The Vatican Dogma - Bulgakov

"At present the Vatican dogma is the central problem for the reunion of the church—if the Lord ever re­veals to the world this miracle of His mercy. Earlier, at the epoch of the councils of Lyons and of Florence the chief subject of dogmatic disagreement was the dogma about the Holy Spirit, the filioque clause; questions of papal primacy, of using leavened or un­leavened bread for the Eucharist, of purgatory and a few others were of secondary importance. In our time, the question about the Holy Spirit has not of course lost either its importance or its difficulty, but in fact, in the believers’ minds, it has ceased to be an impedimentum dirimens (to use V. V. Bolotov’s term) and admits of calm theological discussion, such e.g. as took place in conferring with the Old Catholics. The question about the unleavened bread and the differences between the Eastern and Western liturgies, the signi­ficance of which was at one time exaggerated out of all proportion, has also almost lost its importance. Even the question of purgatory and of the new dogma of the Immaculate Conception (in so far as it is dissoci­ated from that of papal infallibility) is comparatively of secondary importance. "But all these particular disagreements are blotted out by one that is fundamental: by papacy grown strong during the centuries of schism and established as a dog­ma at the Vatican. This is the basic and decisive diver­gence between East and West. Catholicism identified itself with papacy and takes its stand upon it; Orthodoxy cannot under any circumstances accept papacy which it regards as a heresy in the doctrine about the church, although it can and should recognize the primacy of the Roman See and honour it as of old. We are thus brought to a deadlock: until Catholicism ceases to be papistry and renounces the Vatican dogma (if only through a new and more exact definition of it)—and this requires a kind of geological cataclysm—there is no way to union with it. But what is impossible to man is possible to God, and all we can do is to trust to Provi­dence which leads us, rules the destinies of the Church, and does that which with men is impossible." Father Sergei Bulgakov (1929) - Link to entire article