Orthodox left the Catholic Church, not the other way around.
“Orthodox left the Catholic Church, not the other way around.”
OK, I’ll bite. Aside from the fact that it was the Bishop of Rome, the Patriarch of the West, who broke communion with the then 5 other Patriarchates and went into schism, leaving them, so to speak, why do you say that?
Golly; I wonder why...
2 Corinthians 6:17
Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you,
So you’ve been taught.
Only Constantinople had removed Rome from the Diptychs in the early 11th century, and come the date you Latins favor for the schism, Patriarch Michael only anathamatized the very rude Cardinal Humbert, not the Pope of Rome. The other Eastern Patriarchates were still in communion with Rome, or so they thought, until the Crusaders started forcibly installing bishops in occupied sees making it clear that you Latins felt you confessed a different faith from us. We didn’t change the Creed in defiance of decrees of the Ecumenical Council and contrary to the plain word of Scripture, we didn’t change ecclesiology, we didn’t introduce novel doctrines about purgatorial fire, the West did.
Your version of events hangs on the thin reed of the papal claims, which even folks in your communion at that time your First Vatican Council doubted, and which the East had never accepted — numerous canons of the Ecumenical Councils and of councils given ecumenical force at the Sixth make no sense if the ancient and undivided Church had believe your ecclesiology. The weight of patristic opinion is that the rock on which the Church is founded is Peter’s confession, not Peter’s person. Even were the latter true, it is rather a stretch to get from there to the monarchical papacy and an ecclesiology contrary to that found in both St. Ignatius and St. Cyprian on the basis of the poetic identification of sees with their founder, a stretch the Popes of Rome themselves only made as they gradually arrogated power to themselves (cf. St. Gregory the Dialogist’s objection to the title Ecumenical Patriarch being applied to the Patriarch of Constantinople, based on misunderstanding ecumencial as universal, rather than “for the oecume” meaning the Empire, which no longer contained the city of Rome, and which objection explicitly both denies the universal authority of the Pope of Rome and acknowledges the Petrine foundations of Antioch and Alexandria (St. Peter consecrated St. Mark the Evangelist to be the first Bishop of Alexandraia)), a process only completed after your schism when the Popes started arrogantly claiming that being in communion with the Pope of Rome was necessary for salvation.