Untitled - Rore Sanctifica

Postscript on Catholic Unity. 187
that the Sevrepos 77X01)9 of re-union on a different
basis, at least equally recognised in the Church,
would, to use the words of my friend Father
Lockhart, be "
infinitely better than perpetuated
schism."
It is more and more becoming the general
conclusion of all who have most deeply studied
the question that the great Communions of
Christendom were originally separated and are
still kept asunder rather by quarrels of detail
than by differences of principle.*
The Greeks
have never formally committed themselves t/
to
a denial of the divine primacy of the
Roman See which they recognized at Florence,
whatever individual theologians ~ may have * said
in the heat of controversy ; what they chiefly
objected to was the claim, based not on divine
commission but on the forged decretals, then
universally received as genuine, to exercise a
kind of coactive patriarchal jurisdiction in the
East, practically superseding the office of their
own Patriarchs. And we know how much
abuses, since remedied, connected with appeals
to Rome had to do with the divisions of the
sixteenth century. It is not to be supposed that
the Holy See, which has so readily adapted
itself to varieties of circumstance in its dealings
o
* This conviction will
_
hardly be disturbed by the rheto
rical reassertion of the contrary opinion, without even a
shadow of proof, in Archbishop Trench s recent charge.