Orthodox Leaders Meet to Heal a Rift
Seeking to demonstrate improved relations between the world’s two main Orthodox Christian churches, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople has begun a 10-day visit to Russia, praising the country’s loyalty to its Byzantine heritage.
“You not only preserved, but multiplied your amazing culture, at the center of which is the Christian faith,” he told a gathering of young people behind St. Basil’s Cathedral near Red Square on Monday.
Although he also recalled the decades of official Soviet atheism, he said, “You fought, endured, and became worthy of that calling that you received from Constantinople.”
He spoke after a procession from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which was blown up at Stalin’s orders in 1931 and rebuilt in the 1990s. A mass at the Cathedral on Monday morning marked the feast day of Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius, Greek brothers who created the Cyrillic alphabet and preached to Slavs in the 9th century.
Bartholomew and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church have celebrated liturgy together, in Greek and Slavonic respectively, for two days in a row since the Ecumenical patriarch’s arrival in Moscow on Saturday.
The Russian Orthodox Church is the world’s largest Orthodox church, while the Ecumenical Patriarchate, now reduced to a tiny community in Istanbul, is symbolically its most important, leading millions of Orthodox Christians around the world.
The Russian church has objected when the Patriarch of Constantinople is described as the Orthodox equivalent of a Roman Catholic pope, and the churches have tangled, often bitterly, since the collapse of the Soviet Union over jurisdictional issues in Estonia and Ukraine, as well as elsewhere in Europe, where an influx of recent Russian immigrants has led to cases of splintered parishes and property disputes....
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“You not only preserved, but multiplied your amazing culture, at the center of which is the Christian faith,” he told a gathering of young people behind St. Basil’s Cathedral near Red Square on Monday.
Although he also recalled the decades of official Soviet atheism, he said, “You fought, endured, and became worthy of that calling that you received from Constantinople.”
He spoke after a procession from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which was blown up at Stalin’s orders in 1931 and rebuilt in the 1990s. A mass at the Cathedral on Monday morning marked the feast day of Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius, Greek brothers who created the Cyrillic alphabet and preached to Slavs in the 9th century.
Bartholomew and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church have celebrated liturgy together, in Greek and Slavonic respectively, for two days in a row since the Ecumenical patriarch’s arrival in Moscow on Saturday.
The Russian Orthodox Church is the world’s largest Orthodox church, while the Ecumenical Patriarchate, now reduced to a tiny community in Istanbul, is symbolically its most important, leading millions of Orthodox Christians around the world.
The Russian church has objected when the Patriarch of Constantinople is described as the Orthodox equivalent of a Roman Catholic pope, and the churches have tangled, often bitterly, since the collapse of the Soviet Union over jurisdictional issues in Estonia and Ukraine, as well as elsewhere in Europe, where an influx of recent Russian immigrants has led to cases of splintered parishes and property disputes....