The Great Schism of 1054 Explained

1. What Was the Great Schism of 1054?

The Great Schism of 1054, also called the East-West Schism, is the separation between the Catholic Church centred on Rome and the Eastern Orthodox churches centred on Constantinople. The year is fixed by a single dramatic incident: on 16 July 1054 Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, leading a legation sent from Rome, placed a bull of excommunication on the high altar of Hagia Sophia naming Patriarch Michael Cerularius and those who supported him, and on 24 July a synod at Constantinople issued its own anathema against the legates and their document. Those two acts are the events the date commemorates.

The quarrel that produced them looks small on the surface. The immediate arguments were about whether the bread of the Eucharist should be leavened or unleavened, whether clergy should be married, and which fasts belonged to Lent. Beneath those disputes lay two questions that neither side has yet resolved: what authority the Bishop of Rome holds over the whole Church, and whether the Latin West was entitled to add the word Filioque to a creed settled by an ecumenical council.

What the Date Does Not Mean

Historians generally hold that 1054 was not experienced at the time as the definitive rupture between the two halves of Christendom. The Byzantine chroniclers of the period give the incident little space. Communion between Latin and Greek Christians continued in many places for generations afterwards, Greek and Latin bishops still corresponded and sometimes concelebrated, and the crusading armies of 1096 arrived in Byzantine territory as allies of an emperor who had asked the pope for help. The date became "the schism" largely in later Western historiography, which needed a year to point at.

Source note: the argument that 1054 marks a stage rather than a legal rupture is standard in modern scholarship. The Czech historian Francis Dvornik made the case at length in his studies of Photius and the Byzantine church, and Steven Runciman argued it in The Eastern Schism (1955). The Catholic theologian Yves Congar reached the same conclusion from the theological side.

2. The Long Estrangement Before the Break

The Great Schism was preceded by roughly five centuries of drift, during which the Greek East and the Latin West stopped being able to hear one another. Four forces did the work: language, politics, distance, and divergent custom. None of them was a doctrinal quarrel to begin with, and each of them made the doctrinal quarrels harder to settle when they came.

Language

The early Church was bilingual at its centre. Educated Romans read Greek, and the Church of Rome itself used Greek in its liturgy into the third century. That competence faded. By the sixth and seventh centuries few in the West read Greek well and few in the East read Latin at all. St Augustine, the most influential theologian of the Latin tradition, admitted his Greek was poor, and the Greek East consequently never absorbed him. Theological vocabulary drifted with the languages: the Greek hypostasis and the Latin substantia look like the same word and mean different things, and a great deal of fifth-century and later argument turned on such mismatches. Two churches that cannot read each other's theologians will eventually suspect each other's theology.

Politics and the Empire

Until 476 the Bishop of Rome lived within a Roman Empire. Afterwards the West was governed by Germanic kingdoms while the Roman Empire continued in the East from Constantinople. Emperors in Constantinople regarded the Church of the capital as the church of the imperial city, and the Council of Constantinople in 381 and the Council of Chalcedon in 451 gave that see a rank second only to Rome on the explicit ground that Constantinople was the new imperial residence. Rome objected to the reasoning: the primacy of Rome rested on Peter and Paul, so no city could claim rank from its politics.

The decisive political break came on Christmas Day 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor. To the Frankish court this restored the Western empire. To Constantinople, which had an emperor already, a pope had just conferred the imperial title on a barbarian king. From then on the papacy's protectors, patrons and theological interlocutors were Frankish, and Frankish theology carried the Filioque with it.

Distance and Custom

Practical differences accumulated because the two halves of Christendom rarely saw each other. The West came to use unleavened bread for the Eucharist and the East used leavened bread, each reading its own practice back into the Last Supper. The West fasted on Saturdays in Lent and the East did not. The West gradually required celibacy of its clergy while the East ordained married men to the priesthood and continues to. The West baptised by pouring in many places while the East kept full immersion. Individually these are customs. Cited in a polemical letter they read as evidence that the other side has abandoned the faith.

Paul writes to a church already tempted to fragment, and he grounds unity in what Christians share rather than in what they can enforce. The estrangement of East and West happened slowly enough that few people at any given moment thought they were breaking that bond. For the wider map of who separated from whom and when, see our guide to the Christian denominations and how they divided.

3. The Photian Schism of the Ninth Century

The Photian schism was a break in communion between Rome and Constantinople in the 860s that anticipated almost every feature of 1054 and then healed. Its subject was a disputed patriarchal election, its escalation involved a jurisdictional fight over Bulgaria, and its theological content was the Filioque. Rome and Constantinople had already rehearsed the Great Schism two centuries early.

What Happened

In 858 Patriarch Ignatius of Constantinople was deposed in a political quarrel and replaced by Photius, a distinguished layman rapidly ordained through the necessary orders. Supporters of Ignatius appealed to Rome. Pope Nicholas I, after sending legates whose findings he then rejected, declared in 863 that Photius was not the lawful patriarch and that Ignatius should be restored. Constantinople regarded this as a Roman attempt to adjudicate the internal affairs of another patriarchate.

The dispute widened when the newly converted Bulgarians, evangelised from Constantinople, were courted by Frankish and Roman missionaries. Photius reacted in 867 with an encyclical to the Eastern patriarchs objecting to Latin practices in Bulgaria and, above all, to the Frankish missionaries teaching the Creed with the Filioque. A synod at Constantinople that year condemned Nicholas. Within months Photius had been deposed by a change of emperor, and a council in Constantinople in 869 to 870, which the Catholic Church counts as the Fourth Council of Constantinople, condemned him.

How It Healed

Photius returned to the patriarchate in 877 after the death of Ignatius, with whom he had reconciled. A council at Constantinople in 879 to 880, attended by papal legates under Pope John VIII, restored communion and set aside the earlier condemnation. The Orthodox churches count this council rather than the one of 869 to 870. Communion between Rome and Constantinople held.

4. The Filioque and the Frankish Insertion

The Filioque is the Latin word meaning "and the Son", inserted in the West into the clause of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed that confesses the Holy Spirit "who proceeds from the Father". The creed as promulgated by the Council of Constantinople in 381 contains no such word, and the Council of Ephesus in 431 forbade the composition of a rival creed. Every subsequent Eastern objection grows from those two facts.

Where the Word Came From

The addition appears first in Spain. The Third Council of Toledo in 589, at which the Visigothic king Reccared renounced Arianism, recited the creed with Filioque, almost certainly as a defence against Arian teaching that the Son is less than the Father. From Spain the usage spread into Gaul, and Charlemagne's court at Aachen adopted it with enthusiasm. Frankish theologians defended the word in the 790s while arguing against the Spanish Adoptionists, and the synod of Aachen in 809 asked Rome to approve its use in the sung Creed.

Rome hesitated for two hundred years. Pope Leo III told the Frankish delegation in 810 that the doctrine expressed by the word was true and that the creed should nonetheless not be altered. According to the ninth-century account, he had the creed without the Filioque engraved on two silver shields, in Greek and in Latin, and set up at St Peter's. Rome itself is generally held to have begun singing the creed with the Filioque only in the eleventh century, and the coronation of the Emperor Henry II in 1014 is the occasion usually named.

The Orthodox Objection, Stated in Its Own Terms

Orthodox theologians make two distinct arguments, and Catholics who answer only the second have missed half the case. The first is canonical. A creed established by an ecumenical council is the common property of the whole Church, and no local church, however senior, may alter it by its own authority. On this reading the offence is the unilateral act, and it would remain an offence even if the doctrine added were true.

The second argument is theological. In the Greek fathers the Father is the sole arche, the single origin and source within the Trinity, from whom the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds. Saying that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son appears to give the Godhead two sources, or to fold the Spirit's origin into the Son in a way that subordinates him. Photius pressed this hard, and Orthodox theology has largely followed him. Jesus himself speaks of "the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father" (John 15:26), and the East reads that verse as decisive about the Spirit's eternal origin.

The Catholic Answer

Catholic teaching holds that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as from one single principle, a formula defined at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274 and repeated at Florence. The intention is to affirm what the same verse of John also says, that the Son sends the Spirit, and that the Spirit is the Spirit of the Son (Galatians 4:6). The Catechism of the Catholic Church treats the question directly and does something worth noticing: it states that the Eastern formula, that the Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son, is a legitimate expression of the same faith, and that the two traditions are complementary when each is read in its own vocabulary (CCC 246 to 248).

In 1995 the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity published a clarification titled The Greek and Latin Traditions Regarding the Procession of the Holy Spirit, which affirmed that the Father is the sole origin of both the Son and the Spirit and explained the Latin term in that light. In practice, when the creed is recited in Greek at papal liturgies, it is recited without the Filioque. For the doctrine of the Spirit itself, see our guide to the Holy Spirit in Scripture and Catholic teaching, and for the wider doctrine of God our guide to the Trinity.

5. Two Understandings of Primacy

Both East and West agree that the Bishop of Rome held the first place among the bishops of the ancient Church. They disagree about what first place means. That single disagreement is the load-bearing issue of the schism, and it is the one that dialogue has moved least.

The Orthodox Position

Orthodoxy holds that the Church is governed conciliarly, that all bishops are sacramentally equal, and that the see of Rome enjoyed a primacy of honour as the first among equals. On this account a primate presides, convenes, mediates appeals and speaks for the communion, and he does not hold ordinary jurisdiction over the flock of another bishop. Orthodox theologians point to the practice of the first millennium: ecumenical councils were summoned by emperors, doctrinal decisions were settled by the assembled bishops, and Rome's agreement mattered greatly without Rome's word alone being sufficient. They read the papal claims that developed in the medieval West as a change to the constitution of the Church rather than a growth of what was always there.

The Catholic Position

The Catholic Church holds that the primacy of the Bishop of Rome is a primacy of jurisdiction founded on Christ's words to Peter, that Peter's office continues in his successors, and that this belongs to the structure Christ gave the Church. The relevant texts are Matthew 16:18 to 19, where Jesus names Simon the rock and gives him the keys of the kingdom, Luke 22:32, where Christ tells Peter to strengthen his brothers, and John 21:15 to 17, where the risen Christ commissions him to feed the sheep. The First Vatican Council defined the doctrine in 1870 in Pastor Aeternus.

Our guide to the papacy and the office of Peter argues that case in full, and this page does not repeat it. What belongs here is the historical observation that in 1054 neither side was in a position to hear the other's account. Rome had begun to articulate its authority in the vigorous new language of the reform movement, and Constantinople had a thousand years of conciliar practice in which no bishop had ever governed another patriarchate.

Where the Dialogue Has Got To

The joint Catholic-Orthodox commission published a document at Ravenna in 2007 agreeing that primacy and conciliarity are both essential to the Church at every level, and that at the universal level the Bishop of Rome holds the first place among the patriarchs, with the content of that primacy still to be agreed. Pope John Paul II had already made an unusual invitation in his 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint, asking church leaders and theologians to help him find a way of exercising the primacy that is open to a new situation while renouncing nothing essential to it.

6. What Actually Happened in 1054

The events of 1054 unfolded over about eighteen months and involved four men: Pope Leo IX, his legate Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, Patriarch Michael Cerularius, and the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos. The story is worth telling in order, because almost every popular account compresses it into a shouting match.

The Provocation, 1053

Around 1053 Leo, the Archbishop of Ohrid, wrote a letter addressed to a Latin bishop in southern Italy attacking Western liturgical practices, above all the use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist, along with Saturday fasting and the omission of the Alleluia in Lent. The letter was written with Cerularius's approval and was clearly meant to circulate. In Constantinople the patriarch closed the Latin churches of the city, which used the Western rite. Latin Christians in the imperial capital lost their liturgy.

The timing had a political edge. The Normans were conquering southern Italy, a region with many Greek-rite Christians under Constantinople's jurisdiction, and Latin bishops there were pressing Latin usages on Greek congregations. Leo IX had gone to war against the Normans in 1053, been defeated at Civitate and held in honourable captivity. Rome and Constantinople both had reasons to want an alliance and reasons to resent each other.

The Legation, 1054

Leo IX sent a legation to Constantinople led by Humbert of Silva Candida, a fierce reformer with no diplomatic instincts, accompanied by Frederick of Lorraine, the papal chancellor and a future pope, and Peter, Archbishop of Amalfi. They carried letters asserting Roman authority in strong terms, drawing among other things on the Donation of Constantine, a document later proved to be a forgery. The emperor received them warmly, since he wanted Roman help against the Normans. Cerularius refused to receive them on the terms they demanded and declined to acknowledge their authority.

Then the ground shifted. Pope Leo IX died on 19 April 1054, and no successor was elected until the following year. The legates had been sent by a pope who was now dead, and their commission had arguably lapsed with him. They proceeded anyway.

16 July and 24 July

On 16 July 1054, as the clergy prepared for the afternoon liturgy, Humbert and his companions walked into Hagia Sophia and laid a bull of excommunication on the high altar. It named Michael Cerularius and his supporters, accused them of a list of errors, and included the remarkable charge that the Greeks had removed the Filioque from the Creed, an accusation exactly backwards. The legates then left the city, shaking the dust from their feet in the gesture of Matthew 10:14.

Cerularius convened a synod. On 24 July it anathematised the bull, the men who had drawn it up, and everyone involved in producing it. The document was publicly burned. Careful readers of the two texts have noted for centuries what the Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate stated jointly in 1965: the sentences were aimed at particular persons, and neither church excommunicated the other.

7. Why 1054 Is a Marker Rather Than a Clean Break

The scholarly consensus holds that 1054 marks a stage in a long separation rather than the moment communion ended. Four pieces of evidence support that reading, and each of them is checkable against the surviving record.

The Other Patriarchates Were Not Involved

The ancient Church had five great sees: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. The quarrel of 1054 was between two of them. Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem were not parties to it, and their relations with Rome changed slowly and separately over the following century and a half. A dispute between two patriarchs did not automatically divide the whole East from the whole West.

Contemporaries Barely Noticed

Byzantine historians writing in the decades after 1054 give the episode little attention, and some of the major chroniclers of the period pass over it. In the West it registered as one incident in a difficult embassy. Neither church published a formal declaration that communion with the other had ceased. A definitive rupture between the two halves of Christendom would have been reported as one.

Communion Continued in Practice

Latin and Greek Christians went on receiving communion together in many places for a long time afterwards. In 1095 the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos appealed to Pope Urban II for military help, and the First Crusade set out partly in response. Crusaders and Byzantines quarrelled constantly about strategy and territory, and they did so as Christians who assumed they belonged to one Church. Latin bishops were installed in Antioch and Jerusalem after 1099 in ways that caused deep resentment, and even that was a jurisdictional grievance within a communion still assumed to exist.

The Break Came by Accumulation

Separation became a settled fact through repeated injuries over the following two centuries: the massacre of the Latin residents of Constantinople in 1182, the retaliatory sack of Thessalonica by Norman forces in 1185, and above all the events of 1204 treated in the next section. Ordinary Greek Christians came to regard Latins as a hostile foreign power, and no amount of theological agreement at the top could undo what people had watched happen to their city.

8. 1204: The Sack of Constantinople

The Fourth Crusade did more lasting damage to relations between East and West than the excommunications of 1054. A crusading army raised to fight in Egypt was diverted to Constantinople by a combination of debt to Venice and a Byzantine dynastic dispute, and in April 1204 it stormed and sacked the greatest Christian city in the world. Latin rule was imposed on the empire for the next fifty-seven years.

What the Army Did

The sack ran for three days. Churches were stripped, tombs of the emperors were broken open, and the accumulated relics and treasures of nine centuries were carried west, where many of them remain in the treasuries of European cathedrals. Hagia Sophia was looted and desecrated. Latin sources as well as Greek ones record the violence: the crusader chronicler Geoffrey of Villehardouin describes the plunder with something close to satisfaction, and the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates, who fled the city, wrote a lament that is still painful to read.

The crusaders then installed a Latin emperor and a Latin patriarch in Constantinople and divided the empire among themselves. The Byzantines recovered their capital in 1261 under Michael VIII Palaiologos, and the empire never recovered its strength.

Rome's Response, Then and Since

Pope Innocent III had forbidden the crusade to attack Christians and had excommunicated the Venetians earlier in the campaign for the sack of the Christian city of Zara. When he learned what had been done at Constantinople he wrote to his legate in furious terms, saying that the crusaders had spared neither age nor sex and had turned their swords from the infidel against Christians, and that the Greek Church now saw in the Latins only perfidy and the works of darkness. His condemnation was clear, and the Latin Empire he inherited was nonetheless a fact he then tried to govern.

Eight centuries later, Pope John Paul II spoke to the point directly. Addressing Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens in 2001, he said that Catholics were deeply saddened that the crusaders of the Fourth Crusade had turned against their brothers in the faith, and he asked the Lord's forgiveness. In 2004, on the eight hundredth anniversary, he repeated the sorrow to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, who received it. Our guide to the Crusades and how Catholics should judge them takes up the wider history.

9. The Failed Reunion Councils

Two councils reunited the Catholic and Orthodox churches on paper, and both unions collapsed within a generation. Lyons in 1274 and Ferrara-Florence in 1438 to 1439 failed for the same reason: each was negotiated by a Byzantine emperor under military threat, and neither carried the bishops, monks and people of the East with it.

The Second Council of Lyons, 1274

Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, who had recovered Constantinople in 1261, faced an invasion planned by Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily. Union with Rome would deprive Charles of papal support. Michael sent a delegation to Lyons which professed the Filioque and the Roman primacy, and the union was proclaimed. At home the reaction was overwhelming rejection: the monasteries refused it, Patriarch Joseph I refused it and was set aside in 1275, and Michael resorted to imprisoning, blinding and mutilating opponents. When he died in 1282 his son Andronikos II repudiated the union at once and denied his father a church funeral.

The Council of Ferrara-Florence, 1438 to 1439

The second attempt was far more serious. Emperor John VIII Palaiologos travelled to Italy in person with Patriarch Joseph II and a large delegation of Greek bishops and theologians, and the two sides debated for months on the Filioque, purgatory, the bread of the Eucharist, and the papal primacy. The Ottoman Turks were closing on Constantinople, and Byzantine hopes of Western military help were explicit. The decree of union, Laetentur Caeli, was promulgated on 6 July 1439. Its formula on the Spirit accepted the Eastern language of procession from the Father through the Son as equivalent to the Latin, and its clause on the papacy affirmed the Roman primacy while preserving the rights and privileges of the Eastern patriarchs.

One Greek bishop refused to sign: Mark Eugenikos, Metropolitan of Ephesus, who held that the Latin additions were genuine errors and that no political necessity justified professing them. He is honoured as a saint in the Orthodox Church. The delegation returned to a hostile city, several signatories withdrew their signatures, and the union was never received by the Byzantine clergy or people. Constantinople fell to Mehmed II on 29 May 1453, fourteen years after the decree, and a synod at Constantinople formally repudiated the union in 1484.

10. The Centuries Apart

From 1453 to the twentieth century the two churches lived largely separate lives, and the separation hardened into a settled condition that few on either side expected to change. Three developments from those centuries still shape the relationship.

Life Under Ottoman Rule

After the fall of Constantinople the Ecumenical Patriarch became the civil head of the Orthodox Christian population within the Ottoman Empire as well as its spiritual head. That arrangement preserved the Church and constrained it: theological education contracted, contact with the West was mediated through political suspicion, and Orthodox identity fused tightly with national identity in Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania. Meanwhile the Russian Church, outside Ottoman control, grew into the largest Orthodox body, and Moscow acquired a patriarchate of its own in 1589.

The Eastern Catholic Churches

Groups of Eastern Christians entered into full communion with Rome while keeping their own liturgy, canon law and married clergy. The Union of Brest in 1595 and 1596 brought in the Ruthenian church of what is now Ukraine and Belarus, and the Union of Uzhhorod in 1646 brought in others. These bodies, together with the ancient Maronite, Melkite, Syro-Malabar, Chaldean and other churches, are the Eastern Catholic churches, and our guide to the Eastern Catholic churches in communion with Rome describes them.

Orthodox Christians have generally regarded these unions as a wound, calling the approach uniatism and holding that it divided Orthodox communities and treated communion with Rome as a matter of individual bodies switching allegiance. The joint Catholic-Orthodox commission addressed this at Balamand in Lebanon in 1993, agreeing that uniatism is not an acceptable method for seeking unity today, while affirming that the Eastern Catholic churches which exist have the right to exist and to care for their faithful.

Hardening Definitions

The theological distance widened as each side defined itself in the other's absence. The Catholic Church held the Councils of Trent and the First Vatican Council without Orthodox participation, and defined the Immaculate Conception in 1854 and papal infallibility in 1870. Orthodox theology developed its own syntheses, including the fourteenth-century defence of hesychasm by St Gregory Palamas, which is authoritative in the East and unfamiliar to most Western Catholics. Two churches that stopped arguing with each other also stopped correcting each other.

Source note on size: the Pew Research Center's 2011 study Global Christianity estimated Orthodox Christians at roughly 12 percent of the world's Christian population, with the largest national communities in Russia, Ethiopia and Ukraine. Ethiopia's Orthodox belong to the Oriental Orthodox family, which separated after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and is distinct from the Eastern Orthodox churches described on this page.

11. 1965: Lifting the Anathemas

On 7 December 1965 Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I jointly removed the excommunications of 1054. The act was performed simultaneously in two places: at the closing public session of the Second Vatican Council in St Peter's Basilica, where the joint declaration was read and Paul VI's brief Ambulantes in Dilectione was promulgated, and at the Phanar in Istanbul, where the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate issued its corresponding tomos in the presence of a papal delegation.

What the Declaration Says

The Joint Catholic-Orthodox Declaration states that Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I, with his synod, regret the offensive words, the reproaches without foundation, and the reprehensible gestures that marked the events of July 1054. They declare that they remove from memory and from the midst of the Church the sentences of excommunication that followed, and consign them to oblivion. The text also records the historical judgment that has since become standard: the excommunications were aimed at the persons concerned and not at the churches, and they were never intended to break ecclesial communion between the sees of Rome and Constantinople.

What the Declaration Does Not Say

Both sides stated plainly that the act did not restore communion. The declaration itself acknowledges that this gesture of justice and mutual pardon cannot suffice to end the differences, ancient and recent, that remain between the two churches. Removing a personal anathema from the record settles a wrong done in 1054, and it leaves the questions of primacy and the Filioque exactly where they stood. Catholics and Orthodox still do not share the Eucharist as a matter of course, and both churches teach that shared eucharistic communion expresses a unity of faith that has yet to be restored.

The Meetings That Made It Possible

The 1965 act followed a meeting that had itself been extraordinary. On 5 and 6 January 1964 Paul VI and Athenagoras met in Jerusalem, embraced, prayed the Our Father together in their own languages, and exchanged the kiss of peace. No pope and ecumenical patriarch had met since the Council of Florence in the fifteenth century. The Second Vatican Council's decree on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio, published in 1964, had already stated that the Eastern churches possess true sacraments and above all, by apostolic succession, the priesthood and the Eucharist, and that they therefore remain joined to the Catholic Church in the closest intimacy (Unitatis Redintegratio 15).

Christ's prayer on the night before he died ties the unity of his followers to the credibility of the Gospel before the world. Every serious step taken since 1964 has cited that verse, and the reason is given in the verse itself: division is a counter-witness. For the theology of what repairing it would require, see our guide to Christian unity and ecumenism.

12. Where Things Stand Now

Catholics and Orthodox remain out of full communion, and the relationship between them has been transformed since the meeting of Paul VI and Athenagoras in 1964. Both statements are true, and holding them together is the beginning of an accurate picture.

The Formal Dialogue

The Joint International Commission for the Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church was established in 1979 by Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Dimitrios I. It has produced a series of agreed statements, of which three matter most. The Munich document of 1982 treated the Church as constituted by the Eucharist. The Ravenna document of 2007 agreed that conciliarity and primacy are inseparable at every level of the Church, including the universal level. The Chieti document of 2016 examined how synodality and primacy actually worked in the first millennium, when East and West were still in communion, on the principle that the first millennium is common property and can serve as a reference.

What Has Changed in Practice

Popes and ecumenical patriarchs now meet regularly and attend each other's principal feasts by delegation: a Catholic delegation goes to the Phanar for the feast of St Andrew on 30 November, and an Orthodox delegation comes to Rome for the feast of Saints Peter and Paul on 29 June. Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew I met in Jerusalem in 2014 on the fiftieth anniversary of Paul VI and Athenagoras, and in 2016 Pope Francis met Patriarch Kirill of Moscow in Havana, the first meeting between a pope and a Russian patriarch in history. In November 2004 Pope John Paul II returned to the Ecumenical Patriarchate relics of St Gregory of Nazianzus and St John Chrysostom that had been kept in Rome for centuries, relics the Orthodox had long asked for and understood to have gone west in the crusading period.

The Difficulties That Remain

Three obstacles are real and should be named. The first is the primacy, where the Ravenna agreement that the Bishop of Rome is first among the patriarchs leaves the content of that office unresolved. The second is the status of the Eastern Catholic churches, which Orthodoxy finds hard to accept and which Catholics will not abandon. The third is division within Orthodoxy itself: the Moscow Patriarchate broke communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2018 over the status of the church in Ukraine, and that internal breach complicates any negotiation involving the whole Orthodox world.

What Catholics May and May Not Do

Catholic law makes provision here, and the provision has limits. A Catholic who cannot approach a Catholic minister may in certain circumstances receive the Eucharist, penance and anointing from an Orthodox priest, and Catholic ministers may administer those sacraments to Eastern Christians who ask for them of their own accord and are properly disposed (Code of Canon Law, canon 844). Orthodox churches generally do not permit their faithful to receive in Catholic churches or Catholics to receive in theirs, and Catholics should respect that discipline rather than press it. Attending an Orthodox Divine Liturgy as a guest is welcome in most places, and Catholic law states that the Sunday obligation is satisfied by assisting at a Mass celebrated in a Catholic rite (canon 1248), which an Orthodox liturgy is not. Our guide to Eastern Orthodox beliefs and worship sets out that tradition on its own terms, and our guide to the Mass covers the Catholic obligation.

13. What the Schism Asks of You

The Great Schism asks three concrete things of a Catholic who has just learned this history, and none of them is an opinion about the eleventh century.

Learn the Creed You Say

Most Catholics recite the Nicene Creed every Sunday without knowing that one clause of it has been argued over for twelve hundred years, or which councils produced the words. Learning the Creed line by line, and knowing why the Church chose each phrase, is the ordinary work of a Christian adult. Our guide to Sacred Tradition and how doctrine develops covers how the Church settles such questions.

Stop Repeating What Is Not True

The schism is surrounded by claims that will not survive checking: that the Orthodox left the Church in a single day, that the two churches excommunicated each other wholesale, that the lifting of the anathemas in 1965 restored communion, or that nothing separates the two churches now beyond habit. Every one of those is a mistake about the record, and each one derails a real conversation with a real Orthodox Christian. Where a genuine disagreement remains, on the primacy above all, state the Orthodox case as an Orthodox Christian would state it and then give your own. Accuracy about a division is a form of charity toward the people on the other side of it.

Pray for Unity, and Mean It

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity runs each year from 18 to 25 January, and the Church asks for prayer for unity far more often than that. Praying for something for a thousand years without seeing it is ordinary Christian experience, and Christ commanded it in John 17 before there was anything to repair. No one knows the day or the hour of the Lord's return (Mark 13:32), and the time you have to become the kind of Christian who prays for his separated brothers is the time in front of you now.

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