Why Gregory VI of Constantinople Refused Invitation to Vatican I

Editor’s Note: On Saturday, November 29, 2025, Pope Leo XIV was escorted by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I around Nicea and the Patriarchal Palace. They commemorated the 1700th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council and the 60th anniversary of the 1965 lifting of the mutual anathemas between Catholicism and the Orthodox Church. This spirit of Ecumenism is well-known inside the Patriarchate. However, given this event is in relation to the First Ecumenical Council, we have a short, but very insightful and relevant, excerpt from Archimandrite Spyridon Bilalis to publish today. Below, Bilalis examines how Gregory VI (a predecessor of Patriarch Bartholomew) handled the question of how the Orthodox Church properly relates to the Papacy in the context of joint participation in Councils. The Ecumenical Patriarchate has its legacy of confessors against the errors of Papism, but (lamentably) it has a more recent legacy of dialogue and wishful or pseudo-fraternity. In this context, we should weep that the current Patriarch would rather follow in the footsteps of his beloved Athenagoras rather than the faithful Gregory VI.

Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory VI	Pope Pius IX

The response of Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory VI to the invitation of the Pope of Rome for an Orthodox delegation to participate in the First Vatican Council:

The First Vatican Council (December 1869 – October 1870) met in St. Peter’s Basilica, having been convened by Pope Pius IX, who presided as president. It was not even a general council of the Western “Church” but only a papal-Roman partial council.

A year earlier, on September 8, 1868, the pope had summoned to the council “all the bishops of the Churches of the Eastern type, who were not in communion with the Apostolic See.” The pope addressed the invitation to the Orthodox East as “heir of the chief of the Apostles… with the aim of extending his authority more widely over all Christians, dwelling in any part of the earth” and with the ultimate aim of uniting them all with the Roman See “which is the center of all truth and unity.”

A four-member papal delegation visited Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory VI to deliver the Vatican’s invitation. The Patriarch refused to accept the papal document, emphasizing that Pius IX had convened the council in an incompetent and uncanonical manner, since he insisted on the principles of the papal encyclical of 1848 on primacy and infallibility, characterizing his embassies as “not simply a conciliar decision and a human one, but a divine right.” Gregory VI, a worthy successor to Gregory V, responded to the pope’s representatives in a patristic manner, strongly criticizing the Vatican’s illegal and uncanonical actions:

“For us Orthodox,” he said, “an Ecumenical Council and an Ecumenical Church and true catholicity is and is called that holy and inviolable body in which, regardless of its material population, the pure teaching of the Apostles and the faith of each local Church are summarized, which was supported and tested from the foundation of the Church until the first eight centuries, during which the Fathers of the East and the West and the most holy and spirit-inspired Councils and those venerable Fathers, whose writings are known to all and must become the infallible and safe guide of every Christian and bishop of the West, of him who sincerely desires and seeks the gospel truth. They are the supreme criterion of Christian truth. They are the safe path, on which we can meet with the holy kiss of dogmatic union. Anyone who walks around and outside that orbit will be considered by us to be outside the truth and unqualified to gather around him the members of the Orthodox Catholic Church. If by any chance some of the Western bishops, who have doubts about some of their doctrines and want to gather, let them gather, to revise them every day, if they want to. We have no doubts about the ancestral and unchangeable doctrines of piety.”

Once again, the Orthodox East, through the mouth of the inspired Patriarch Gregory VI, called on Rome to awaken and stop following the slippery path that Pius IX was leading it on, by convening the First Vatican Council. Gregory presented before the papal representatives the spirit-inspired Councils and the God-bearing Fathers, that is, this very Holy Tradition of the Church, as the supreme criterion of Christian truth. On the contrary, Pope Pius IX convened the First Vatican Council in order to annihilate the Ecumenical Councils, to put the voices of the Fathers in second place, and to elevate his personal infallibility as the supreme criterion of truth. Gregory VI and Pius IX stood opposite each other as representatives of two fundamentally opposite worlds. The East, through Gregory, holds the unfading light of Holy Tradition, while the West, through Pius IX, having fundamentally altered Holy Tradition, is now illuminated by the smoking lamp of papal infallibility.

However, Gregory VI’s rebuttal of Pius IX also has a sequel, which concerns the very fact of the convening of the First Vatican Council as ecumenical: “Oh, venerable abbots,” said the Patriarch, “when we speak of an Ecumenical Council, it must not escape your memory that the Ecumenical Councils were constituted in a different manner than the one proclaimed by His Beatitude.” If the Most Blessed Pope of Rome admitted apostolic parity and fraternity, he should, as to equals in value and first in order by virtue of the see and in accordance with canon law, address a special letter to each of the Patriarchs and Councils of the East and not impose by circular and by public invitation, as if he were the despot and leader of all, but ask the brothers as a brother, equal and of equal rank, if they agree and approve together where and how and of which Council the constitution will be. Since this is how things are, either you should make a historical retrospective and to the Ecumenical Councils, so that the true and Christ-chosen union desired by all may be achieved and remain in history, or we should be content with our own unceasing prayers and supplications for the peace of the entire world, the stability of God’s holy Churches and the unity of all. However, in the present case, we assure you with regret that we consider both the invitation and this epistle that you brought with you to be unnecessary and fruitless.

If Pope Pius IX had deepened and understood the classical response of Gregory VI, he would never have convened a virtual ecumenical council, in order to intercept the dogma of primacy and infallibility with it! But even the ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras, if he had Gregory’s inspired text before his eyes, would never have sent observers to the anti-canonical Second Vatican Council from the Orthodox perspective, which proclaimed both papal primacy and infallibility! Pope Pius IX, after ignoring the scrutiny of Gregory VI and other honest voices of Western bishops, transformed the First Vatican Council… into a parody of an Ecumenical Council, into a backroom council, and into a servile instrument of papal primacy and infallibility.

FROM:

Archimandrite Spyridon Bilalis, Orthodoxy and Papism, Volume A, pp. 268–271.