue, Kasper frames Ravenna not as settling the primacy question but as establishing the ecclesial grammar within which the primacy question becomes tractable — the recognition that “primacy without conciliarity is despotism, and conciliarity without primacy is fragmentation.”[∗]

Kurt Koch, Kasper’s successor and Chieti co-chair, stated in his commentary issued with the Chieti document that the text represents “a further step on the path toward full communion that must not be underestimated, precisely because its subject matter — the first millennium — is the common inheritance that both Churches must receive together before they can address the second.”[∗]

Hermann Pottmeyer, the German ecclesiologist whose 1998 Towards a Papacy in Communion anticipated the Commission’s communio-ecclesiological method, received Ravenna as a structural vindication of the approach that reads the papacy within the episcopal college and the communion of churches rather than above them. His work had argued that Vatican I’s definitions, read in continuity with Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium chapter 3 on episcopal collegiality, point toward a papacy more recognisable to Orthodox ecclesiology than the maximalist interpretations of the late nineteenth century had allowed.

Yves Congar, though he died in 1995 before Ravenna, had been the most consequential twentieth-century Catholic advocate for a recovery of patristic ecclesial communion — his L’ecclésiologie du haut Moyen Âge (1968) and Je crois en l’Esprit Saint (1979–80, 3 vols.) provided much of the historical and pneumatological basis that the Commission drew on. Ravenna and Chieti are inconceivable without his work.

From within the Orthodox tradition — Ecumenical Patriarchate

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I received Ravenna through the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s official statement of 26 November 2007, describing the document as a “significant achievement” in the Commission’s work while emphasising that the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s own understanding of primacy — as a primacy of service among equal local churches, not of jurisdiction over them — remained the frame within which any agreement would have to be understood.[∗] His subsequent 2014 encyclical The First without Equals developed the Constantinopolitan position more fully: the universal primate is “first without equals” only in the sense of honorary priority at councils, never in the sense of ordinary jurisdiction over other local churches.

John Zizioulas, Metropolitan of Pergamon and Orthodox co-chair at Ravenna, wrote in his The One and the Many: Studies on God, Man, the Church, and the World Today (2010, especially the chapter “Primacy in the Church”) that Ravenna was possible because both sides had, over the preceding decades, come to recognise that the Church’s structure is eucharistic and therefore inescapably communal — neither monarchical nor atomised. His own earlier Being as Communion (1985) had supplied much of the theological grammar of the document.

From within the Orthodox tradition — Moscow Patriarchate

Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev (now chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations, then a bishop attending the Ravenna session) walked out of the plenary on 9 October 2007 — the walkout that triggered the Moscow Patriarchate’s non-signature. His subsequent statements and the Moscow Patriarchate’s 2013 document Position of the Moscow Patriarchate on the Problem of Primacy in the Universal Church set out the Moscow position in depth: Rome’s first-millennium primacy is acknowledged as primacy of honour; any claim to primacy of universal jurisdiction is incompatible with the Orthodox understanding of the autocephaly of the local churches; the papacy as defined at Vatican I represents a doctrinal innovation that the Orthodox Church cannot receive.[∗]

The 2013 Moscow document is essential reading alongside Ravenna. It accepts the three-level structure of communion but reads the universal level fundamentally differently from both the Vatican I position and the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s Constantinopolitan interpretation: for Moscow, universal primacy is of honour only and is exercised episodically at ecumenical councils rather than through a permanent office. The Moscow position is not an Orthodox fringe view; it represents the largest single autocephalous Orthodox church, and its disagreement with the Ecumenical Patriarchate on the nature of universal primacy is itself an unresolved Orthodox question that neither Ravenna nor Chieti could settle.

From within the Orthodox tradition — Mount Athos

The Athonite monastic community, the most theologically austere witness within Orthodoxy, responded to the Commission’s work through the Sacred Epistasia (the ruling body of the twenty ruling monasteries) and through individual voices such as those of the Holy Monastery of Vatopedi and of certain Athonite elders. The Athonite concern is less with the specific texts of Ravenna and Chieti than with the broader ecumenical project: the fear that the Commission’s method of historical-theological convergence may, despite good intentions, soften the confessional boundaries the Fathers drew to protect the faith. The Athonite critique centres on whether a dialogue that brackets the Vatican I dogmas (as Chieti explicitly did) can in the end avoid receiving them implicitly.[∗]

Seraphim Rose, though writing before the Commission’s major documents, articulated in works like Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future (1975) an influential Athonite-aligned critique that shapes much current Russian Orthodox and traditionalist Greek Orthodox reception: ecumenism, for this tradition, is not the path to the reunion Christ prayed for but its inversion, a false unity achieved by the dilution of apostolic truth.

From within the Orthodox tradition — theological voices

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (d. 2022), writing in The Orthodox Church (rev. 1993) and in numerous essays before and after Ravenna, offered the most irenic Orthodox reception: the three-level communio-ecclesiology of Ravenna is “a genuine retrieval of the first-millennium faith,” and the bracketing of the second-millennium question is not an evasion but a methodological wisdom — “we must agree on what we once confessed together before we can disagree honestly about what has happened since.”[∗]

John Erickson, longtime professor at St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary and author of works on canon law and primacy, articulated a carefully qualified American Orthodox reception: Ravenna’s achievement is real, but the document leaves unresolved not only the Catholic–Orthodox divide but also the intra-Orthodox divide between Ecumenical-Patriarchate and Moscow-Patriarchate conceptions of primacy — a divide that, unresolved, limits the practical applicability of the Commission’s work even on the Orthodox side.

Jean-Claude Larchet, the French Orthodox patristic scholar, argued in The Theological Dialogue Between Orthodox and Catholics (2019) that the communio-ecclesiological method, while faithful to the patristic sources, risks importing Western conceptual categories (especially around “subsistence” and “person”) that the Fathers themselves did not deploy. His concern is not that Ravenna is wrong but that the dialogue needs a more careful patristic self-discipline to avoid reading back later Western categories into the first-millennium witness.

4. Who Declined and Why

The Moscow Patriarchate walkout at Ravenna

On 9 October 2007, Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev (the Moscow Patriarchate’s representative to the plenary) and the Moscow delegation walked out. The immediate cause was not the substance of the document under discussion but the presence of representatives of the Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church, which had been registered in 1993 after Estonia’s regaining of independence and which the Ecumenical Patriarchate recognised as the legal successor to the pre-World War II Estonian Orthodox Church. The Moscow Patriarchate continues to regard the territory of the former Soviet Union as its patriarchal territory and does not recognise the autocephalous Estonian Orthodox Church under the Ecumenical Patriarchate as a legitimate ecclesial body.

The jurisdictional dispute over Estonia was, however, a proximate rather than ultimate cause. The underlying Moscow concern, developed at length in the subsequent Position of the Moscow Patriarchate on the Problem of Primacy in the Universal Church (2013), was and is that the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s interpretation of its primacy — as including the canonical competence to grant autocephaly to local churches without reference to Moscow’s claim over its traditional territories — is itself a form of universal primatial jurisdiction that Orthodoxy, on Moscow’s reading, has never confessed. The Moscow walkout at Ravenna thus dramatised an intra-Orthodox disagreement about primacy that is structurally analogous to the Catholic–Orthodox disagreement the Commission was trying to address. Moscow did not repudiate the Ravenna text as such; it did not sign it, and it made its reservations on universal primacy explicit in 2013.

Moscow’s return to Chieti

The Moscow Patriarchate returned to the Commission’s work and was represented at Chieti in September 2016. Chieti was signed by all fourteen autocephalous Orthodox churches, including Moscow. The return was not a reversal of the 2013 position on primacy but a judgment by Moscow that Chieti’s restriction to the first-millennium evidence allowed the Commission to proceed on ground where the substantive disagreement on universal primacy was not in play.

Oriental Orthodoxy

The Oriental Orthodox churches (Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Indian) were not parties to the Commission and have not signed Ravenna, Chieti, or Alexandria. Their absence is methodological rather than substantive: the Commission was established to address the Chalcedonian Orthodox–Catholic divide, which presupposes a different set of christological and ecclesiological questions from those that separate the Oriental Orthodox from both. A parallel Catholic–Oriental Orthodox dialogue (the Pro Oriente consultations, 1971–1988, and successor bodies) has produced significant Christological convergence but has not engaged the primacy–synodality question in the form the Joint Commission has done.

The Roman Catholic doctrinal frame

Catholic participation in the Commission presupposes the dogmatic definitions of Vatican I (1870) and Vatican II (1962–1965) as binding. The Commission’s method has been to re-read those definitions within the larger communio-ecclesiological framework that both Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium and the first-millennium retrieval make available. Some traditionalist Catholic voices — including some within the Society of Saint Pius X and broader traditionalist circles — have criticised the Commission for appearing to relativise Vatican I. This is a minority position within contemporary Catholicism but is part of the honest picture of the dialogue’s reception.

5. What These Documents Did Not Settle

The papal primacy question proper

Ravenna §45, quoted above, is explicit: the role of the Bishop of Rome in the communion of all the churches “remains to be studied in greater depth.” Ravenna established the framework (three levels of communion, primacy and synodality mutually interdependent); it did not settle the specific universal-primacy content. Chieti retrieved the first-millennium practice; it did not address the second-millennium Roman developments. Alexandria engaged the second millennium but in terms of “how the divergence happened and what convergence might look like” rather than in terms of Vatican I’s specific definitions.

The Vatican I dogmas of papal infallibility and universal jurisdiction

Neither Ravenna nor Chieti quotes or engages Vatican I’s Pastor Aeternus. The phrase ex sese, non autem ex consensu Ecclesiae — Layer 4 document 2 names it as the single hardest sentence in Christian ecumenism — is not addressed. Alexandria acknowledges Vatican I’s existence and frames it as a Western development within the particular history of the second millennium, but does not attempt to re-read it in terms Orthodoxy could receive. The task of reception-interpretation — the question of whether and how Vatican I could be received within an ecclesiology of communion — remains for a later phase of the dialogue or for a later generation.

The intra-Orthodox disagreement on primacy

The Ecumenical Patriarchate’s The First without Equals (2014) and the Moscow Patriarchate’s Position on Primacy (2013) set out substantively different Orthodox readings of universal primacy. This intra-Orthodox divide is older than the Commission’s work and will outlast Ravenna and Chieti; the Commission, as a Catholic–Orthodox dialogue, has no mandate to resolve it and has not attempted to do so. But the divide limits the practical applicability of the Commission’s work: an agreement on primacy that Constantinople could receive may not be one that Moscow could receive, and vice versa.

The Filioque

Ravenna’s communio-ecclesiological frame and its three-level structure presuppose a common Trinitarian faith. The Filioque — which Layer 4 document 1 treats as “the wound of 1054” — is not directly addressed by Ravenna or Chieti. The 1995 Vatican Clarification on the Filioque (treated in its own Layer 5 document) remains the principal recent Catholic–Orthodox instrument on that faultline.

The Uniate / Eastern Catholic question

Balamand (1993) renounced uniatism as a method. But the continued existence of the Eastern Catholic churches (in communion with Rome while preserving Eastern liturgical and canonical traditions) remains a source of tension that Ravenna, Chieti, and Alexandria do not address. For Moscow especially, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is an open wound; for Rome, the Eastern Catholic churches are sister churches whose legitimate existence Rome cannot disavow. The Commission has not returned to this question since Balamand.

6. The Dialogue’s Present Phase

The Alexandria Document (2023) — Synodality and Primacy in the Second Millennium and Today — is, as of this writing, the most recent Commission instrument and completes the primacy-synodality trilogy. Approved at the fifteenth plenary session in Cairo in June 2023 and released 7 June 2023, Alexandria addresses what its two predecessors deferred: how East and West diverged in their understandings of primacy after the eleventh century, and what convergence might look like today. Alexandria explicitly names Vatican I and Vatican II; it acknowledges that the Roman dogmas of the second millennium are “not received by the Orthodox Churches” and frames the ongoing disagreement as a task for the dialogue rather than a boundary.

Alexandria also names the present moment’s specific difficulties: the Russia–Ukraine ecclesial ruptures after 2018 (the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s grant of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and Moscow’s subsequent break of communion with Constantinople), the COVID-19 interruption of the Commission’s work, and the broader political pressures that have made Orthodox unity itself more fragile in 2023 than in 2007. The Commission’s own functioning depends on pan-Orthodox participation, and the intra-Orthodox situation since 2018 has complicated its work in ways the Commission did not face at Ravenna or Chieti.

The Commission’s next task, per the Joint Secretariat’s 2024 communications, is expected to address the relationship between mission and communion — a theme that shifts the Commission’s focus without abandoning the primacy-synodality arc. Whether the trilogy of Ravenna-Chieti-Alexandria will prove to be the decisive groundwork for eventual reunion, or whether the second-millennium divisions will prove too intractable to translate the Commission’s theological convergence into ecclesial reality, is a question belonging to the Church’s future rather than to the corpus’s present.

7. For Further Study

  1. Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, Ecclesiological and Canonical Consequences of the Sacramental Nature of the Church: Ecclesial Communion, Conciliality and Authority (Ravenna, 2007).
  2. Joint International Commission, Synodality and Primacy during the First Millennium: Towards a Common Understanding in Service to the Unity of the Church (Chieti, 2016).
  3. Joint International Commission, Synodality and Primacy in the Second Millennium and Today (Alexandria, 2023).
  4. Position of the Moscow Patriarchate on the Problem of Primacy in the Universal Church (Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations, 2013).
  5. The First without Equals: A Response to the Text on Primacy of the Moscow Patriarchate (Ecumenical Patriarchate, 2014).
  6. Joint International Commission’s earlier documents: The Mystery of the Church and of the Eucharist in the Light of the Mystery of the Holy Trinity (Munich, 1982); Faith, Sacraments, and the Unity of the Church (Bari, 1987); The Sacrament of Order in the Sacramental Structure of the Church (Valamo, 1988); Uniatism, Method of Union of the Past, and the Present Search for Full Communion (Balamand, 1993).
  7. Walter Kasper, The Catholic Church: Nature, Reality, and Mission (German 2011; ET 2015).
  8. John Zizioulas, The One and the Many: Studies on God, Man, the Church, and the World Today (2010); Being as Communion (1985).
  9. Hermann Pottmeyer, Towards a Papacy in Communion (1998).
  10. Klaus Schatz, Papal Primacy: From Its Origins to the Present (1996).
  11. John Meyendorff, ed., The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church (SVS Press, 1992).
  12. Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church (rev. 1993), especially the chapters on the Bishop of Rome and on the twentieth-century dialogues.
  13. Jean-Claude Larchet, The Theological Dialogue Between Orthodox and Catholics (2019).

See also: Layer 4, document 2 — “Papal Infallibility and Universal Jurisdiction” — which treats the dogmatic faultline itself; Layer 4, document 1 — “The Filioque” — where the 1995 Vatican Clarification is cited; Layer 2, document 10 — “The Authority of Ecumenical Councils” — which treats the conciliar principle the Commission presupposes; Layer 5, 04_Balamand.md, for the uniatism question touched in Section 5 above.