Jaffa, Israel
It was a providential spot to be on the day when Pope Francis met Patriarch Kirill. Jaffa does not figure greatly in the New Testament. In the Old Testament it is likewise marginal, being the Mediterranean port at which the cedars of Lebanon arrived, and from which Jonah attempted, unsuccessfully, to flee his mission to go east to Nineveh by sailing west instead. Yet Jaffa was a decisive turning point for Peter, literally pointing the future of Christianity westward, toward the Gentiles and the centre of the Gentile world, Rome.
It was in Jaffa, at the home of Simon the leather tanner, that Peter received the vision that all foods were clean to eat (Acts 10). It was to Simon’s house in Jaffa that the centurion Cornelius, prompted by his own vision, sent a delegation to bring Peter to Caesarea, the imperial town on the sea. Peter saw in his vision the possibility of baptism for the Gentiles, and Cornelius and his household became the first baptised Gentiles.
The church in Jaffa, dedicated to St Peter, is orientated towards the sea. Pilgrims are reminded of the tradition that churches are traditionally orientated towards the east, but that this 19th-century church was built towards the sea, towards the west, towards the imperial capital, towards Rome. Peter eventually went to Rome because if the Gospel was for the Gentiles, then it ought to be preached not only in the capital of the Jews – Jerusalem – but in Rome too.
The mission to the Gentiles went through Jaffa as much as it passed along the road to Damascus. All of this invites the Catholic Christian to think about west and east, and the mission of the Gospel. Peter’s successor for many centuries came from across the Mediterranean, from Italy. He now comes from further west still, from across the Atlantic. In the New World is now the greatest shrine in the Christian world by number of pilgrims – more of the faithful come each year to Guadalupe than come to either Rome or Jerusalem. Indeed, the majority of the global Catholic population is in Latin America, west across the ocean.
The move west by Peter to Rome, and the decision of Peter’s successors to remain in Rome when Constantine moved his capital east to his eponymous “New Rome” on the Bosporus, gave rise, centuries later, to the dynamics of global Christianity that made the encounter of the pope and patriarch so historic, but also belonging more to history than the future. Christianity spread rapidly throughout the wider ancient Near East; Armenia boasts the claim to be the first nation to become entirely Christian. Yet after that the evangelical energy went from Rome westward to the rest of Europe.
As the first millennium approached the expansion of the Church went north-east towards the Slavic people, with the Poles opting for western Christianity (966) and the Kievan Rus opting for the east (988). That division of the Slavs between west and east endures to this day, and lies at the heart of the Russian Orthodox hostility to Rome. It believes that Ukrainians (and probably Poles too, but that ship has sailed), ought to be Russian Orthodox; or perhaps simply Russian first, the consequence of which is thought to require Orthodoxy.
Byzantine Christianity, though more vibrant in Constantinople than Rome after the decline and fall of the latter, did not give rise to continental missionary expansions. And as Islam choked off some of its ancient territories in the first millennium, and eventually took Constantinople itself in 1453, the seat of eastern Christianity pushed further north-east, to Moscow. In Moscow though, Christianity faced a formidable tsar, who ruled over the Church by suppressing the patriarchate for two centuries. The Moscow patriarchate was resurrected briefly after the First World War, only to be liquidated by Lenin and Stalin, and then revived as a de facto branch of the state, which it remains to this day.The entanglements of altar and throne were complex and compromising in the west too, but the Church was able to free herself sufficiently to evangelise.
Those entanglements sometimes proved beneficial for missionary expansion, most evident in the Catholicising of Latin America. The turn to the west at Jaffa had enduring consequences. At the dawn of the third millennium the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople (Istanbul) no longer exists in practice; it is a patriarchate without people, having been asphyxiated by modern Turkey after four centuries of constraint under Ottoman rule. The Moscow Patriarchate is deeply compromised and facing a rebellion in Ukraine that could cost it half of its membership.
The other Orthodox patriarchates, from Athens to Jerusalem to the former communist bloc, are not centres of ecclesial vitality or evangelisation. The great missionary potential of Asia, should it be realised, will be western Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant. The Far East will not be eastern in the Byzantine sense. Constantinople and Moscow were once important, and remain so for the Church to breathe “with both lungs”. Yet despite that aspiration, the future of global Christianity appears to be increasingly western. It began at Jaffa, with Peter looking west.
Fr Raymond J de Souza is a priest of the Archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario, and editor-in-chief of Convivium magazine
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