I’ve been reading up on it for quite some time but it is almost impossible to find an unbiased source.
The facts are there, if one just reads every account for them and overlooks the interpretations. Asdmittedly there are not many facts, but one can glean them out of the accounts.
An important point I would make is that there seems to be a lack of evidence for the Orthodox refusing to “follow” this Pope (Leo). What was it this Pope wanted that the Orthodox were supposed to do? That really needs to be clarified. Reading the text of the Bull of excommunication could shed light on this.
Then the rights each party claims for itself need to be sorted out.
My answers will sound polemical to someone who does not agree with me. But in the interest of stimulating some discussion on this topic I will tell you that the Orthodox did not send a messenger to Rome to excommunicate the Pope. The fact is the Patriarch of Constantiople did not initiate any action whatever, so it is hard to see how they “left” anything.
Many Catholic sources today will say that the Bull itself was invalid, because the Pope had died before it was delivered. I don’t know that invalidity to be the case but it would be very ironic if the very instrument used to launch the schism turned out to be a worthless piece of paper.
The second point I would make, and I have pointed this out many times before, is that the Eastern Catholics did not change anything at all at the time of the schism. There was not even anything like a crises. They did not have to write new rules, there was no confusion as to who does what. The bishops of Rome literally had no function in the east, local Patriarchs and their synods took care of everything.
From the Eastern Catholic/Orthodox position nothing was done differently before or after the schism. No new doctrines, no new canons. There were no recusant “underground Papists” like one would find in England and Ireland centuries later after the protestant rebellion from Rome. The east was not governed from Rome, it had a completely different relationship to Rome than what one would find in the west.
Essentially, in the Pentarchy each church was autocephalic, meaning that each one was a unique corporate entity. Something like several companies in a strategic partnership, or a cartel. Rome was one such, Constantinople another, Alexandria and Antioch still as others.
The Roman element was undergoing rapid change, and adopting an extremely top-down style of governance. Within it’s own sphere that was perfectly acceptable. We know that the western church continued to change afterward.
In any case, we know the messengers announcing the schism came from the west and arrived in the east to tell them about it. That is an historical fact.
Michael
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