[Cronos]

The Orthodox Church does not deny the Primacy of the Successor of Peter, the Patriarch of Rome. However, that "Primacy" is interpreted as "First Among Equals" and not "Supreme Infallible Ruler".

And that's something Pope JP II and Pope Benedict are emphasising.

So, if you are Orthodox you would have to state that the Patriarch of the West is the first among equals. This is what was The declaration of Ravenna in 2007 re-asserted and re-stated the notion that the bishop of Rome is indeed the protos, although future discussions are to be held on the concrete ecclesiological exercise of papal primacy. We Catholics ARE open to this discussion.

Let's face facts -- in the centuries between 450 and 800, the Patriarch of the West was the only thing keeping civilisation alive in the West, unlike the East that had the stability of The Empire. Secondly, just like in the East where the Patriarch of Constantinople had control over all the Greeks and the Bulgarians etc. it could be argued the same for the Patriarch of the West (only while in the east you had definied political distinctions between the Basileus in Constantinople and the Tsar of all Bulgaria, you didn't have that in the West)

[Cronos]

Nuts, didn’t complete my statement. So, there was a historical reason why the Catholic Church developed the way it did while the Orthodox were more closely tied to the State (even under the Turks where there were separate millets to the chagrin of the Romanian Orthodox and Bulgarian Orthodox who had to fight to get their own autocephalous Churches).