Publisher's Synopsis
Assuming the papacy is a malignancy of the primacy, this books attempts to unravel the church history in which the role of the patriarch of Rome was functional in the first millennium. Gradually suppressed and replaced by the apparently more prestigious papal title, to the detriment of Church unity, the inchoate form of the patriarchate emerged at the Council of Nicea (325). A valuable window into the prodigious research of the CDF official, Adriano Garuti, OFM, is available for those without a reading knowledge of Italian. With Ratzinger's former conviction that the roles of patriarch and pope were to be differentiated, the advanced organizing principle of suppressing the patriarchal title is discernible in its embryonic stage.
