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At least in part, D, I was kidding; That's why I put a :) after the comment.

I appreciate the fairness of your comments, but I guess I have to disagree that the Dictatus don't represent the thinking of the likes of Gregory VII or, for that matter, of Boniface VIII and as you know, my opinion is shared by a number of Catholic writers of some note...and not particularly leftist ones at that. But whether or not they do isn't really the point, as a practical matter. The real point is that Orthodox Christians, especially theologians, believe that they do reflect a type of thinking which was perfectly acceptable in the Roman Church perhaps even to this day, certainly within the living past. I myself remember being told by one of my Sister of Mercy teachers that unless the Orthodox "submitted" to the Pope we were all bound for hell. Massive biographies by Oxford dons will do little or nothing to calm the quite justified concerns of not only Orthodox theologians, but also, and in the end more importantly, Orthodox laity.

On a micro level, by the way, I don't think the Dictatus Papae are really of much consequence. Unam Sanctam, on the other hand, has of late been subject to all sorts of revisionist writing in an attempt to make it consistent with modern Latin theology, especially in the area of the possibility of theosis outside The Church. To pretend that the likes of Boniface VIII, as some now do, was a good pope only concerned with saving souls, the role of The Church in that work and that when he spoke of submission to the pope, that meant something different in the Middle Ages, something more gentle and spiritual, than it does now is absurd. refusal to submit to Boniface VIII meant the death of 6000 people at Palestrina. Unam Sanctam was part of the pope's feud with Philip the Fair and gave a theological justification for precisely the behavior that history has condemned him for.

I must say that pretending a document like Unam Sanctam shouldn't give Orthodox Christians pause seems at best disingenuous and does the position of the Latin Church in any discussions about the proper role of the Pope no good at all.

I'm sorry if you understood me to be saying Unam Sanctam should give you no pause. I was insisting that it did not claim absolute temporal power (which was the way it was being portrayed) and that such temporal authority as it claimed was grounded in the pope's pastoral authority.

I do not defend Unam Sanctam as having been a wise move by Boniface. He was, however, provoked and seeking to respond to a real problem.

And Unam Sanctam does not have dogmatic authority for the West, nor could it.

So, I can understand that it gives Orthodox pause and probably greater pause than it gives me but it does give me some pause--not a lot.

And honestly, I do not think we can say that the dictatus papae represent Gregory's thinking. But we'll have to agree to disagree.