It is almost as if the Holy Spirit were active in these later days :)
"I think the fact that Fr. Taft and Patriarch Bartholomew were students together in Rome presages unanticipated results."
Now there's an interesting and potentially important factoid.
No, He is always active. God always knocks on our hearts. Our lack of progress cannot be blamed on God. It's just that we are lucky to have the caliber of hierarchy willing to cooperate with Him more. It's about time, if you ask me, that they put in practice what they preach.
And one has really to admire +BXVI. He came on stage and the first thing he basically said was: (re)unite the Church!; not by morphing or bu absoirption, but as two faces of the same coin. Of course, the fact that we have come this far in a relatively short time (40 years is a lunch break in Church time and speed) is due to the works of some great men: the 1964 bilateral withdrawal of those senseless anathemas, "committing them to oblivion," was the breath of life. If anything positive came out of Vatican II that was certainly one of them.
Under +JPII, the Orthodox and the Catholic actually sat down and began talking to each other. At the closing of 2006, we witnessed two brothers in Christ, the first and the second bishop in His Church, holding up each others' hands, telling us: we can do it!