Next week Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity, is due to travel to Russia to meet the Patriarch in the highest-level visit by Vatican officials in four years. The aim of the five-day trip (due to start on Monday) is to improve relations between Rome and Moscow, which are at their lowest point since before the Second Vatican Council. Two years ago a visit by the cardinal was cancelled by the Moscow Patriarchate, outraged by what it described as aggressive Catholic missionary activity in its “canonical territory”.
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We are gathered here today in the spirit of peace for the good of all human beings and for the care of creation. At this moment in history, at the beginning of the third millennium, we are saddened to see the daily suffering of a great number of people from violence, starvation, poverty and disease. We are also concerned about the negative consequences for humanity and for all creation resulting from the degradation of some basic natural resources such as water, air and land, brought about by an economic and technological progress which does not recognize and take into account its limits.
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Pope John Paul, who celebrated his eighty-first birthday this week, is a man in a hurry. In the twilight days of his long papacy, he is expanding the perspective of his by now traditional pastoral visits around the world and he is laying down markers for the future. These concern the future relations of the Roman Catholic Church both with the separated Orthodox Christian Churches, and with the other monotheistic religions, Islam and Judaism.

Hence the first-ever visit this month by a pope to a mosque, the impressive Great Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. Twenty years ago it would have been inconceivable that a pope from Rome should remove his shoes, put on white slippers and traverse one of the great Holy Places of Islam for a meeting with the Grand Mufti and other clerics in the courtyard of the mosque.
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Pope John Paul is to make a brief visit to Athens in May. Many of the Greek Orthodox clergy and the monks of Athos are up in arms. Could this nevertheless turn out to be a breaking of the ice which has lasted since the Western and Eastern Church split in 1054? An Assumptionist priest who was formerly stationed in Athens looks at the tensions.
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On 7 January, Russia’s Orthodox Church celebrated the two-thousandth anniversary of the birth of Christ. Thousands attended the Christmas liturgy in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, triumphantly, and, many have averred, tastelessly, restored to the city’s skyline more than 60 years after Stalin ordered its obliteration from it. Live coverage of the event was marred, however, when Patriarch Alexis II arrived more than an hour late, delayed by his participation in the day’s informal meetings between President Putin and the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder.

As the television cameras panned in on the massed faithful awaiting their Patriarch, they picked out the emerald robes of seemingly the most senior cleric in attendance — Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin, head of Russia’s Central Spiritual Directorate of Muslims. For the third year running, the chief representative of Russia’s Roman Catholics, Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, had not been invited.
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Pope John Paul II has never made it a secret: As the first Slavic pope, as a church leader from eastern Europe, he dreamed of being God’s instrument to bridge the millennium-old schism between East and West.

Over the years, out of sensitivity to the Orthodox patriarch of Moscow, he has declined repeated invitations from the eastern Catholics in Ukraine and from the Ukrainian government to visit them.

The pope is aging quickly and the rhetoric between the Orthodox and Rome is heating up rather than calming down — the Orthodox have moved beyond complaints of proselytizing; they now speak of outright “persecution” of their people by the Latin Church. All this has led the pope to change his mind and visit the millions of Eastern-rite Christians who have paid a martyr’s price for their loyalty to the Chair of Peter.

John Paul recognizes that this is a dangerous move in terms of his long-term dream of reuniting Constantinople/Moscow and Rome. To offset, as much as possible, any ecumenically negative consequences, the Vatican is continually talking about this visit as a reaching out to full brothers and sisters (see page 4).

The Slavic pope has even made a substantial donation ($150,000) toward the building of a new Orthodox cathedral in Bucharest. His generosity, however, is not limited to this sensitive trip to the East. Back in January 1995, the pope helped build the Orthodox cathedral in Ulyanovsk, the birthplace of Vladimir Lenin.

The people of Ulyanovsk, who were sorely strapped for funds, could not have been more gracious in accepting the gift: they named the pope “an honorary member of their communion in Christ.”
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‘Bitter differences’ lead to dead-end, Polish ecumenist says by Jonathan Luxmoore, Ecumenical News International [WARSAW] High-level talks between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches which ended in the United States recently were marred by “methodological deficiencies” and a “polemical atmosphere,” leaving relations between the two Christian communions at a dead-end, according to an expert on
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Windows To The East, an annual public lecture series on Eastern Christianity, will take place Thursday and Friday at St. Thomas More College. Dr. Myroslaw Tataryn, associate professor of religious studies at University of Saskatchewan, is one of the organizers. As he explains, Windows To The East is part of an on-going lecture series that
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[WCC News] The Special Commission on Orthodox participation in the World Council of Churches (WCC) will meet from 6 to 8 December in Morges, on Lac Léman, Switzerland. At its inaugural meeting the Commission will deal chiefly with matters of planning and procedure for the series of its Protestant-Orthodox discussions to be held over the
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by Stephen Brown, Ecumenical News Service [GENEVA] A special commission set up by the World Council of Churches (WCC) in a bid to resolve complaints by its Orthodox member churches is scheduled to hold its first meeting in December. The scheduling of the meeting follows a series of delays and apparent unwillingness by some Orthodox
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[CHICAGO | ELCA News] Talks between the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas have arrived at “A Lutheran-Orthodox Common Statement on Faith in the Holy Trinity.” The 13-paragraph communique explains the emphasis of both traditions on the Nicene Creed and draws attention to a
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A pan-Orthodox conference that took place from April 29 to May 2, 1998, at Thessaloniki, Greece, was devoted to relations between Orthodoxy and the ecumenical movement – a topic which has caused concern among very many people not only in the Russian but also other Local Orthodox Churches.
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As a child, a friend of mine used to be told by his nanny: Before you say anything, ask yourself: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? The same three questions may well be asked about the current proposal to define Mary as Co-Redeemer.

Is it true? The answer to that question depends on the way in which we interpret the title Co-Redeemer, along with the related titles Mediator of All Graces and Advocate of the People of God. As a member of the Orthodox Church I have no objection to these three titles in themselves — provided that they are rightly understood.

Indeed, closely similar language occurs in the prayers and hymns used in the Christian East. With the greatest frequency in Orthodox worship we say to the Virgin Mary, Most Holy Mother of God, save us. In our invocations to other members of the Communion of Saints, including St John the Baptist, except on very rare occasions we never say more than … pray for us.
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When Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople made a month-long tour of 16 cities in the United States in October and November, he was feted with honours at Washington’s Jesuit-run Georgetown University and greeted with splendour in Baltimore’s Catholic cathedral. As so often in inter-Church relations, however, the conciliatory declarations belied bitter realities.

Ironically, the sharp downturn in Catholic-Orthodox relations during the past six months came into the open after one of the Pope’s most impassioned appeals for Christian unity. The occasion John Paul II picked was a Eucharistic Congress held in May at Wroclaw in Poland. “In this our second millennium, when the unity of Christ’s disciples has suffered tragic divisions between East and West, prayer for the rediscovery of full unity is a special obligation”, the Pope said. “Can we bear joint and effective witness to Christ if we are not reconciled with one another? Can we be reconciled with one another without forgiving one another?”
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Rome — and Poland — are buzzing with rumour, counter-rumour and denial: will Pope John Paul and Patriarch Alexis of the Russian Orthodox Church meet in Vienna on 21 June or won’t they? Perhaps by the time this article is published there will have been an announcement that puts paid to the rumours, but even an eventual negative provides a timely stimulus to consider relations between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.

One argument against the likelihood of a meeting between the Pope and the Russian Patriarch is obvious: there has been no preparation. The Patriarch will be in Vienna on his way to the European Ecumenical Assembly in Graz and the Pope wants to meet him. The Pope has spoken prophetically about his desire to see the reunion of East and West, to reverse the basic division in Christendom of nearly a millennium, before the year 2000. Yet his health and the ticking of the clock make this an unattainable goal, at least in human terms.
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