Scottish Catholic Observer

After almost three decades of tense Catholic-Russian Orthodox relations, Pope Francis will meet Patriarch Kirill of Moscow (above) today in Cuba on the Pope’s way to Mexico.

It will be the first-ever meeting of a Pope and Moscow patriarch, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman, told reporters last Friday.

As Pope Francis travels to Cuba and as Patriarch Kirill makes an official visit to the island nation, the two will meet at Havana’s Jose Marti International Airport and plan to sign a joint declaration, Fr Lombardi said. The meeting ‘will mark an important stage in relations between the two churches’, said a joint declaration on the meeting.

Holding a simple meeting with a Moscow patriarch—spiritual leader of the world’s largest Orthodox church—was a failed dream of St John Paul II and an opportunity that escaped retired Pope Benedict XVI as well. Repeatedly after the Soviet bloc began dissolving in 1989 and the once-repressed Eastern Catholic churches began functionally publicly again, Russian Orthodox leaders insisted there could be no meeting between a Pope and a patriarch as long as Catholics were ‘proselytising;’ in what the Orthodox considered their territory.

The Vatican insisted the Catholic Church rejects proselytism, which it defines as actively seeking converts from another Christian community, including through pressure or offering enticements.

—This story ran in full in the February 12 edition print of the SCO, available in parishes.