Interestingly, a rather long reply I typed up and sent never appeared. When that sort of thing happens, as it does occasionally, I am superstitious (or perhaps religious) enough to think that it is God's intervention to keep me from saying or doing that which He does not wish me to say or do.
I won't try to recreate all I wrote. It frankly wasn't that good anyway. The gist of it was that if you go back and read the post that I wrote (to which everyone reacted extremely negative), and really think about what I was writing, you may see that I was not actually writing in anger at all. Nor did I ever say "SUBMIT"!
All that I was doing was reacting logically to all that I had read. My thrust has been: God wants us to come into communion, since He dispenses valid sacraments to both of us. But "communion" can be limited to sharing the sacraments. The West should not dominate the East, or vice versa. I tried to give enough history to show that the West evolved as it did for a REASON, and the reason was not merely political. For Christianity itself to survive in the West, Christianity had to become the government for a long, long time, until the savages that we were learned how to read and write and administer.
I think that the Western Church would bend over backwards to reunite with the East - at least to share sacramental communion, and I was trying to convey that: complete respect for the Eastern patriarchal territories, no attempt at bringing the monarchic church East, no effort to impose "filioque" - and understanding that these things have evolved as they have over the course of a millennium, for very good reasons in many case, and that we're probably not going to be able to use the same catechism, but also that it doesn't matter nearly so much as that we be able to share communion and the sacraments. Certainly within the Western Church the Dominicans are about as far removed from the Francicans, and diocesan priests are as different in practice from Jesuits as can be, and yet these different organisms are able to all function under the big, big tent. I really don't see the differences East and West as being so profound that we cannot share the table together.
From reading the Orthodox here (go back and read what you wrote), it was clear that what you were saying is that the only terms under which we can come back into communion is if the Western Church should die, by considering everything that we have done in the past one thousand years an error. My response was simply that I think Rome has the better historical argument. Of course you do not agree, but I don't consider it an outrage or a destruction of the comity of the thread, after having heard everything that is supposedly wrong with my church, to answer, to the point: "I disagree. My Church is not wrong."
I did not follow that up with a counterattack. I simply, sadly, said that if the terms are that the West has to admit that the East was right, the Schism can never be repaired, because we don't think that the East was right.
Now, I think that we can come back into communion if we agree that nobody gets to win the historical arguments. They simply need to be put into abeyance so that we can share the sacraments. That has been my point all along.
My "turnaround" was not a turnaround backing away from that. It was a pragmatic response to what I read. The terms I suggested: nobody wins the historical argument and we reconcile without resolving the issues, and simply respect the differences, was UNACCEPTABLE to you. What you offered amounts to us saying that we were wrong and disassembling 1000 years of tradition. But that would be a lie. We don't believe that we were wrong. We believe that we were right. The same way you feel.
The only "turnaround" I had concerned Rome not sending missionaries into Orthodox areas. If healing the Schism will eventually be possible, which I had greater, naive hope for when I initiated the thread, then it is a waste of time and energy to duplicate efforts within the Church. But if it is doomed to fail, then Rome has a duty to send missionaries to the people of the East too.
Just go back and read the thread.
I never said the East had to change anything, at all. All I said was that to share communion the East needs to tolerate the differences in the West, and the West the East. That is the very antithesis of "SUBMIT!"
It was you who said that this sort of tolerance is bad religion, and not an acceptable basis for reunification. Your proposals amounted to the Catholic Church admitting a millennium of error in order to come back into communion.
My only response to that was, and is: we were not in error.
I am not angry at you for feeling as you do. If you were angry at my response, I apologize for not making it clearer.
Mostly, I find the whole thing deeply depressing.
If by your lights, Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism share the same faith to such an extent that inter-communion should be able to be instituted, what would be the purpose of these missionaries? To what would you be converting them?
The answer, of course, was in your original post, where you stated that the barrier to some sort of union is purely political. Therefore, the decision not to send Roman missionaries east-ward would likewise be political -- i.e. in order to promote union.
The implication is obvious (at least to me) -- sending Roman missionaries into Orthodox lands to "compete for souls" against the Orthodox Church would likewise be fundamentally political. What exactly would these converts be gaining, other than being juridically aligned with the "right" hierarchy? If they would be gaining something more than that, then we obviously do not yet share the same faith, and union would be a farce.
This all points to what the other Orthodox posters on this thread have been saying, and for the most part without rancor (which has no place in this kind of discussion) -- there are profound differences between the basic spiritual approaches of the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches.
This, of course, is without even beginning to address the question of just why Roman Catholicism would place a priority on sending missionaries into Orthodox countries when Catholic parishes across the western world are in desperate need of priests to care for their most basic spiritual needs, and when Catholics have hundreds of millions of readily available Protestants (not to mention non-Christians) who presumably need conversion to Roman Catholicism even more badly than do we Orthodox.
I also tried to dispel a popular opinion in the West that the Orthodox Church does not recognize papacy, and to explain why the Patriarch of Russia has the right to ask that territories under his patriarchy are left to him, as well as why it is impossible for Alexy II to receive the Pope in an official capacity against charges often made that the Patriarch of Russia just doesn't like the Pope or that he somehow demands something that was not a prerogative of a patriarch all along.
I went to great lengths, as much as reasonably possible on this forum, to point to some key theological, philosophical, cultural and historical differences that divide us, especially how we, as well as other Christians, read biblical accounts and draw inferences from them about papacy and many other issues.
Agrarian raises some valid points about you statements that seem to contradict each other, regarding our alleged sacramental agreement and continued proselytizing in Russia.
Bottom line is: if these issues and solutions were that simple, I believe that we would not be talking about them one thousand years later. I am sorry if the Orthodox "burst your bubble" but I hope you will be Christian enough to at least accept if not understand that as much as you think your Church is right, we know that your Church was with us at Seven Councils, which means -- since we are still there -- we must still be right and we are not going to change for the sake of pragmatism or political expediency.
Please, tend to your Church and seek ways to find solutions for her, solutions that are more urgently needed than enticing the Orthodox to join you half way.