CHAPTER VI
THE REUNION COUNCILS
The Popes, after the schism had become an undeniable fact, never lost hope of undoing it. Of the numberless attempts made by them, the messages, conferences, proposals, that were taken up by one Pope after another, the most important were three councils—at Bari in 1098, Lyons in 1274, and Ferrara-Florence in 1439. We may notice at once that the attitude of Rome towards the Eastern schismatics has always been rather different from that towards Protestants. First, to the canonist and theologian, who do not measure the dignity of Churches by their riches or numbers, the loss of the great Apostolic Eastern Churches is much more deplorable than that of the Protestant bodies. Secondly, there is not the special bitterness about the Eastern schism that there is about the Reformation. The first Protestants were the children of the Pope's own patriarchate, whose fathers had been converted from Rome, who had used the Roman rite, and had received the Holy Orders they now rejected from the Pope. Thirdly, the Eastern Churches are far nearer to us than any Protestant congregation. Practically, as we shall see, the only thing wrong with the Easterns is the schism. Their faith hardly differs at all from ours. And they are corporate bodies, Churches in themselves, quite properly constituted with a hierarchy whose orders no one has ever thought of questioning. And with such bodies the Roman Church can treat. So Rome has always been very much more conciliatory to the Eastern Churches than to Protestants. With the numberless Protestant sects she can have no
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