Abstract: Benedict XVI’s theological act of renouncing the title of “Patriarch of Occident” has a message of multiple consequences. The author of the present study analyzes a part of the predictable consequences of the pope’s gesture. The article also presents the historic-dogmatic context of the formulation of this title as well as the different manner it is understood in the East and the West of the Christian world. The act of the Roman bishop meets a delicate time between the Orthodoxy and the Catholicism, the very time the primacy is put to theological debate between the two Churches. The conclusion of the author is that renouncing the title of “Patriarch of Occident” represents a radical position of the pope to the way the ecclesial communion should be articulated. Far from encouraging an ecclesiology of communion, the gesture of Benedict XVI is obviously for a jurisdiction primacy, which is unacceptable from the point of view of the Orthodox theology.

Keywords: papal primacy, Patriarch of Occident, communion ecclesiology, theological dialogue, Orthodoxy