A joint Catholic-Orthodox leaders’ gathering to celebrate the First Council of Nicaea’s 1,700th anniversary in 2025 is looking likely. On Sunday the Vatican published a personal letter Pope Francis wrote to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople suggesting the leaders’ gathering. That same day Cardinal Kurt Koch — who heads the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity Read more
New tasks and challenges emerge between the synod’s first and second sessions. Greater attention needs to be paid to the wider context of the synodal renewal, to the preconditions and consequences of this process. It concerns a much larger and more demanding task than simply transforming a rigid clerical system within the Catholic Church into Read more
Pope Francis is well known for his strong views about faith and protecting God’s creation. The Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople is of the same view. Faith in God comes with two “inseparable” elements, Bartholomew said on Sunday which was the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation He said these two Read more
The Week of Christian Unity, the church celebrated this week, supports an unfashionable cause. It encourages the healing of divisions between churches. Divisions rule In culture, politics and religion, however, division provides most of the news of the day. The religious headlines emphasise fractures within churches. They tell of discrepancy between the professed values of Read more
Among the many popular and impious sayings about Rome, some dating back to early times, there is this little gem: Roma veduta, fede perduta. Basically, it means you risk losing your faith when you go to the Eternal City. It’s certainly a phrase that was bantered about during the 16th century when Martin Luther (an Read more
Christian Unity is more than a “nice to have” it is an essential element of those who confess their vocation to live like Christ. The scandal to the world is the disunification of the Christian churches. Ironically, in disunity, many find strength because they are “not like the others”. They enjoy the separation because it Read more
A cathedral in Geneva, Switzerland, has celebrated its first Catholic Mass in nearly 500 years. The vigil of the First Sunday of Lent was the day chosen to celebrate the historic Mass. The last Mass celebrated at St Pierre Cathedral took place in 1535. After the Reformation, the building was taken over by John Calvin’s Read more
An elderly Orthodox priest yelled “Pope you’re a heretic” several times as Pope Francis arrived for a meeting in Athens with the leader of Greece’s Orthodox Church on Saturday. “The pope is unacceptable in Greece! He should repent!” the priest told reporters after being removed from the scene. According to The Associated Press, Francis “appeared Read more
Bishop Georg Bätzing, president of the German bishops’ conference, defended the plan for “ecumenically mindful” reception of Communion in Catholic and Protestant services during Germany’s ecumenical congress May 13-16. The bishop told KNA, Germany’s Catholic news agency, May 11 that the services planned May 15 were not about “cross-denominational Communion in the sense of a general mutual Read more
Pope Francis is confident Catholics and Orthodox Christians will attain full communion. In a message to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I on Monday, Francis praised Bartholomew’s efforts to promote Christian unity. “We can thank God that relations between the Catholic Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate have grown much over the past century, even Read more