Your point is well taken. What the Orthodox fail to understand here, is that the Eastern Emperors and the Eastern Church required a Popes approval on all matters of faith and doctrine.
Hmm. That must be why they accepted all 7 canons of Constantinople I (381) over the objections of the Papal legates, right? (To use but one example.)
Yet the Orthodox will argue “no the popes role was minor”. Ney, the Eastern councils approved by the Emperors required the Popes approval (signature).
Like the Quinisext Council (Trullo) convened by Emperor Justinian II in 692?
It appears the Orthodox are trying desperately to show the Popes were weak throughout history and the Patriarch’s of Constantinople were on a par with the Popes and ruled over the Church somehow without ever needing the Popes approval, when the Emperor’s themselves who ruled over the Eastern Patriarchs always sought the Popes approval on Church matters. The Ceasars, the Jews, and secular powers always new how important the bishop of Rome is to the whole Church, even though the Orthodox today reject this fact.
With due respect, I think the way that you are phrasing your objections to the Orthodox stance on the Roman Pope shows a rather fanciful reading of history.
It should be noted; That before Constantine lifted the persecution of Christians, there was never any Patriarch in Constantinople, yet there has always remained a Bishop of Rome, whom the Ceasars persecuted before Constantine.
It should be noted that the title “Pope” did not refer in any kind of exclusive sense to the bishop of Rome
even in the West until around the sixth century.
What the Orthodox also fail to realize is that the Patriarch’s of Constantinople is not a divine office as the bishop of Rome and the apostolic successors are of the divine office.
What certain Latin Catholics fail to recognize is that all bishops are Peter.
Patriarchs are an Ecclessial office that is always subject to change.
Uh…remember the resignation of Pope Benedict? It literally just happened a little while ago. I guess that Papacy was divinely instituted until it was divinely, um…un-instituted, right? Sheesh.
The point that I am failing to get across to our Orthodox posters, is that the Eastern Church that ruled next to her Emperors pagan or Christian. Left the Popes in the West to fend for themselves to fend off invaders. A perfect example of a so called weak pope was St.Leo the great who, by himself along side providence put the invader Atilla (who was feared by all) to flight and later died. The so called weak office of the popes saved many innocent lives, when they were left to deal with the many invaders who later civilized the invaders politically and civilly.
Oh, Gabriel…I wish you were at the Great Friday Paschal service last night. So many good hymns that you could have chanted and meditated on. The kind of view you express above is a bit unnerving given your institution that the Roman Papacy is somehow a “divine office”. There’s nothing necessarily divine about temporal military victory (that kind of thinking is generally more in keeping with the Islamic dialectic), and our Savior made a pretty big point of separating Himself from the expectation of the people around Him who were awaiting a military conqueror/ruler Messiah.
And so we praise Him saying: “Holy Mighty, who by weakness showed forth what is greater than power.”
History records not weak popes, but the course the popes took to evangelize the difficult West without the help of the Eastern Patriarch’s and her powerful Emporers.
Ugh. Learn some history, please. You make it sound as though the Popes went door to door personally evangelizing whole villages, one by one. As though there was no exchange at all between East and West, and so all of Western Christianity owes its existence to the valiant efforts of the bishops of Rome. Were these the same Roman bishops who generally sent legates to the ecumenical councils, instead of appearing themselves? I guess they were busy bringing Jesus to the far-flung reaches of…Rome and its immediate environs or something. Meanwhile, back in reality, our beloved St. Athanasius the Apostolic was twice exiled to Treves (you think he just sat on his hands once there?); the Theban Legion was martyred in the Swiss Alps, leading to a cult of veneration that lasted for centuries in thoroughly western Switzerland; our Fathers among the Romans St. Arsenius and Ss. Maximus and Domatius lived in Scetis alongside their Egyptian brothers and teachers, establishing great monasteries and acting as beacons of light across the Christian world just as St. Anthony the Father of the Monks had been to them, Coptic monks possibly played a decisive role in establishing the form of monasticism once commonly practiced in the British Isles (
read this), etc. If Christianity had never come to Rome, it would have still spread. Last I checked, the Bishop of Rome was only very rarely a Syrian or Greek (
), never a Copt, and never a Nestorian, and these are the people who, for better or for worse, did the majority of the leg-work in bringing Christianity to the world in the wake of the apostles and the first generations of disciples.
Yet, I don’t see how the Orthodox fail to the see this reality of history and draw a conclusion that the popes were somehow insignificant and weak?
So your opinion is reality? Since when?
Still is. I’ll take the Protestants, they believe in Jesus Christ crucified. 
