Cardinal Walter Kasper has been talking about the October 2007 Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, held in Ravenna, and explaining what’s left in the process of achieving full unity.
The breakthrough, he said, was that “the Orthodox agreed to speak about the universal level – because before there were some who denied that there could even be institutional structures on the universal level. The second point is that we agreed that at the universal level there is a primate. It was clear that there is only one candidate for this post, that is the Bishop of Rome, because according to the old order – ‘taxis’ in Greek – of the Church of the first millennium the see of Rome is the first among them.
“Whereas the Orthodox must clarify more deeply the question of ‘primacy, ‘protos,’ on the universal level, we Catholics have to reflect more clearly on the problem of synodality and conciliarity, especially on the universal level,” he said.
‘So we do not want to impose the system which today is in the Latin Church on the Orthodox Churches. In the case of the restoration of full communion, a new form of the exercise of the primacy needs to be found for the Orthodox Churches.’
