I have noticed an increasingly recurring trope in recent self-styled Roman Catholic “Trad” material of late.

It is a tellingly defensive dig against the Orthodox Churches, and a disclaimer that “of course” the trad author or speaker in question is not advocating an “Eastern Orthodox ecclesiology,” which is supposedly showing its bankruptcy, because certain local autocephalous Orthodox sees are currently out of communion with each other (right now, most notably, Constantinople and Moscow over the status of Ukrainian Orthodoxy).

Examples of this protesting-much-methinks can be found in Eric Sammons of Crisis Magazine, Charles Coulombe writing on OnePeterFive, or 1P5 editor Timothy Flanders’ recent interview with the ever-prolific Peter Kwasniewski, among others.

After all, obviously, Orthodoxy can’t be true and has to be discounted right off the bat if there can be such a grave internal schism in it! How can it pretend to be the early or original Church?

Slam dunk for Rome, so now we can get back to the business of Submitting to the Pope (if only to “Recognize & Resist” him), etc.

Despite this dig, however, temporary suspensions of communion between various local churches, and maintenance of “indirect communion” by way of third churches are so much a part of early-first-millennium “business as usual,” it should give any intellectually-honest inquirer into these matters pause about which way of “being church” is more original and native to the way the Church has always operated.

One could insert a long, boring textual narrative of how this played out in several episodes of early-church history, but a picture is worth a thousand words.

Here is just one graphic snapshot, courtesy of a good friend and a student of Patristics and Church history at Oxford, of the state of Christ’s Church and the mutual relationships between its major Sees in the year 381, a critical year in the midst of the Arian and other doctrinal crises, when the second ecumenical council (the First Council of Constantinople) was held. It is a bit simplified and back-of-the-napkin, but it is accurate and illustrative enough for these purposes:

What is not pictured above, but is equally telling and historically meaningful, is that Meletius of Antioch (one of the two contenders for the Antiochian See, and the one not recognized by the Rome — thus, for all intents and purposes, a “schismatic” beyond the pale in the modern Roman Catholic definition!) was the one who presided over Constantinople I, now universally recognized as the Second Ecumenical Council, and which finalized what we today call the “Nicene” (or “Nicene-Constantinopolitan”) Creed, still recited by most Christians to this day.

Back to today’s situation: yes, Moscow and Constantinople have broken communion with each other, but trads never mention that, e.g. Antioch, or the Orthodox Church in America, is in communion with both.

So what are the implications of this to the recurring “Trad” Catholic disclaimer against Orthodoxy and its supposedly deal-breaking disunity?

Does it seem like the Orthodox Catholic Church of the 4th century operated along the lines of Vatican I, and what Roman trads feel compelled to defend over and against “Orthodox disunity?” Or was it perhaps more along the lines of what the interrelationships between the Orthodox Churches look like today?

Interrelationships that, while often complicated, stormy, or conditioned by all-too-human and worldly affairs, at the very least still exhibit a shared faith and a common, unbroken liturgical and spiritual tradition, on the basis of which renewed unity and reconciliation in ongoing conflicts might be accomplished in the future — as they have been many times in church history?