Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches compared [View all]

last updated:
25/11/2016

One summer’s afternoon in 1054, after testy exchanges with the Patriarch of Constantinople, the Pope’s representative, Cardinal Humbert, entered the city’s main place of worship, Hagia Sophia, placed a document on the altar, and then left quickly. The document was a Bull of Excommunication, expelling the recipients from the church and thereby denying them a route to heaven. This dramatic gesture is widely taken to mark the beginning of the ‘Great Schism’, the moment when the previously ‘undivided’ Church was split and Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism were born.

History, of course, is more complicated than this. At the end of the first millennium, the unity of the Church was already broken. Five hundred years earlier, complex disputes about the nature of Christ had led to a rupture between the Catholic/Orthodox and Eastern ‘Oriental’ Churches following the Council of Chalcedon in 451.

And even the moment seen as the start of the schism was infact just the latest step in what was a growing gap between east and west.

The Bull of Excommunication was the not so much the cause, but rather the symptom, of the difficulties which had been gradually unfolding over time.

http://www.euronews.com/2016/11/25/catholic-and-orthodox-christian-churches-compared