Doesn't such a merger have to be approved by the monopolies commission? English supermarket chain, Morrisons had terrible problems when they bought out Safeways. I can't see Catholicism plc having it any easier.

--Jonathan Hagger

This is well and good of course that the two great members of the Catholic family are talking to each other but, like universalism or vagante ordinations, which the mainstream media rediscover every few years, this is not news!

The Orthodox have always been willing to accept papal primacy.

The sticking point remains: is the papacy a man-made rank of the divinely instituted episcopate for the good order of the church (like any Orthodox patriarch, metropolitan or archbishop) or has the Pope always been the divinely instituted Vicar of Christ with immediate and universal jurisdiction (so why bishops then?)?

Of course Orthodoxy has long been a working model for Catholic-minded Anglicans as classic Anglicanism seems to have adopted its ecclesiology, a communion of independent bishops. The Bishop of Fond du Lac was friends with St Tikhon, then the Russian archbishop for the Americas. Many sincerely non-proselytising Episcopalians helped immigrant Orthodox parishes get started and as recently as half a century ago if a new Presiding Bishop was installed the Orthodox bishops either would come or send priest representatives (all of whom probably would happily sit in choir but not participate as their church teaches).

And as recently as 70 years ago many Orthodox leaders thought reunion with Anglicanism was possible. (Several patriarchates and the first hierarch of ROCOR thought, unlike Rome, if Anglicanism as a whole unprotestantised and became Orthodox the clergy could be received in their orders.)

Today's Orthodox convert boomlet in America: yesterday's intellectual Anglican converts.

So close and yet so far.

Non-papal (but not necessarily anti-papal with primacy not supremacy) Catholicism, or Anglican ecclesiology but no Protestantism (neither Low nor Broad Church).

And it works.

I doubt that that Pope Benedict will give up the claim to infallibility to heal the breach with the Orthodox Church. How could he?

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia:

The Vatican Council has defined as "a divinely revealed dogma" that "the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra -- that is, when in the exercise of his office as pastor and teacher of all Christians he defines, by virtue of his supreme Apostolic authority, a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the whole Church -- is, by reason of the Divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, possessed of that infallibility with which the Divine Redeemer wished His Church to be endowed in defining doctrines of faith and morals; and consequently that such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable of their own nature (ex sese) and not by reason of the Church's consent"

If infallibility is a "divinely revealed dogma", how can this pope reverse a divine revelation?

June Butler

That's just it. He can't undo a past definition of doctrine. So either that definition stands or Rome joins the Orthodox.