Two articles from Commonweal

First, their editorial on the Reese affair.

Second, an intriguing essay by the Orthodox priest and writer John Garvey on Orthodox impressions of the papacy of John Paul and that of Benedict to this point. One of Garvey's main textual bases for expressing Orthodox concerns regarding the centralization of Roman authority is John Paul's encyclical Ut Unum Sint (which appears to have been written, at least in part, by the subject of my research, the late Fr. Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, O.P.). In Ut Unum Sint, the pope asks for help from other Christians to better reflect on how the Petrine ministry could be better exercised to remove it as a stumbling block to Christian unity. I'm not sure that I agree with Fr. Garvey's strong statement that "as long as the idea of papal infallibility is in place", there would be no petrine ministry acceptable to the orthodox; this doesn't seem to understand the difficulty of contemporary Roman Catholicism relinquishing a dogma that has become central to its identity, if not necessarily to all Catholic theologians. But it has been interesting, particularly as a Tillard scholar, to see that in many of the treatments of John Paul's papacy in the secular press, Ut Unum Sint appeared to pop up far more frequently as a high point of his theology than some of his other encyclicals.