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Before the Reformation, before the Crusades, there was one unified Christian church. And then it all fell apart. This is the story of how two halves of the same faith stopped speaking the same language, stopped answering to the same leader, and stopped following the same rules. It's the story of a dead Pope still giving orders, a forged document that fooled the Western Church for centuries, and a single afternoon inside the most breathtaking cathedral in the world, where one famous cardinal made a decision that would echo for a thousand years. The schism was not a clean break. It's full of violence, brutality, and betrayal of brother versus brother, the Western Pope versus the Eastern patriarch, a division that still echoes across the centuries to this day. And today, we're going back to find out what actually happened, how Christianity went from one church to being Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. So sit back, relax, and welcome to Religion Camp. What's up, people? And welcome back to Religion Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent, where every single week, I explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from all religions from around the time forever. Yes, that is what I do here in this tent. I try to understand what every person on this planet believes. I truly think it's the best way to connect with my fellow human beings by understanding the God they worship, even if they're not actively practicing that religion. Just growing up in a religious tradition or a country with a religious history shapes the way that we see the world. And to be a better steward of mankind, I want to understand the faith that everyone adheres to. So that is what we're doing today. And, oh, boy, do we have a controversial one. This one is very spicy, and the mood inside the tent is tense because I'm not alone. I'm joined by you, the viewer, which I'm very grateful about. Truly. I appreciate you, dude slash lady, for listening to this and for tuning in, because every time you do that, you help the show grow, you help keep the lights on in the tent, and you keep the fire burning here at the campsite. But I'm also joined by formerly a brother, my pal, Christos Papadopados, that, I don't know, maybe a thousand years ago, we were once a part of the same Christian body. And then due to this great schism, I went Roman Catholic and he became Eastern Orthodox, specifically of the Greek affliction. Is that true? No time, Christos, because, look, I know this is a bad episode for you not to have a microphone on, okay? It got broken or stolen. I don't know exactly what happened. To it. But Christos is without a voice, and many of the people that have commented are probably happy about that. But unfortunately, he is our Greek Orthodox representation and will have been neutered for this episode. So I apologize to all the Greek Orthodox. I'm going to do my best to try to be neutral in this, but as a Roman Catholic myself, I'm going to recognize I have a bias. Okay? So if you're listening to this, maybe parts of that may seep in. I apologize to my Eastern Orthodox brothers. Okay? I don't mean that with any malice, but it's just the lens that I view the world. So if there's anything that I say that is completely out of pocket, Krios, you just feel free to flag me. If there's anything I say that's offensive, it's Christos fault. Now let's jump in. Okay, what is this schism and how does it happen? Well, it doesn't happen all at once. It is a slow, gradual drift, like continents shifting apart from each other. And you don't really see it moving until it's too late. But once it actually happened, and it was massive. So to understand where the story really starts, we got to go Back to like 400 AD. All right, the Roman Empire. Everyone pictures one emperor, one capital ruling the entire world. And Even back in 400, you already have two different worlds operating under the same umbrella. So of course you have the Latin speaking West that's run from Rome, and then you have the Greek speaking East run from a fancy new capital called Constantinople. Now, on paper it's the same empire, but in practice, you have two distinct civilizations that are slowly forgetting how to work together and understand each other. So when the Western Roman Empire fell APART in the 5th century, Rome was left with a lot to deal with. I mean, broken roads, barbarian kingdoms, no emperor that they can call on. And one institution was left standing, and that is the Bishop of of Rome, literally the Church, AKA the Pope. With no emperor in the west, the Pope basically became one of the few institutions capable of governing what was left. So he negotiated with invaders and he would feed cities and keep order. And the Western Church learned basically by necessity to think of itself as having one strong head, one voice. Because for centuries, anything that was alternative was just chaos and anarchy. Now we go to the East. Constantinople didn't fall. The Eastern Roman Empire, what we now call the Byzantine Empire, basically just kept on sailing and went all the way through the centuries that gutted the West. So they were wealthy, sophisticated, stable, and crucially, the Patriarch Of Constantinople, the head of the Eastern Church lived right down the road from a powerful living emperor. So the two halves of Christianity grew up with very opposite instincts. In the west, the Church learned to stand on its own, even above kings, because for a long stretch, the Pope and the Church was the only thing holding society together. Meanwhile, in the east, the Church and the Emperor worked side by side. The Emperor protected the Church and the Church basically anointed the empire. And no single bishop was meant to be the king over everything. So now picture two siblings that are separated young. One grows up in a collapsing city and turns fiercely self reliant and is basically used to making every hard decision basically alone. And the other grows up wealthy and connected and comes to see the first as a little crude, a little full of himself. And then years later, they sit at the same table. And every small thing one does, the other reads as annoying at best, and at worst is just straight up insulting. And on top of that, the language start to drift too. So the west prays in Latin, the East prays in Greek. Christos. And so by the 1000s, the church leaders on each side, they couldn't even like, talk to each other, like read each other's documents without a translator. They were starting to not even really feel like one church anymore. Which is crazy, because almost everything that these two churches would spend the next thousand years divided over, they had already agreed on for centuries. I mean, the same God, the same Christ, the same scripture, the same creed, give or take a few words. They didn't drift apart because they couldn't agree on the hard questions. They drifted apart because they stopped being able to actually listen to each other. So that's the board before the game begins. You have two kind of distinct cultural groups that are operating under one faith, no longer speaking the same language or sharing the same idea of who's really in charge. And in this type of environment, all they needed was a spark. And in the 11th century, they got it. But first, the two things they were actually fighting about. And the first is a big one, bigger than bread and bigger even than the famous three words. So here is like the actual fault line that creates the schism. Everyone in the ancient Church agreed that Rome was special. Rome was the city of Peter and Paul. For centuries, the Bishop of Rome was honored as the first amongst the bishops of the world. First in dignity, first, first in honor, and the one that you look to first. And the east had no problem with that, and they still don't. The fighting was over what first actually meant, and it Comes down to two words that sound almost identical, but they actually mean different things. One is primacy versus supremacy. You have to understand, at this time, there was no Pope. There was just many different bishops. And the Bishop of Rome was the head of everything. So before they even called him the Pope, he was just known as the Bishop of Rome and was kind of treated as the Pope. And in Rome, they believe that Christ himself had entrusted Peter, and therefore Peter's successors, all the other popes, with a unique authority over the entire Church. Not just honor, but like an actual Church jurisdiction. The final word, basically, on everything that happened within the Church. So when the Pope ruled on a matter of faith, that was meant to settle it everywhere for everyone, that is pretty clearly a doctrinal supremacy. But the east understood it differently. To them, the Church was governed collegially through all the bishops together gathered in council. No one of them was to lord over the rest. Rome held the place of the highest honor, of course, but the first chair at the table. But that first chair is still a chair at the table. It's not a throne above them. So Rome could be honored without being obeyed. That is primacy. And this became really an unsolvable difference, not the kind of thing that you can compromise on. One side believed that the Pope could, in the end, overrule a council of bishops, and the other believed that a council of bishops was the highest authority that there was, and that no single man, not even the Bishop of Rome, would stand above it. And there's no compromise between those two. It's like, is the Pope in charge or is the council in charge? Now, here's the thing that nobody at the time could admit. This was not a fresh argument. In 1054, they had already had disagreements over this issue almost two centuries earlier. Yeah, I mean, I didn't even really know that the Church had multiple schisms before the big one. In the eight hundred sixties, a brilliant scholar named Photius became Patriarch of Constantinople. And that's their main Church leader, Guy. But the Pope at the time over in Rome was Nicholas I and refused to recognize him. His reasoning was this. He was mad that Constantinople appointed its own patriarch without Rome's approval. Rome was claiming a veto over who led the Church in the East. Constantinople was astonished that anyone would even ask. The two sides would trade condemnations and fought over authority across this, you know, the newly converted Bulgarian land. And then Phocius threw in a charge that would echo for the next thousand years. He accused the west of corrupting the. The sacred Creed by adding words to it. And we'll get to that in a second, and why that matters. But here's why. Photius's schism actually is important here. It actually healed over. The rift became patched up, Communion was restored and the Church stayed united. Which was proof that these disputes, even the deep ones about papal power and the Creed and all that stuff, they were not automatically fatal, they could be survived. So in 1054, it wasn't the first time that these sides were feuding. Arguably, they could have resolved it, they just kind of chose not to. Now, what were those added words to the Creed that Photius was so mad about? Well, in Latin, it's a single word, filioque, and it means and the Son. Now, let me explain what this means. Centuries earlier, in the three hundreds, the whole Church had hammered out a shared statement of belief that their vision statement essentially what it means to be a Christian. And they call this the Nicene Creed. Think of it as a locked, signed document that both east and west had agreed to never alter on their own. It came to read that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Here's where that word comes in, filioque. And the east considered that an outrage, like they thought, hey, you, change it up. Whereas in the west, they were like, no, this is the way that it's supposed to be. From the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit proceeds. So now it's not like Rome sat down one day and sneakily rewrote the Creed behind the east back. The Filioque didn't even start in Rome at all. It started in Toledo in Spain, in the year 589. You see, the Visigoths who ruled Spain had been Arians, the word for people who followed an old Christian heresy called Arianism. So Arianism denies Christ was fully and equally God, and that's kind of foundational to Christianity, that Christ is fully God. So the greater Church called it a heresy and kicked all the Aryans out. But then the Spanish king converted to mainstream Christianity. And so the Spanish bishops added and the Son to the Creed to slam the door shut on Arianism and preserve the Church against this heresy. So now they made the Creed include the Son to essentially prove, hey, look, we believe Christ is, you know, is and was fully God, and the Spirit proceeds from him too, not just the Father, because Christ is God. So if it proceeds from the Father, it must also proceed from the Son. It's a technical thing, but it matters. So it was their local fix for a local problem, to shut out this heresy. But then, you know, the change spread. It moved out of Spain and into the Kingdom of the Franks, championed by the court of Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor. So for a long time, Rome itself actually resisted putting it in the Creed. One pope even had the original unaltered Creed engraved on silver tablets and displayed in St. Peter's to make a point. But the truth is, this change to the Creed wasn't bad, and it did make sense. So in 1014, Rome finally adopted the altered version into its own liturgy. So from the Western perspective, this was never sabotage. It was a legitimate clarification that had grown up over four centuries to defend Christ's divinity. But from the east side, the procedure itself was the scandal. It wasn't necessarily what was changed, it was the fact that there was any change at all. The Creed was the shared property of the whole Church, settled by councils where east and west decided together. Nobody, not Spain, not the Franks, not even Rome, had the authority to edit it alone. Change in the Creed unilaterally wasn't just a theological error. It was Rome's claim to supremacy, manifest, printed right there in the words of the faith. So to the east, the filioque and the question of papal power, they weren't two arguments that were the same issue. This was basically them thinking like, oh, Rome's acting like the big dog. They're just adding a word in there and completely undermining us. They never even brought it up with us. What's their problem? So that's the real engine of the schism. Not the Communion or the bread, but the bottomless question of who gets the final word. And a single edited line of the Creed that made that question explode. Which raises an obvious problem. If the deep dispute was about something as weighty as the authority of the Pope and the wording of the Holy Creed, how on earth did the thing that actually lit the fuse turn out to be a fight about baking? Yeah, it sounds crazy, but let me explain. You see, in the 1000s, large parts of southern Italy were actually Byzantine territory. So they were Greek speaking, Eastern, right? Christians worshiping the way that the east had been for hundreds of years. And they were under the spiritual umbrella of Constantinople. But in the 1040s, a new force came storming through, and that is the Normans. The same restless warrior people who would soon conquer England. And they conquered a ton of southern Italy. And once they were in charge, the Latin Church moved in and did something that the east found intolerable. It forced those Greek churches to drop their Eastern customs and do Everything the Roman way. So no more Greek. They wanted Latin practices, Latin bread. The Eastern right was kind of pushed out in their own backyard. So word of this reached Constantinople and landed on the desk of the patriarch at the time, Michael Cerrillarius. And he didn't take it well, and we'll get to his personality in just a second. But for now, you need to know that he was not a turn the other cheek kind of guy. His response was retaliation. If the Latins were going to be closing Greek churches in Italy and doing stuff in Greek, then you know what? I'm going to close the Latin churches in Constantinople. What do you think about that? And then around 1052 and 1053, that's what he did. Now, the popular version adds a vivid detail here. It talks about how several his people trampled Latin communion bread in the streets as worthless. The original source here is Humbert, the Western envoy that we're about to meet, which he writes in his own furious account. Now, it may have happened, but it's a charge from one side that's kind of biased and it's not a neutral fact. And that's just a preview of this entire story where much of what each side knew about the other was just what the angriest spokesperson kind of claimed. But let's get to why bread was used as the ammo in this disagreement. So the Western Church used unleavened bread for their communion sacrament. These are the flat wafers that you'll see in Mass to this day. And these wafers were flat, they had no yeast. And the reasoning was that the Last Supper was a Passover meal and Passover bread is unleavened. So to do exactly what Jesus did, which is what Christ commands Christians to do, he says, eat. You know, take my bread and eat of it. And that is what they're trying to emulate. They're trying to use unleavened flat bread. But the Eastern Church was using leavened bread that was real and risen and looks like normal bread. You would get kind of at like a restaurant. Is that fair? Yeah. So they had a reason that mattered enormously to them. To the Eastern mind, the flat unleavened bread belonged to the Old Covenant, the world of Passover, of the law before Christ. But leavened bread, bread with life rising in it, belonged to the New Covenant, to the Resurrection, to a living and risen Lord. They even pointed to the Greek of the Gospels, arguing that the word used at the Last Supper was the ordinary word for everyday leavened bread, not the word for the traditional Passover matzah. So to the east, using flat wafers wasn't just odd, it was hugely significant to their theology. Now, maybe to some of us today, arguing this passionately about something that seems unimportant, like bread, it seems ridiculous. But to them, it's not a technicality. Communion is literally the holiest sacrament. So when each side saw the other's bread as wrong, they weren't like, kind of quabbling over a recipe. Each was convinced that the other was getting the single most sacred moment in their entire religion, just flat out wrong. That's why people over in the east, like Christos people, they reached for a nickname that they would give to my people, which is completely rude and, I think uncalled for. They would call us the Azomites, meaning the unleavened ones. But to the western side, the east were the strange ones. I mean, they were putting yeast into something holy. They were doing it out of the way that Christ had done it and how Christ had commanded us to do it. So you have two groups of devout people staring at each other's altars in horror and convinced that the other one had, you know, lost the picture. So here is the full scope of the grievances. The fight over the Pope's authority, the edited creed, and then, of course, the bread feud, where each side believed that the other was desecrating the most holy ritual that they had. And so, of course, this goes on for years. You have letters going back and forth, each one angrier than the last. And it may have stayed a cold war on paper, but what turned it hot was the three worst possible men collided at the worst possible moment, and one of them happen to already be dead. Yes, here's what happens. Every disaster usually centers around a crazy personality that sets it off. And this one has three of them. Hey, guys, I just want to take a break really quick to tell you about Cash App. I love Cash App. I use it all the time. If you know anything about me, I try to make my life less chaotic because I travel a lot. I got kid, I got a wife, and I'm just doing stuff. I'm buying coffee. I'm just living my life. And Cash App makes it so easy. And it just makes my everyday life moments super simple. And the Cash App card is super cool because it's not just a boring debit card. It's not something that your dad got from a Bank in 2002. You can customize it, add it to your digital wallet, and boop it everywhere and use it for just everyday spending. 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Terms apply. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App's Bank Partners. Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton bank member fdic. Visit Cash App Legal Podcast for full disclosures. Thank you so much for Cash App for supporting the show. Now let's get back to it. First, you have the Patriarch of the East, Michael Cerularius, the Patriarch of Constantinople. He's proud, he's rigid, he's extremely territorial and politically fearless and as we've already seen, not afraid to retaliate. He did not believe that the Pope was above him or superior to him. To him, the Bishop of Rome was one very important patriarch that had primacy among several, not the monarch of all of Christianity. He had no intention of bowing or apologizing or negotiating from a lesser place of weakness. He had already shut down Western churches to make a point. This was a man who was not interested in some type of graceful little compromise. And then of course, you have the Pope in the west, and in this case is Pope Leo ix, a reform minded bishop from what is now known as France. And by the standards of his age, he's one of the good ones. And I'm not just being biased here, you can look it up yourself. He was serious about rooting out corruption and serious about the dignity of the Church. But he was also fully committed to the conviction that Christ had given Peter's successor a supreme authority over the entire Christian world, the east included. If Jesus Christ said, hey Peter, upon you, I Will build my church. You are the rock that I will build it on. And Peter becomes the Bishop of Rome. It's like, hey, this is what it is. So you have this immovable object in Constantinople and an irresistible claim coming out of Rome. And that collision was built in from the very beginning. And then comes a twist that makes the story like, like Hollywood. Basically. Leo sent a delegation to Constantinople in the spring of 1054 to settle things. But Leo was sick. And in April of 1054, while his envoys were still on the road, Pope Leo IX died. Now think about what that means. A papal delegation's authority comes from the Pope. And when the Pope dies, it normally evaporates until a new pope renews it. So the men carrying Rome's demands into Constantinople were technically acting on behalf of a man who no longer existed. They were negotiating for a ghost, I guess, but they pressed on anyway. And that brings us to a third man. And that man is Humbert of Silva Candida, a cardinal and Leo's chief advisor and the worst possible person to send on a mission of peace. You see, Humbert was fiercely anti Byzantine and was extremely combative and short fused and, you know, was sent to ease tensions. And he arrived ready to fight. He didn't open with diplomacy, but with these blistering written attacks on the Patriarch of the East, Severlarius. And you know, he starts to argue for Rome's supreme authority. He quoted a document called the Donation of Constantine, supposedly the Emperor Constantine's own grant of sweeping power to the papacy in Rome. And what's crazy is that that document was actually a forgery. It was a fake that was cooked up centuries after Constantine died, But nobody in 1054 actually knew that, and the truth wouldn't be exposed for centuries. Now Humbert didn't necessarily know that he was using a forged document. He almost certainly believed that it was the genuine word of the first Christian emperor. And I mean, why wouldn't he? It supports his side. So he's like, look, I have the paperwork right here. So both sides were certain and both of them were standing on ground that wasn't quite what they thought. On the east you have a proud patriarch who won't recognize Rome's authority and won't be lectured in his own city. And on the west you have an aggressive cardinal carrying out the demands of a Pope who's already dead, citing a document that's not real, with no diplomatic skill at all and just an insane temperature. And now you put both of these men in the same city, you're not. I mean, what do you think's gonna happen? It's not gonna be a negotiation, it's gonna just be a fight. And that's basically what we get. What happens next takes place inside perhaps the most beautiful building in the Christian world at the time. And it's the scene that history would remember forever as the afternoon that Christianity broke. Now, the only problem is that what everyone remembers isn't exactly what happened when several areas got a look at Humbert. The arrogance, the demands. He did the one thing guaranteed to piss off a guy that's already hot tempered. He just refused to engage. He simply just didn't talk to him. So from April into July of 1054, Humbert sat in Constantinople getting nowhere and just being ignored. And his fury was just building inside of him. And then on Saturday, July 16, 1054, Humber decided he was not going to wait anymore. And it all went down in the Hagia Sophia, the greatest cathedral of Constantinople. Very possibly the most breathtaking structure in the world at that time. It was a dome so vast and so high it seemed to literally hang from heaven by a thread. The roof floating on, the light pouring in beneath it. Gold mosaics across acre after acre of beautiful wall glittering in the candlelight. I mean, it was gorgeous. Like the air like, probably was thick with like incense. It was built deliberately to feel like you were inside heaven itself. And it was during the afternoon Divine Liturgy, which is the central act of worship in the Eastern Church. The cathedral was full, clergy in their vestments, all the people of the church crowded in and the chants were filling the space. And into that sacred space walked Cardinal Humbert and his, his boys. Basically not to worship, but to march past the congregation, straight up the length of the church, all the way to the high altar, the single holiest spot in the holiest building in the holiest city of the Eastern Church, during the holiest moment of the holiest week. And there on the altar, Humbert laid down a document, a bull of excommunication, a formal decree cutting the patriarch off from the church, condemning several, several, and in his own words, all those who supported his folly. And then he turned and walked down the length of the Hagia Sophia through the stunned congregation just watching this all happen, towards these massive doors. And at the threshold, he performed one last gesture. It's the act Jesus told his disciples to perform against any town that rejected them. He said to shake the dust from their feet when they were leaving. And that is exactly what Humbert did. He shook the dust off the cathedral from his shoes. And he declared in Latin, let God see and judge. I mean, a pretty bold thing to do in, you know, for an away game. I mean, pretty crazy. Now, a deacon reportedly ran after him and the decree in his hands and just begged him to take it back, to undo it, but Humbert refused. The document was left behind on the floor, and then there was just silence. The people left standing in that beautiful heavenly space had to just kind of take it in. And it was dead quiet, like the ringing in their ears was the only thing they could hear. Solarius answer came within days. The Eastern Church basically, said Humbert and all of his friends and followers, they themselves were now excommunicated from the Eastern Church. And the decree was answered. The doors had slammed in both directions. And that, in the version everyone knows, is the moment that the Christian Church basically split into two. It was kind of like a mic drop in the most beautiful church in all of Constantinople. And Christianity was now on two different paths. But the crazy thing is that neither of those excommunications actually excommunicated the other church. If you read the documents, the scope is super, super narrow. So Humbert's bull condemned civillaris personally and the handful of men directly around him that were supporting him. Several six reply condemned Humbert and the two other church leaders standing next to him. That's it. Two furious documents that were against the two people specifically. Not against the church or the other parishioners, but specifically several, several. And Humbert, it might as well just been like angry tweets going back and forth. Nobody excommunicated Eastern Christianity as a whole, and nobody excommunicated the Church of Rome as a whole either. The Roman Church leaders even went out of their way to praise the Byzantine emperor and the ordinary people of the city. And remember, Humbert's bull may not have been valid at all, because, remember, the pope who authorized him had already been dead for three months. And plus, the document he made demands from turned out to be a forgery. So the man who supposedly split Christianity was acting on the authority of no one and with a fake document. All in all, the events of July 1054 were barely recorded. You see, chroniclers kind of just moved on. Popes and Byzantine emperors kept on negotiating. And 40 years later, when Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade, east and West were still cooperating really closely, closely enough that no one really recognized the formal schism between them. But all of that was about to change. Well, the rupture definitely solidified and hardened over the next century. And A half. And then it was made official by a violent catastrophe. In 1204, Western Crusaders, who had taken vows to march for the Holy Land, turned on Constantinople instead. They stormed the greatest Christian city on earth. They looted it. They took things from the churches, they destroyed elements of the altars and carried the pieces home as trophies. I mean, imagine your own family breaking into your door and then destroying the things that you love. The people who were supposed to stand beside you are now going against you. That is how the east remembers this event. Afterwards, the leavened bread and the added words to the creed hardly even felt like problems at all. I mean, that's. That's a little thing that could be patched up. Suddenly, the east realized that they were no longer distant relatives of the Church in the West. But for them, the west was full of complete foreigners. They felt burned and betrayed by people that were supposed to be their kin. And this is where the split really became final and where we still see the effects of it to this day. Like the Eastern Church calls itself Orthodox, which means the right belief, the correct worship, the way things are supposed to be, while the Western Church calls itself Catholic, meaning universal, a faith for everyone, for all people, all Christians. Neither side ever thought that it was really leaving. Each was convinced that it was the true Church, holding the line while the other one strayed away. Nobody ever really meant to slam the door and walk out, which is why the dramatic scene that we talked about, that mic drop at the Hagia Sophia, the single afternoon that Christianity cracked in two, as people will call it, is largely something that later generations kind of retroactively built in. People are looking for a clean beginning to a break that had no clean beginning. And they started looking back and found that unforgettable scene, and they basically crowned it the moment that everything went wrong. But really, the division started far earlier and the official separation came far later. So we generally want one villain and one date and one simple battle where we say this is where it all split. But the truth is way more complicated. You have years of disagreement, you have time, you have distance, you have language barriers. And, of course, two proud men and a long sorrowful drift. And, unfortunately, an ignorant and violent group of crusaders. Now, our story doesn't stop in 1204. It goes all the way up to 1965, 911 years after Humbert dropped that decree on the altar. In fact, to the very anniversary day, Pope Paul VI and the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I stood up together and formally lifted the mutual excommunications of 1054. They reached back across nine centuries and pulled both documents off the table. But still, it wasn't enough. Lifting these excommunications didn't suddenly reunite the churches, and everyone speaks the same language. And all the traditions are now blended into one. To this day, Catholics and Orthodox remain divided, not in hatred, but perhaps in familiarity, and still unable to share the bread at Communion. In 1054, it took less than a week for two men to stop speaking. And it took nine centuries just to take back those words and the conversation that was silent on a summer afternoon in the Hagia Sophia. Now, after a thousand years of distance, they are still, even to this day, trying to begin communication again. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is an abridged history of the great schism of 1054. I mean, can't we all just get along? Christos, come on, let's just go. Let's just come together. You accept the true creed with the filioque, and of course, you accept the actual unleavened bread the way Christ told us to do it, right? And. And we just all just patch it up. Come on, Christos. I will say one thing about y' all with the Eastern Orthodox. With all due respect, all my Eastern Orthodox brothers, I still recognize the sacrament of communion in your church. It's all national churches. And to really get on with the church, you kind of need to be of the culture, you know what I mean? Like, you go to a Catholic Church in America, you go to a Catholic Church of France. It's all the same liturgy. But I don't know if you would ever go to, like, a Serbian Orthodox Church or if you would go to, like, a Russian Orthodox Church or Ukrainian Orthodox Church, you would only go to a Greek Orthodox Church. So that's the thing. The schism over there in the east, it kind of created these nationalized lines where I'm like, over with the Catholics. I mean, you might get some language stuff, but we're still kind of all rocking with each other. I still accept my Mexican Catholic brothers, shout out to y', all, my Portuguese Catholic brothers, my French Catholic brothers. I'm just saying it's something to think about. All right. It's pretty warm over on this side of the water. Come to have a swim sometime. Nothing wrong with it. And you're not going to miss your. The. The leaven stuff. I'm telling you, the unleavened is fire. You're going to enjoy it. That's all. That's all I'm saying. But in all seriousness, I think we can all get along and recognize that these two hot headed, you know, ill tempered men from a thousand years ago don't need to dictate the future of our church today. And there's even more interesting church stuff happening. The SSPX is about to have a. They're about to, this is a specific branch of Catholicism and they're about to ordain a new bishop which is about to cause perhaps a, perhaps another small schism. We're going to see what happens with that. It's very interesting. That's an episode for another time. But I'm curious, what do you guys think? If you're a Catholic or some type of Eastern Orthodox tradition, maybe Greek like Mabel Christos over here, I would love to know what you think. Is there something that I missed in understanding the schism? Is there anything that you learned that you didn't know growing up in one of these faith traditions that you go, oh no. I can see how all this happened. I think a few things with this one. We need to be careful with the things and the threats that we do because these two guys, Michael and Humbert, they cause all these people to feel divided when they didn't need to. You know, their inability to negotiate and see each other as humans and respect each other had cascading effects that changed the fabric of the world as we know it. And it's just a shame. And it also goes to show, like basically a couple months of the two of them going back and forth and it took 900 years for them to patch it up. Just goes to show that a grudge and vengeance is, it runs deep and it's truly sad when it happens. I will also say that like, you know, like I said, I'm not a theologian, but I have a lot of respect for my Orthodox brothers, especially you, Christos. He doesn't have a mic still. Anyway, what do you guys think? Anything I missed, anything I got wrong, please drop a comment. YouTube, Spotify, I read all of them. If there's anything you learned or anything you want to contribute to the conversation, put it in the comments. Even if I don't get back to it, I will read it for one and two, someone will read it and you will help educate the other campers here at the campsite to better enrich themselves and further their own understanding about the matters of the church. Anyway, God bless you all. Have a beautiful Sunday. Thank you so much for tuning into another episode and I will see you all next time. Go forth, have a lovely day and peace be with you.