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"I hope after reading these passages you will understand how inconceivable it is for an informed Roman Catholic to understand how any non-Roman Catholic can argue Christ's intention to establish a visible Church with a visible leader."

I can't speak for other non-Roman Catholics but I think I'm on safe ground saying that Orthodoxy would agree that Christ did establish a Church with a visible leader. +Ignatius of Antioch, in the 1st century or very very early in the second, wrote that The Catholic Church was to be found in its fullness in a diocese composed of a bishop surrounded by his clergy and people. Orthodoxy further teaches, as I said before, that the Bishop of Rome's appropriate canonical position in The Church as established by the councils is the primus inter pares among the bishops. If the Pope however isn't teaching the Catholic Faith as handed down to us by the Fathers and the Ecumenical Councils, he cannot be the primus inter pares of The Church. Four of the five Patriarchates of The Church as it existed before the Great Schism determined that the Pope of Rome had broken with them and fallen into, as some then put it, heresy. Since that time we have been in schism and while Rome over the centuries has created "Patriarchates" in lands under the canonical jurisdiction of the Orthodox Patriarchates, Orthodoxy has not presumed to create a counter Papacy and Patriarchate for the West.

Here's the bottom line, S. If Rome honestly wants reunion with the Orthodox East, among other things the Papacy will have to be changed; No more universal jurisdiction, no more "ex cathedra" infallibility, no more teaching that unless one "submits" to the Pope of Rome, no salvation. Any union based on something less than this will be as false and as rejected by the Laos tou Theou as the False Union of Florence. In Orthodoxy, S, without the "Axios" of the whole Church, the laity included, things just won't change, even if the hierarchs wanted it to. I think that +Benedict XVI knows this; he's way too smart and way to patristic not to.

Your comments, and those of others relative to the theoretical role of the Papacy within The Church causes us great confusion. You see, S, we really to look at The Church like +Ignatius of Antioch and we view the consensus patrum as being in accord with that mindset, what we call "phronema".When we look at the Latin Church, we see an absolutely top down system which looks for all the world like the feudal system the Franks set up in the early Middle Ages, with the bishops being the vassals of a monarchical pope and the people as the serfs destined to pay, pray and obey. Although there have been Fathers, East and West, who seem to have viewed The Church just that way in one writing or another, because we don't attribute infallibility to any given Father, we feel they were in error. In any event, we do not believe that a Frankish feudal system is what Christ intended for His Church. In Orthodoxy, the relationship among the hierarchy, the monastics, the clergy and the people is called "sydeesmos" which sort of means "partnership", with each part of The Church fulfilling its appropriate role. It is not at all anything like democracy.

It is precisely this difference in phronema between the East and the West which, it seems to me, will prevent any early union between the East and the West, though I suspect that there will continue to be de facto, and in some cases perhaps even de jure, unions between the Orthodox Churches and certain particular Eastern Churches in communion with the Latin Church. The mindset of the Latin Church, from the hierarchy on down, is just far too different from that of the other Patriarchal Churches to make union possible without some sort of major change in that Church...and it will have to be in the Latin Church since that's the only Church where the hierarchy can make those changes without canonical regard for what the clergy and laity think.