RUSSIA:A senior figure in the Russian Orthodox Church has indicated that significant progress has been made towards a historic first meeting between Patriarch Alexiy II and Pope Benedict XVI.
No pope has met a Russian Orthodox patriarch. "There is real movement," Metropolitan Kirill, external relations spokesman for the Moscow patriarchate, said yesterday at the end of Patriarch Alexiy's four-day visit to France. Earlier this week Patriarch Alexiy said a meeting with the pope could take place within a year or two.
Currently 73.6 per cent of people in the Russian Federation claim affiliation to the Russian Orthodox Church, which has a membership of over 150 million.
On a visit to Ireland in 2001, Metropolitan Kirill told The Irish Times that his church opposed Pope John Paul visiting Moscow because Catholic priests were actively seeking converts from the Russian Orthodox Church.
Such proselytism was "senseless in the context", he said, and gave rise to suspicion and mistrust. He was referring in particular to common understandings on the Eucharist.
He said that in western Ukraine Christians affiliated to Rome used force and civil law against his church in disagreements about property, despite an earlier agreement to resolve problems peacefully. High-level contact between Rome and the Russian Orthodox Church picked up after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 but soon soured as tensions rose between the two churches in Ukraine. It did not help that western Ukraine had once been part of Poland and this was also believed to be a factor in the absolute refusal of Patriarch Alexiy to meet Pope John Paul, something the Polish pope very much wished for.
However, since the election of Pope Benedict in April 2005, relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and Rome have improved greatly. The east-west divide, known as "the Great Schism", had been threatening for some time before Pope Leo IX and Patriarch Michael I excommunicated each other in 1054, generally taken as the historical moment of the split between western and eastern Christianity. The primary cause was a dispute over papal authority and how extensive it should be, with the eastern church asserting that such authority was only honorary where it was concerned.
There was also a theological row, known as the "filioque" dispute, over the insertion of three words into the Nicene Creed by the western church. It concerned the addition of the words "and the Son" in the part of the creed that reads: "I believe in the Holy Spirit . . . who proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque, in Latin)".
The eastern church claimed this diminished the authority of God the Father and had been introduced unilaterally by Rome.
The Russian church is the largest in the worldwide Orthodox family of an estimated 220 million people. A meeting between the patriarch and the pope would most likely take place in either Vienna or Geneva.