K
I don’t think I would describe what Francis is doing as Orthodox. When we hold synods we don’t stack then with neo-Marxists, bishops known to have covered up for sexual predators, and open advocates of sodomitical “marriage.” While there is a legitimate difference in both theology and praxis on subjects like marriage between Rome and Orthodoxy, I don’t know of any Orthodox bishop who has ever openly advocated that anyone should be allowed to take communion as long as their conscience says its OK, irrespective of the teaching of the Church. Nor would any Orthodox bishop be advocating communion for the divorced and civilly remarried. The revisionist Latin bishops keep saying they want to adopt our discipline, but they don’t. We may permit second marriages following a divorce and penance, but we don’t commune those who just remarry in front of the town clerk.
The real danger here is not that the Latins want to cut some slack to the divorced and remarried, but that they want to do away with essentially all Eucharistic discipline. I am sorry but that is not Orthodox! They want to say something that they have always understood to be a sin, is still a sin, but it’s OK to take Holy Communion anyway if your conscience tells you that what you are doing is right and that the Church’s teaching is wrong.
It is not Orthodoxy that this Pope seems to be trying to emulate so much as the Anglicans. IMHO the Roman Church is in a serious crisis.
Unfortunately our separated Latin brethren seem to be almost as much in horror of their church becoming conciliar, rather than monarchical — which *would* be a move toward Orthodoxy — as they are of Francis following the lead of their revisionist bishops on matters of remarriage and Eucharistic discipline.
You may be right that Francis wants to follow the Anglicans into total apostasy, rather than just trying to make the papacy into a normal patriarchate that acts on the basis of the advice of its Holy Synod, and what this synod of theirs recommends and how he acts on whatever recommendation is made will probably provide enough evidence to tell the difference.