The seat of the Church moved when the power-mad Pope in Rome was excommunicated from the Church, in 1054. And it’s been that way ever since... The Roman Catholics are trying to come back to the Church, but their heretical beliefs (in particular, the Filioque, Papal primacy, original sin and others) prevent their rejoining the true Church.
What Orthodox jurisdiction do you belong to?
The seat of the Church moved when the power-mad Pope in Rome was excommunicated from the Church, in 1054.
>>The Ecumenical Patriarch only spoke for himself in 1054. Much of the rest of the East remained in communion with the Pope of Rome for centuries afterward.
The Patriarchate of Antioch is a prime example, as Patriarch Peter III attempted to mediate the split between Rome and Constantinople without much success. The schism wasn’t complete until 1729 when my Melkite Church separated from Orthodoxy for political reasons.
The Filioque is an orthodox theologoumena as long as the some of the ambiguities found in the Scholastics are avoided, as St. Maximos the Confessor writes:
he following is St Maximus’ Letter to Marinus as found in Migne, PG 91:136.
Those of the Queen of Cities [Constantinople] have attacked the synodal letter of the present very holy Pope, not in the case of all the chapters that he has written in it, but only in the case of two of them. One relates to the theology [of the Trinity] and according to this, says ‘the Holy Spirit also has his ekporeusis from the Son.’
The other deals with the divine incarnation. With regard to the first matter, they [the Romans] have produced the unanimous evidence of the Latin Fathers, and also of Cyril of Alexandria, from the study he made of the gospel of St John. On the basis of these texts, they have shown that they have not made the Son the cause of the Spirit — they know in fact that the Father is the only cause of the Son and the Spirit, the one by begetting and the other by procession — but that they have manifested the procession through him and have thus shown the unity and identity of the essence.
They [the Romans] have therefore been accused of precisely those things of which it would be wrong the accuse them, whereas the former [the Byzantines] have been accused of those things it has been quite correct to accuse them [Monothelitism].
In accordance with your request I have asked the Romans to translate what is peculiar to them (the ‘also from the Son’) in such a way that any obscurities that may result from it will be avoided. But since the practice of writing and sending [the synodal letters] has been observed, I wonder whether they will possibly agree to doing this. It is true, of course, that they cannot reproduce their idea in a language and in words that are foreign to them as they can in their mother-tongue, just as we too cannot do.
http://www.monachos.net/content/patristics/patristictexts/185
As far as the lack of Catholic apostolic succession is concerned, no Orthodox ecumenical council has ever ruled against the validity of Catholic holy orders.
The fact is jurisdictions like the Orthodox Church in America, Greek Archdiocese, etc. receive Catholic convert clergy by vesting without reordination.
I never became Orthodox because they can’t even agree among themselves about the validity of non-Orthodox sacred mysteries among other issues.
Some like the more rigorist types in Orthodoxy say that all non-Orthodox are graceless and damned even if they have faith.