Pope Francis will meet the head of the Russian Orthodox Church for the first time next week in Havana, both churches announced. The historic meeting is an attempt to heal the 1,000-year-old rift in Christianity.
Francis will meet Patriarch
Kirill on February 12 at Havana’s José Martí International Airport, a statement
from the Vatican said. The meeting “will include a personal conversation … and
will conclude with the signing of a joint declaration,” the statement added.
Francis will stop in Havana en route to Mexico, and Kirill will be on an
official visit to Cuba at the time.
The statement added:
This meeting of the Primates of the Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church, after a long preparation, will be the first in history and will mark an important stage in relations between the two Churches. The Holy See and the Moscow Patriarchate hope that it will also be a sign of hope for all people of good will. They invite all Christians to pray fervently for God to bless this meeting, that it may bear good fruits.
The churches split in 1054
amid disagreements over theology and became two separate faith traditions:
Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians. Next week’s meeting would go a
long way toward healing what is known as the Great Schism.
Past attempts to
organize meetings between Popes John Paul II and Benedict and their Russian
Orthodox counterparts failed because of differences over what the Russian
church labeled the “actions of the Greek Catholics in Ukraine and proselytism
of Catholic missionaries in the canonical territory of the Moscow
Patriarchate.”
The Russian
Orthodox Church, in its statement, added that while those and
other differences remained, “[n]evertheless, the situation as it has developed
today in the Middle East, in North and Central Africa and in some other
regions, in which extremists are perpetrating a real genocide of the Christian
population, has required urgent measures and closer cooperation between
Christian Churches.
In the present tragic situation, it is necessary to put aside
internal disagreements and unite efforts for saving Christianity in the regions
where it is subjected to the most severe persecution.”
My colleague Emma
Green, writing in May 2014, noted that has
been a slow thaw in the Vatican’s relations with the Eastern Church. She wrote
at the time:
On his way home from a meeting with Pope Francis in the Holy Land, Patriarch Bartholomew I, the primary leader of Eastern Orthodox Christians, gave an interview in which he said that he and Francis are planning a gathering in Nicaea 11 years from now "to celebrate together, after 17 centuries , the first truly ecumenical synod." That's a pretty big deal.
Next week’s
meeting will come four months ahead of the opening in June of the first Synod
meeting of the various Orthodox churches in more than a millennium. That
gathering has been threatened, the National Catholic Reporter adds, by differences between the
Russian and other Orthodox leaders.
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