This is exactly my point, Kosta. While we can discuss various concerns raised in your 27-29, that is not the reason I posted the hypothetical in 26. My point was simply that while the Latin Catholics love the Orthodox Church, the Orthodox do not love us back. Even if the Catholic Church unilaterally abolished everything she created since 8c onward for the sake of the commandment to be one, the Orthodox would still find something or other, like Sunday football, to be utterly, utterly!-- unacceptable.
My further point is, it does not have to be this way. Indeed, the talk of rushing headlong into reunion is counterproductive and only serves to scare both sides. Instead, I hope, we are entering a period where the Orthodox presence grows in the West, and therefore the Orthodox and the Catholics grow accustomed to each other, for the first time in many centuries, as having common goals, and common, for the most part, theology.
The greatest dividing factor is nor filioque or even Vatican I. The greatest dividing factor is friction along the European and Middle-Eastern fault lines. In America, at least, they should not be allowed to dominate.
I meant to address it to you as well.
***The greatest dividing factor is nor filioque or even Vatican I. The greatest dividing factor is friction along the European and Middle-Eastern fault lines. In America, at least, they should not be allowed to dominate.***
Huzzah!!!! What a great statement. I would take it further, though. I did not move to the US until 1990 and therefore take a more world-wide view of things. These lines should not be allowed to dominate in the Church anywhere in the world. The Church is the Church of Jesus Christ; the USCCB needs major spanking and admonishment for their sins. The old saying is that the floor of hell is paved with the skulls of bishops. To this day, as much now as it was then, that saying is valid.
You sound like my younger daughter. If I don't approve of what she does it means I don't love her, I am the bad guy. Love does not always mean approval.
The Orthodox simply do not approve of Latin ways. They see their Faith as a narrow path and not one wide enough to accommodate all sorts of things outside of the Holy Tradition.
The Orthodox approach to reunification is like that story of the Prodigal Son. They do not condemn but they will not approve either. That doesn't mean they don't love you. And if the Catholics decides to return to being Orthodox again, as the Orthodox believe they were, they will accept them. The Orthodox are just less compromising, that's all.
Look, the East was the source of all sorts of heresies and schisms in the first millennium. In fact, the Undivided Church is almost an oxymoron, because almost half of the time between the Council of Chalcedon until the Great Schism was spent in some sort of non-communion between the Constantinople and Rome!
During those times, the Latin approach was exactly the same the Orthodox take today. Rome was not willing to compromise Eastern innovations. That's why +Maximos the Confessor and +John Chrysostomos sought refuge in Rome, and that's why so many Roman Popes are Orthodox saints.
One pope, Honrouis I, a single exception in the first millennium, apparently knew of a festering heresy in Constantinople, and while he never subscribed to it, he apparently allowed it and for that he was condemned by the Sixth Council as a heretic and cursed by all subsequent popes being enthroned until much after the Great Schism.
Rome was the guardian of Orthodoxy until it got itself mixed up with Franks (who were themselves iconoclastic heretics and extreme puritans), and until Rome succumbed to Frankish demands, although not without resistance.