Pope Francis urged world leaders to “promote peaceful coexistence” in the face of “a devastating outbreak of violence against Christians” on Monday, when he received the Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, Pope Matthias I, in the Vatican.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is the largest of the Oriental Orthodox Churches, which rejected the definitions of the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451.
In his address, Pope Francis told Pope Matthias I “what unites us is greater than what divides us,” and added that “shared sufferings have enabled Christians, otherwise divided in so many ways, to grow closer to one another.”
“Just as in the early Church the shedding of the blood of martyrs became the seed of new Christians, so today the blood of the many martyrs of all the Churches has become the seed of Christian unity,” Pope Francis said. “The ecumenism of the martyrs is a summons to us, here and now, to advance on the path to ever greater unity.”
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