"First, I still cannot see how you can claim that Trullo was an Ecumenical Council."
I accept it as Ecumenical because the Church does. The teaching of the Church is that the Council in Trullo was a continuation of the Fifth Council that dealt with matters left unfinished at the Fifth Ecumenical Council. All of the canons in Trullo were confirmed at the Sixth Ecumenical Council.
"You are reading into [Canon 32] something that it simply does not say." Yeh, me and the rest of the Church are "reading into".
"With regard to Patriarch Photius, it seems to me that you are giving to him an infallibility that you are denying to the pope." HOGWASH. I render to him the respect that all Orthodox Christians render to him. It's the Tradition that's
infallible, not St. Photius.
"Why should the decision of the Patriarch of Constantinople be held in higher regard than that of the pope." It's the Tradition that is held in higher regard. No pope and no ecumenical patriarch can override the Tradition. I have just as hard a time with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew as I do with Pope Benedict XVI. You should hear what we say of the present EP. He is generally held in very low regard, so much so it mystifies us that Pope Benedict XVI bothers to talk with him at all. Another stinker is Patriarch Alexei II, called by some the Ghetto Orthodox Patriarch because of his past.
"That being said, however, it may come as a surprise to you but Photius never condemned the West for the use of unleavened bread."
I believe you may want to double check that statement.
Sure on that?
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02172a.htmCertain it is that in the ninth century the use of unleavened bread had become universal and obligatory in the West, while the Greeks, desirous of emphasizing the distinction between the Jewish and the Christian Pasch, offered up leavened bread. Some surprise has been expressed that Photius, so alert in picking flaws in the Latin Liturgy, made no use of a point of attack which occupies so prominent a place in the polemics of the later schismatics. The obvious explanation is that Photius was shrewd and learned enough to see that the position of the Latins could not successfully be assailed. Two centuries later, the quarrel with Rome was resumed by a patriarch who was troubled with no learned scruples. As a visible symbol of Catholic unity, it had been the custom to maintain Greek churches and monasteries in Rome and some of Latin Rite in Constantinople. In 1053, Michael Cærularius ordered all the Latin churches in the Byzantine capital to be closed, and the Latin monks to be expelled. As a dogmatic justification of this violent rupture with the past, he advanced the novel tenet that the unleavened oblation of the "Franks" was not a valid Mass; and one of his chaplains, Constantine by name, with a fanaticism worthy of a Calvinist, trod the consecrated Host under his feet. The proclamation of war with the pope and the West was drawn up by his chief lieutenant, Leo of Achrida, metropolitan of the Bulgarians. It was in the form of a letter addressed to John, Bishop of Trani, in Apulia, at the time subject to the Byzantine emperor, and by decree of Leo the Isaurian attached to the Eastern Patriarchate. John was commanded to have the letter translated into Latin and communicated to the pope and the Western bishops. This was done by the learned Benedictine, Cardinal Humbert, who happened to be present in Trani when the letter arrived. Baronius has preserved the Latin version; Cardinal Hergenröther was so fortunate as to discover the original Greek text (Cornelius Will, Acta et Scripta, 51 sqq.). It is a curious sample of Greek logic. "The love of God and a feeling of friendliness impelled the writers to admonish the Bishops, clergy, monks and laymen of the Franks, and the Most Reverend Pope himself, concerning their azyms and Sabbaths, which were unbecoming, as being Jewish observances and instituted by Moses. But our Pasch is Christ. The Lord, indeed, obeyed the law by first celebrating the legal pasch; but, as we learn from the Gospel, he subsequently instituted the new pasch.... He took bread, etc., that is, a thing full of life and spirit and heat. You call bread panis; we call it artos. This from airoel (airo), to raise, signifies a something elevated, lifted up, being raised and warmed by the ferment and salt; the azym, on the other hand, is lifeless as a stone or baked clay, fit only to symbolize affliction and suffering. But our Pasch is replete with joy; it elevates usfrom the earth to heaven even as the leaven raises and warms the bread", etc. This etymological manipulation of artos from airo was about as valuable in deciding a theological controversy as Melanchthon's discovery that the Greek for "penance" is metanoia. The Latin divines found an abundance of passages in Scripture whereunleavened bread is designated as artos. Cardinal Humbert remembered immediately the places where the unleavened loaves of proposition are called artoi. If the writers of the letter had been familiar with the Septuagint, they would have recalled the artous azymous of Ex., xxix, 2.
Show me where Trullo was accepted by the entire Church, east and west, before 1054.
The teaching of the Church is that the Council in Trullo was a continuation of the Fifth Council that dealt with matters left unfinished at the Fifth Ecumenical Council. All of the canons in Trullo were confirmed at the Sixth Ecumenical Council.
The Fifth Ecumenical Council was in 553, i.e. 139 years before the Council in Trullo in 692. The Sixth Ecumenical Council could not have confirmed Trullo because it closed eleven years before it in 681.
Yeh, me and the rest of the Church are "reading into".
Yeah, you and only the Orthodox Church. Again, so me where this interpretation was universally accepted before 1054.
It's the Tradition that's infallible...
And yet you can so me no Tradition before the Schism that condemns the use of unleavened bread.