“So that is what Rome gained from the meeting: another step for the inevitable eventual reunification”
We won’t live to see it; our children’s children won’t live to see it. In the 1440s Rome and the Eastern hierarchs thought they had a union, but the Orthodox people said ANAXIOS, and that was the end of that. The same thing will happen again, not just in Russia, but across the Orthodox world. We are, as you know my brother, notorious for telling our hierarchs precisely where to put such of their notions as we disapprove of...and submission to the pope of Rome is one of those notions.
Certainly we can work together, probably more closely than with anyone else, but no union.
That’s so long as the Orthodox see reunification as submission, but that will change in due time.
That Kirill will be told by the Russians where to put his Joint Declaration, I have no doubt. It is clearly a gesture forced on him by the Russian regime. However, another meme of Catholic goodwill toward the Orthodox world has crossed their mental border. Not bad.