Father,Mother, Brother,Sister: Primacy and Familial Language

From its inception Christianity has employed familial language to help believers frame their relationships, first to God, who was their common ‘Father’, and to one another. In the early church this was also true of bishops, and especially to the Patriarchs of Rome and Constantinople, where one is struck by the frequent use of fraternal language in order to establish their respective positions within the church. However, by the medieval period a shift took place whereby Rome began to reference itself not as the ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ of other churches but as ‘mother’ and ‘father’. Calls to reunion were thus increasingly framed in terms of filial obedience, with the return of the prodigal son becoming the West’s chief paradigm for understanding reunion. This continued for centuries, until the mid‐twentieth century, when Rome once again began to employ fraternal language in its dealings with the Orthodox.