This has been known for a few days, but more details are reported by Marco Politi in today's issue of La Repubblica:
The Pope is the 'first among the Patriarchs', Rome is the 'first See', the Church of Rome 'presides in charity'. A joint document of the Catholic Church and of the Orthodox Churches explicitly acknowledges definitively and in an unequivocal way the primacy of the Roman Pontiff, easing the way for the reunification of Catholics and Orthodox, divided by the schism of 1054.
The reserved document is the result of the October meeting at Ravenna, where a Catholic delegation presided by Cardinal Kasper and a pan-Orthodox delegation, guided by Metropolitan Zizioulas, of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, established the bases for a deepening of the questions left to be resolved in order to reestablish unity.
Good. But the representatives of the largest Eastern Church not in full communion with the Bishop of Rome left the discussions in Ravenna. A representative of the Moscow Patriarchate, Bishop Hilarion, explained the problems to Interfax:
Metropolitan John [Zizioulas] of Pergamon [of the Constantinople Patriarchate] as co-president of the joint commission for Orthodox-Catholic dialogue is responsible for derailing the dialogue. His comments and the final text of the document work on which has finished in Ravenna without the participation of the Moscow Patriarchate may produce the impression that the Constantinople Patriarchate deliberately pushed the Moscow Patriarchate to withdraw from the dialogue so that decisions should be passed that would have been impossible with the participation of the Moscow Patriarchate. ...
The Patriarchy of Constantinople is extremely interested to discuss the issue of primacy in the Universal Church, because in this Orthodox-Catholic dialogue, it hopes to force Local Churches to interpret the primacy in a way that could extend its historical rights. Until now, Orthodox Churches have acknowledged only priority of honour of the Patriarchy of Constantinople. However, Metropolitan John expresses in his interviews the view point which is inconsistent with the notion of “priority of honour” in the Orthodox canons.
"Constantinople wants to force on us a model of church organization that has never existed in Orthodox tradition and that is closer to the centralized model existing in the Roman Catholic Church. In that model, the patriarch of Constantinople would have the role of the 'Eastern pope.'"
