Vatican joins historic talks to end 950-year rift with Orthodox church

This Times (UK) article with that title is available here. Notice in it the discussion of a possible future Ecumenical Council by which to restore unity between Rome and the Orthodox Churches. The 46 paragraph "Ravenna Document" is available here.

Cathedra Unitatis recently posted an excellent quotation from Archbishop Elias Zoghby; below is an excerpt:

It follows from what we have just said that every man who opposes efforts to promote Christian unity – from whichever side these efforts come – sins against the Son of God and against the whole Christian people. He also sins against mankind, called upon in its entirety to faith in Jesus Christ, but hindered from achieving it by, among other obstacles, the sight of Christians divided among themselves. Those, Catholics and non-Catholics, whom centuries of separation have left complacent in their isolation and who for reasons of expediency, national or racial, try to hinder the progress of Christian unity, will expose themselves on the Last Day to the severe judgement of every baptized soul and of every soul who might have been baptized had he not been scandalized by divisions among Christians.

These men play the part within the churches that sin plays in the soul. The churches must repudiate them if they are to continue on the road to unity, if they want success for the appeal of Pope John XXIII, so favorably echoed by other Christian leaders, and are anxious that with God’s grace the unanimous prayer of Christian peoples should be heard – the prayer for the realization of the desire so dear to our Lord: “that they too may be one … as thou Father art in me, and I in thee.”