RC-Eastern Orthodox dialogue to resume
Not that anything will happen but unlike the official talks with the Anglican Communion there is still hope. This isn’t like talking to Protestants: corporate union/restoration of communion is entirely possible.
The papacy is an issue.
The existence of Byzantine Catholic churches is not. The Patriarch of Moscow is still complaining that the Ukrainian Catholic Church took back what was stolen from them in their homeland of old Polish Galicia, itself stolen by the Soviets during World War II: churches given to the Russian Church, by then literally beaten and under Soviet control (but not heretical or even liturgically liberal). When the Iron Curtain started to collapse the Galicians took back what was theirs. Case closed.
That said nobody in the know, and I don’t mean liberals, wants to see the Orthodox tradition reduced to the state of the present-day Byzantine Catholics: in many places essentially the same as the Novus Ordo but with slightly nicer externals.
Which leads to the other real issue, fairness to non-Roman traditional rites in a reunited church. The current RC system practically speaking is unfair to them.
And that reminds me of this hypothetical problem: in a reunited Catholic Church how would one rationalise all the world’s overlapping dioceses of divers rites? Reducing them, making everything all nice and canonical again with all the local Catholics under one bishop?
From Ad Orientem.
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