Orthodox relations.

Thank you for Margaret O'Gara's article on Pope Benedict XVI and the future of ecumenism ("Ecumenism's Future," July 15). Regarding relations with Orthodoxy, there is a passage in one of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's books that offers some intriguing possibilities. In Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology (Ignatius Press) Ratzinger writes: "As far as the doctrine of the primacy is concerned, Rome must not require more of the East than was formulated and lived during the first millennium. When Patriarch Athenagoras, on the occasion of the visit of the pope to the Phanar on July 25, 1967, addressed him as 'the successor of Peter, the first in honor among us, the one who has the presidency in love,' we hear from the mouth of the great church leader the essential content of the first millennium's statement about the primacy--and Rome must demand no more than this. Reunion could take place on this basis: that for its part the East should renounce attacking the Western development of the second millennium as heretical, and should accept the Catholic Church as legitimate and orthodox in the form which it has found through this development, while, for its part, the West should acknowledge the church of the East as orthodox and legitimate in the form which it has maintained."

This implies that the Roman Church would have to recognize that all its councils since 1054 have not been true ecumenical councils but rather local councils of the Western Church and thus not universally binding. Paul VI paved the way for this development when, on the seven-hundredth anniversary of the Council of Lyon, he referred to it as "the sixth of the general synods held in the West." That would mean that Vatican I and its definition of papal infallibility would not be valid outside the Western patriarchate.

JERRY RYAN

Winthrop, Mass.