In 1848, Pope Pius IX wrote an Epistle to the Easterns, calling for the Orthodox Church to

reunify with Rome. The same year, the Orthodox Church responded with the Encyclical of the
Eastern Patriarchs.
This letter was signed by the Patriarch of Constantinople, the Patriarch of Alexandria, the
Patriarch of Jerusalem, the Patriarch of Antiochthe heads of all four ancient Patriarchatesand
twenty-nine other bishops besides. In this letter, we read:
All erroneous doctrine touching the Catholic truth of the Blessed Trinity, and the origin of the
divine Persons, and the subsistence of the Holy Ghost, is and is called heresy, and they who so
hold are deemed heretics, according to the sentence of Saint Damasus, Pope of Rome, who says:
If any one rightly holds concerning the Father and the Son, yet holds not rightly of the Holy
Ghost, he is an heretic (Cath. Conf. of Faith which Pope Damasus sent to Paulinus, Bishop of
Thessalonica). Wherefore the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, following in the steps
of the holy Fathers, both Eastern and Western, proclaimed of old to our progenitors and again
teaches today synodically, that the said novel doctrine of the Holy Ghost proceeding from the
Father and the Son is essentially heresy, and its maintainers, whoever they be, are heretics,
according to the sentence of Pope Saint Damasus, and that the congregations of such are also
heretical, and that all spiritual communion in worship of the orthodox sons of the Catholic
Church with such is unlawful. Such is the force of the seventh Canon of the third Ecumenical
Council.
2. It was decided at the Toledo Council of the Spanish Church to unite to the Church the West
Goths, who confessed the Arian heresy, and this circumstance served as the occasion for this
addition. Since the teaching on the inequality of the Son with the Father was the fundamental
point of the Arian heresy, the Spanish theologians at the Toledo Council, insisting on the full
equality of the Son and the Father, decided to place the Son also in the same relationship to the
Holy Spirit that the Father has to Him; that is, they said that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the
Father and the Son. In the seventh and eighth centuries, the addition of the Filioque to the
Symbol of Faith spread in the Frankish churches. At first, the Roman popes refused to
recognized the Filioque. Thus, in the ninth century, Pope Leo III rejected the request of the
Emperor Charlemagne to insert this addition into the Symbol of Faith. Moreover, the Bishop of
Rome even ordered that the text of the NiceaoConstantinopolitan Symbol of Faith be engraved
on two silver tablets and that these tablets be set up at the tomb of the Apostles Peter and Paul
with the inscription: "I, Leo, placed these tablets out of love for the Orthodox faith and to
safeguard it".
The Orthodox Church has made it clear.
The filioque is neither a sideline issue nor a debatable doctrine.
It officially has been recognized as a heresy.

3 . Pope John VIII affirmed the 879-880 council of Constantinople, which

anathematized the filioque and struck down the robber council of 869-870.