Moscow Patriarchate thanks Pope for not pressing on meeting with Moscow Patriarch

From Moscow, December 16, Interfax


The Moscow Patriarchate is grateful to Pope Benedict XVI for understanding problems between the two Churches and not pressing on with visiting Russia and meeting with the Patriarch. "Pope Benedict XVI perfectly understands the existing difficulties and therefore is not pressing on his meeting with the Patriarch, not to mention visiting Russia, as was done under his predecessor. We are grateful to him for this," the head of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk said in an interview published in Der Spiegel, whose Russian translation the Department for External Church Relations has published on its website. The Russian Orthodox Church does not rule out the possibility of a meeting between the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia and the Pope, but believes that it should be preceded by the resolution of the problems between them rather than be turned into "just a protocol meeting and handshakes between TV cameras.

"We want a breakthrough in our relations. When the situation in western Ukraine improves radically, when we, the Orthodox and the Catholics, agree once and for all that we are not adversaries gaining believers over from each other, then a meeting between the Pope and the Moscow Patriarch will be possible," he said. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Greek Catholics in western Ukraine "seized hundreds of Orthodox churches, and thousands of Orthodox believers were actually thrown out into the street," said Metropolitan Hilarion.

SSJC comments: Metropolitan Hilarion says nothing, by the same token, of the hundreds of Ukrainian Catholic Churches that were confiscated by the Soviets and assigned to the Moscow Patriarchate in areas it had not before been present in both Eastern Ukraine before the Second World War and Western Ukraine when it was incorporated into the USSR after it, in which the Orthodox Church was involved in the forced conversion of Catholics to Orthodoxy and the suppression of the Greek Catholic Church, which was never a result of proselytisation but pro-actively sought communion with the Roman see in objective historical circumstances. He also says nothing of the thousands of Catholic believers "who were actually thrown out into the street". While he is right to hope that we Catholics and Orthodox will cease to regard one another as adversaries, the healing of memories requires complete honesty and penitence from all sides, if we are to be taken beyond recrimination to resolution and reconciliation.