Since 1964, Catholic–Orthodox relations have moved from nine centuries of silence to genuine, unprecedented contact. Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras embraced in Jerusalem in 1964 — the first meeting of a pope and an Ecumenical Patriarch since Florence — and on 7 December 1965 they simultaneously “removed from memory and from the midst of the Church” the mutual excommunications of 1054.

But the same 1965 declaration is careful, and the honesty is the point: it says the gesture “is not sufficient to end” the differences. What was lifted were the personal excommunications of 1054 — against named men, long dead — not the schism itself. No doctrine was reconciled; communion was not restored. Athenagoras spoke for Constantinople, not all of Orthodoxy. Removing the anathemas was a real act of charity; it was not the healing of the breach.

Since 1980 a Joint International Commission has produced a chain of agreed statements — Munich (1982), Bari (1987), Valamo (1988), Balamand (1993), Ravenna (2007), Chieti (2016). Ravenna’s much-cited achievement is that both sides put on paper that the universal Church needs a protos, a “first” — and that in the first millennium he was the bishop of Rome. Chieti consolidated the first-millennium consensus on primacy and synodality together. And the meetings have continued at the highest level: Francis and Bartholomew in Jerusalem (2014), and the first meeting in history between a pope and a Patriarch of Moscow (Francis and Kirill, Havana, 2016).

The progress is genuine, unprecedented, and honestly bounded — and the Catholic case need not overstate it. The method is the right one: return to the undivided first millennium and recover a shared communion-ecclesiology. But Ravenna and Chieti did not resolve the papacy, and they say so — the same Ravenna text that affirms a universal protos at once records that East and West “disagree… with regard to the manner in which it is to be exercised” (§43), and Chieti notes that the Petrine reading of Rome’s primacy “was not adopted in the East” (§16). Add that Orthodoxy has no single voice — Moscow walked out of Ravenna, and broke with Constantinople in 2018 — and the picture is honest: the warmth and the dialogue are real and historic; the central doctrinal knot remains untied, and the Church says so frankly.