Oriental Church United With Roman Church

5. Certainly, that man would have to be declared utterly inexperienced in ecclesiastical history who did not know of the mighty efforts of the Roman Pontiffs to bring the Orientals into unity since the fatal schism of Photius; he laid hold of the See of Constantinople when the lawful Patriarch St. Ignatius was forcefully ejected in the time of Pope St. Nicholas I. Our Predecessor St. Leo IX sent his legates to Constantinople to put an end to this schism, which, after almost two centuries' respite, had been renewed by Michael Cerularius; but their efforts came to nothing. Subsequently Urban II summoned the Greeks to the council of Bari. They accomplished very little though, even though St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, was fully engaged in working for unity between them and the Roman Church and in revealing to them the errors of their ways by the light of his teaching. At the Council of Lyons which Blessed Gregory X convened, the emperor Michael Palaeologus and the Greek bishops accepted unity with the Roman Church, but then changed their minds and abandoned it again. The Council of Florence, in the pontificate of Eugenius IV, which was attended by John Palaeologus and Joseph, Patriarch of Constantinople, together with the other Oriental bishops, decreed union; everyone present accepted it. At the same Council the churches of the Armenians and the Jacobites returned to obedience to the Apostolic See. When Pope Eugenius left Florence for Rome, he received an embassy from the king of the Ethiopians and restored the Syrians, Chaldaeans, and Maronites to obedience to the Roman See. But as it is written in St. Matthew's Gospel, chap. 13, the seed which fell on a rock produced no fruit since it had no place to put down roots: "These are those who at once receive the word of God with joy but do not have roots in themselves; when tribulation and persecution come on account of the word, they stumble at once." Thus, scarcely had Mark, Archbishop of Ephesus, like a new Photius, tried to destroy the union by raising his voice against it, than all the desired fruit immediately vanished.