To those of us who reside in countries where Catholics and dissident Eastern Orthodox live, as regards one another, in practically ‘water-tight compartments,’ it would not appear that the death of an Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem (Mgr. Damianos Kassiotis, died August 14th, 1931) is of much interest to those in communion with the Holy See. Nevertheless, it must be realized—as it is realized in the Levant—that such an event has not merely interest for local Christians of all the ancient churches, but might conceivably result in events which would have significance for the Church at large. For the death of a patriarch involves the election of a successor; such an election involves ecclesiastical and even secular politics; and in the Near East politics of all sorts are fruitful of religious changes. Ever since, and even before, the break-up of Catholicism, religion in Palestine and Syria has gone hand in hand with politics ; and many of the numerous small mass-reunions of Eastern Christians to the Catholic Church that have taken place during the past three or four hundred years were directly traceable to ecclesiastical politics, and sometimes to grievances of a secular nature. Precisely for that reason some of them have not subsisted, and the reunion has collapsed in renewed schism, bringing upon Eastern Catholics an undeserved stigma of ‘tendency to disunion’; others have remained, and what began as a political move has developed into a soundly religious state of affairs.