What really needs to occur is that the Orthodox need to accept the Pope with authority in special circumstances as he had in the first millenium, and the rest of the time, the Pope of Rome needs to leave all the other churches alone and mind his own business. So yes, the Pope and his cardinals need to stop thinking they can colonize, dominate and control with suspicion and indifference the various eastern churches.
Power is hard to let go, fear is hard to overcome. I think that the Reformation has had a very bad effect on all this. Half the Roman Catholics I know can not fathom that one can be a schismatic and not protestant. They can not fathom that a greek orthodox church might have more eucharistic processions on Sundays throughout the year during it's divine liturgy than a particularly "relaxed" Roman Catholic Church which has none at all on Corpus Christi Day. That a church can have real eucharistic processions and not be protestant is amazing to many of the RC lay people.
The education in understanding the early church, the history of the church and meaning and role of bishops, patriarches, archbishops throughout history is quite lacking amongst RC laity. Perhaps amongst the Orthodox laity there also is convenient forgetting of the roles the Popes played to end heresies often in harmony with a council. But perhaps they deemphasize this with a view that they they must protect themselves from what they think he has become in the present time.
One of the key problems is that the average Roman Catholic does not understand ecclesiology and how it developed, and more importantly what it was in the 600 and 700's back when you could have a schism within the Italian church occur, with both sides being essentially orthodox (and not being protestant or arian etc..)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schism_of_the_Three_Chapters Things like this they can't seem to happen anymore, maybe the SSPX or SSPV are the closest things to this and as we know the SSPX still commemorates the Pope so it is moreso "irregular" rather than technicality schismatic (at least thats my understanding.)
Too many Roman Catholics do not understand how similar the Latin Church once was to the Byzantine. Back in the year 400 A.D. I don't mean exactly idetnical, but close enough that you can make sense of them, and see clear consistency between them.
They key for me is reading the writings of the church fathers and various abbots, bishops, theologians up to the 15th century from both byzantine and latin churches. There is a great deal of unity in what they tend to say.
Look at the writings of Blessed Theophylact
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theophylact_of_Bulgaria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theophylact_of_Bulgaria a saint in both churches. During the counterreformation his writings were equally cherished by Roman Catholics, but today amongst RC his brilliance is almost entirely forgotten.
"Theophylact's commentaries on the Four Gospels and on other books of the New Testament ... are the finest works of their sort after St John Chrysostom, and are read to this day with great benefit."[4]
We need to remember people like him, and also people such as St. Venerable Bede, a doctor of the Roman Catholic Church as well as saint of the Orthodox Church whose exegetical writings are equally profound and harmonize with with Theophylacts. Only 20% of bedes writings exist in English, and yet he wrote as much as Augustine did, often equally to if not more interesting than him.
I was inspired by and fully agree with Utroques statement.
The three levels of primacy are analogous and all have their foundation in episcopal consecration and thus are all divinely instituted. They all emerged in historical circumstances, and in some sense are humanly established, but their source is Christ and ultimately the Father, as Metropolitan Lambriniadis eloquently argues in his rebuttal.
Essentially I see strongly both the Roman Catholic side (mostly from the perspective of orthodox novus ordo/latin mass folks) and the side of the Orthodox. I feel equally at home in the local Greek orthodox church, the local Melkite church and the local "anglican use" ordinariate RC church, in some sense I trust and love them all, yet they are technically separated and can not commune in all. They both have so much to offer, it's sad that they can't come back to where they were. If I were the Pope I feel confident that I could satisfy all parties, but alas I am not. (forgive me for the thought of it.)