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Communist agents in the priesthood were readily identified and purged when communism fell, and Communism is not taught in Russian seminaries

Why you are so sure? Who removed those agents, Putin? He is a former KGB agent, then why should he work against his fellow pals?

Cicero actually suggests that the Russian Orthodox benefited from Stalin. This is about as intellectually honest as saying Hitler benefitted the Jews. Educate yourself about the catastrophe of slaughter and repression the Russian Orthodox endured under Stalin. A couple of seminaries weighed against this means nothing.

This is great exaggeration, Jews suffered enormously more and Hitler never rehabilitated them as Stalin did with Orthodox church.

Another additional obstacle is the fact that one of the crusades targetted the Orthodox equivalent of Rome, desecreting, slaughtering and looting fellow Christians. A huge number of religious artifacts in Vatican museums today are dated 1204, the date they were stolen from Constantinople.

How many times you want to talk about ancient history of Constantinople? Doesn’t the pope apologized for this? Doesn’t the Pope gave back some important icon recently? Think about the future, rolling the same story over and over doesn’t have any sense at all.

Nor does the article explain the Orthodox perspective on how several recent Catholic misteps in Russia soured relations. For example, the naming of 12 new catholic Dioceses in Russia on Feb 2002 basically made the Orthodox think that the Catholic "two lungs of the same church" encyclical was a big lie. To use CCmay's words, the Orthodox felt like this was spitting in their eye -- it brought ecumenical efforts in Russia to an abrupt halt, and doomed any possibility of a papal visit.

Why are you so worried, does Catholic church forcing Orthodox people to convert to Catholicism? Of course no. Then why you want to forbid existence of the Catholic church in Russia and de facto freedom of religion? Does anybody in Catholic countries doing the same to Orthodox church? I never heard about similar stories.

Why Catholic church hasn’t similar problems with non-Russian Orthodox churches? An what Alexy II did to solve bilateral problems between both churches, because it is problem between churches not people.