Unpublished letters from Fr. Lev Gillet to his bishop

This article publishes two previously unpublished letters by Father Lev Gillet (1893-1980), addressed in 1928 to his Greek Catholic bishop, and introduced by Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. These epistolary documents shed direct and personal light on the intellectual and spiritual process that led Gillet to leave the Roman Catholic Church and join the Orthodox Church. The approach is that of an edition of primary sources with testimonial value. The central idea is that this transition did not result from an emotional rejection, but from a carefully argued ecclesiological conviction: Gillet contests the historical and theological legitimacy of the papacy as defined by the Vatican Council, and recognizes in Orthodoxy the authentic continuity of the ancient Church. The contribution of these letters is twofold: they document a pivotal moment in the reception of Orthodoxy in the West and illustrate the question of ecclesial unity at the beginning of the twentieth century.