As a young Greek Orthodox Christian growing up in suburban Buffalo, James Likoudis sensed the deficient unity of the Orthodox communion of churches. Like Catholics, the Orthodox have all seven sacraments, including validly ordained apostolic successors as their bishops. But because they lack the divinely founded principle of unity—the primacy of St. Peter and his papal successors—ethnicity and, often, related nationalist politics take precedence over a common, unifying faith. In his own experience, because the Greek Orthodox church was in Buffalo and his parents didn’t own a car, the Likoudis family rarely made it to the Sunday Divine Liturgy (Mass), even though there was a Serbian Orthodox church only a few blocks from their Lackawanna home.
“It frankly never occurred to me to try to frequent regularly an Orthodox church of another ethnic group closer to home,” writes Likoudis in Eastern Orthodoxy and the See of Peter, which includes his personal journey to Rome. “We were Greek Orthodox, ‘pure Greeks’ (Hellenes), and though we shared a common religion with Orthodox Serbs, Macedonians, and Russians, different languages and customs make it difficult to feel a sense of real solidarity with them.”
In his apologetics and evangelization, Jim always emphasized that Jesus founded a visible Church with a visible hierarchical structure (Matt. 16:18-19; 18:15-18)—and if the Church’s leadership was needed in the earliest years, how much more in subsequent decades and centuries, when Jesus and his hand-picked apostles were not visibly present to preserve what the Lord had started during his earthly ministry? Likoudis took his cue from Jesus himself, who prayed that his disciples “may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.”
Because Jesus is eternal God (John 1:1-3, 14; 8:58-59), his words are guaranteed to come to fruition (Isa. 55:10-11), so that his Church would be visibly one, so the world could believe in him—and so that the Church could and would progressively make disciples of all nations (Matt. 28:18-20), and the gates of hell would never prevail against it.
The college-aged Likoudis could see that the Orthodox churches, despite their beautiful liturgies “and other elements of sanctification and of truth,” as Vatican II recognizes in Lumen Gentium 8, had not been able to call an ecumenical council for almost twelve hundred years, let alone validate one, nor could they—as he would see in time—definitively pronounce on the pressing moral issues of our modern day.
Jim was not a “Triumphalist Catholic,” viewing himself as superior to his beloved Orthodox brethren, other Christians, and non-Catholics in general. Rather, he strove to follow Jesus on Jesus’ terms. Because he came to know that Jesus Christ founded his one Catholic Church, Likoudis knew that any catechesis or ecumenism that diminished the divine identity of the Church, with its divinely ordained primacy in teaching and governing power of St. Peter and his papal successors (see Luke 22:31-32), was bound to fail in one way or another—and thus undermine the Church’s saving mission, including by promoting, wittingly or unwittingly, religious indifferentism. The words I’ve italicized are reflective of Likoudis’s apologetics and the title of his magnum opus, The Divine Primacy of the Bishop of Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy. (I was blessed to serve as an editor for my dear friend and mentor for the updated edition.)
I recall when a young Alan Schreck equivocated on the Church’s divine identity in his catechism Basics of the Faith, which Servant Books originally published in the latter 1980s:
These teachings [of Vatican II] are intended to break down the simple and incorrect dichotomy of one church being the “true church” and all others being “false” churches. Catholics believe that the Catholic church is unique not because it is the only true church or body of Christians but because it possesses the fullness of Christian truth and the means of salvation.
Likoudis, who by then had become the president of the lay apostolate Catholics United for the Faith (CUF), responded that Schreck’s catechism “has many fine qualities with its author manifesting a flair for explaining simply various aspects of Catholic teaching.” Still, in an exchange with Schreck in the February 16, 1989, issue of The Wanderer, Likoudis noted,
To allege, as Prof. Schreck does, that the one true Church also exists, however imperfectly, in other churches and ecclesial communities, is to radically alter the meaning of “the one true Church” as traditionally professed by Catholics. Vatican II declared that there was but “one and unique (only) Church” founded by Christ, and Prof. Schreck concedes that this was simply another way of saying “the one true Church,” “but he does not seem to see that conciliar teaching identifies this “one and only Church of God” and “only Church of Christ” with the visible Catholic Church in this world. This is because he posits an unwarranted distinction between the Church of Christ and the visible Catholic Church. But this is what cannot be done. There is only one Church of Christ, the visible Catholic Church built on the Rock of Peter, and though there are elements of the Catholic Church adhered to by our separated brethren, their possession does not suffice to declare “the church of Jesus Christ as a reality that extends beyond the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church,” as Prof. Schreck would like us to believe. Such a notion only serves to promote the error of those who have mistakenly thought that (emphasis original; see CDF, Dominus Iesus 16-17).
Schreck humbly accepted this and other constructive criticism from Likoudis, incorporating it into his Essential Catholic Catechism, the successor to his Basics of the Catholic Faith, which TAN Books republished in recent years.
Amid the confusion prevalent in the post-Vatican II Church, Likoudis covered the gamut, from infallibility to chastity to the liturgy. He also covered the gamut of the media, from appearing on The Phil Donahue Show to writing, with Kenneth Whitehead, The Pope, The Council, and the Mass.
Some observed only the publicly pugnacious, fiercely faithful side of Likoudis, but I was edified to see how tenderly Jim loved his wife, Ruth. Their storied union of seventy years has blessedly begotten six children, thirty-five grandchildren, and—at present—forty-seven great-grandchildren, including five who are unborn. All of them, like many people beyond their clan, have benefited from the faithful witness of the Likoudis Catholic patriarch, who understood, embraced, and defended the great gift Jesus has bestowed on the world in founding and sustaining his Church, the restoration and fulfillment of the Davidic kingdom of Israel.
“It is simply not true, and never has been, that all bishops are equal by divine right as to their authority, and that Our Blessed Lord established a visible Church without a visible head,” Likoudis noted in the preface of the updated edition of The Divine Primacy of the Bishop of Rome and Modern Eastern Orthodoxy. “It has been a myopic ‘tunnel vision’ of the Church that denies Christ instituted the divine primacy of Peter and his successors in the Church, and it falsifies the import of testimonies to this primacy available from the Fathers, the councils, and even the popes themselves . . . and that even ecumenical councils necessarily required papal confirmation (as Peter ‘confirming his brethren’ [see Luke 22:31]).”