Pope and Russian Orthodox patriarch to meet for first time in history
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis and the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church will meet in Cuba next week in a historic step to heal the 1,000-year-old schism that divided Christianity between East and West, both churches announced Friday.
The meeting between Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill will be the first ever between the leaders of the Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches.
Pope Francis is due to travel to Mexico on Friday until Feb. 18. He will stop in Cuba on the way and meet with Patriarch Kirill on Friday at the Havana airport, where they will sign a joint declaration, a joint statement said. The patriarch will be there on an official visit.
The two churches split during the Great Schism of 1054 and have remained estranged over a host of issues, including the primacy of the pope and Russian Orthodox accusations that the Catholic Church
is poaching converts in Russia.
Those tensions have prevented previous popes from ever meeting with the Russian patriarch, even though the Vatican has long insisted that it was merely ministering to the tiny Catholic community in largely Orthodox lands.
The persecution of Christians — Catholic and Orthodox — in the Middle East and Africa, however, has had the effect of bringing the two churches closer together.
The meeting, which was announced jointly at the Vatican and in Moscow, marks a major development in the Vatican’s long effort to bridge the divisions in Christianity.
Metropolitan Illarion, foreign policy chief of the Russian Orthodox Church, said Friday that there are still core disagreements between the Holy See and the Russian Church, in particular on various Orthodox churches in western Ukraine.
“The situation in the Middle East, in northern and central Africa and in other regions where extremists are perpetrating a genocide of Christians requires immediate action and an even closer cooperation between Christian churches,” said Metropolitan Illarion. “In this tragic situation, we need to put aside internal disagreements and pool efforts to save Christianity in the regions where it is subject to most severe persecution.”
The Vatican has long nurtured ties with the Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I, who is considered “first among equals” within the Orthodox Church. Starting with Pope Paul VI, various popes have called upon the Ecumenical Patriarch in hopes of bridging closer ties with the Orthodox faithful.
But the Russian Orthodox Church, which is the largest church in Orthodoxy and the most powerful, has always kept its distance from Rome. About two-thirds of the world’s Orthodox Christians belong to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said.
About 75 percent of Russia’s 144 million people call themselves Russian Orthodox, according to the latest polls, although only a fraction of them say they are observant. The Catholic Church claims about 1.2 billion faithful.
Under Pope Francis, the Vatican has encouraged continuing ecumenical ties with the Orthodox as well as other Christian denominations. And it has gone out of its way to be solicitous to Russia, especially in shying away from directly criticizing Moscow over its role in the Ukraine conflict.
Ever since Patriarch Kirill took the helm of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2009, the church has enjoyed increasingly close ties with the Kremlin that critics have dismissed as the defacto merging of the state and the church.