They strode through the congregation up to the altar and placed on it the Pope’s declaration of excommunication, quitting the building with a ceremonial shaking of its dust from their feet, amid jeers from a hostile crowd. This was only a personal excommunication of the Patriarch and his associates, but unlike the Acacian schism of the late fifth century (see p. 234), Pope and Oecumenical Patriarch did not declare the excommunication revoked for another nine hundred years after the events of 1054, and even now in many areas the reconciliation between Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism is
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