No problem with the pinging. The more the merrier. My point with the 800 years is that it really was not so bridgeable. If the issues were truly so bridgeable before the Immaculate Conception Dogma then why was it not resolved in the long 800 years prior to it. It is an awfully long time for such an “bridgeable” gap to remain unfilled. The conclusion then is that it was, in fact, very unbridgeable as the time attests and completely independent of the Immaculate Conception. Again, it is the jurisdictional squabbles that are the driving force here not doctrine. At least that’s how I see it.
Ave Maria!
Fra Roderic
The jurisdictional issues are also very real but bridgeable, and even the infallibility issue can be, if construed within the framework of the undivided Church of the first millennium.
The issue of Immaculate Concpetion involves the issue of Augustinian teaching on the original sin, which the Eastern Church never accepeted and the undivided Church did not teach as dogma.
As long as the Immaculate Conception was a devotional belief of many in the Church it could be treated as such in any re-unification without requiring theological changes on either side, but as a dogma it is carved in stone.
It would require that the Orthodox scrap the theology of the Church of the 1st millennium, of the seven councils, in order to accept the dogma of IC, and that's not going to happen because we are still the 1st millennium Church.
So, once IC became a dogma, it essentially welded the doors shut that only a miracle can open because right now the choices are toom extreme for either side, no matter how good the will may be to re-establish our communion.
If, by some miracle we were to find common theological ground on IC, we are still facing the issue of created vs. uncreated grace on which our Churches speak very rarely because it is a huge stumbling stone.