"Flakey" is a kind word to describe the actions of such "orthodox".
Orthodoxia I Thanatos!
Rostislav Mikhailovich Malleev-Pokrovsky
CONTACTS WITH ORTHODOX SEEN AS "VERY POSITIVE"
Vatican Delegation Takes Papal Message to Bartholomew I
VATICAN CITY, NOV. 30, 2003 (Zenit.org).- Bilateral contacts between Rome
and the Orthodox Churches have developed rapidly "in a very positive sense"
this year, says a Vatican official.
Bishop Brian Farrell, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting
Christian Unity, made that assessment in an interview with Vatican Radio.
The occasion was today's feast of St. Andrew the Apostle, patron of the
Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.
The patriarchate, said Bishop Farrell, is the Holy See's point of reference
in the effort to "continue with the formal theological dialogue, but
especially in the work to give value to all the bilateral contacts we have
with the Orthodox Churches, which this year have developed rapidly in a
very positive sense."
Representatives of the Holy See took a message from John Paul II to
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, for the feast. St. Andrew, founder and
apostle of the Church in Constantinople, was brother of St. Peter, first
Bishop of Rome.
Every year on this occasion the Holy Father sends a delegation to
Constantinople -- modern-day Istanbul, Turkey. The patriarch, in turn,
sends representatives to Rome on June 29, the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul.
"These patronal feasts allow us to live better the joy of being brothers
and of participating in a single communion of intentions, which it is
necessary to encourage and continue, so that it appears with greater
clarity before the world," the Pope said in his message to Bartholomew I.
The Vatican delegation was headed by Cardinal Walter Kasper, president, of
the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, along with Bishop
Farrell.
"Reciprocal participation in these patronal feasts," the Pope added in his
messages, some passages of which were reported on Vatican Radio, "is the
most complete expression of our mutual desire to re-create among ourselves
a context of love and participation in mutual prayer to nourish and further
our desire for full communion."
Bishop Farrell told Vatican Radio that this exchange of delegations between
the Holy See and the ecumenical patriarchate "are the symbol of a growing
intensification of the desire to find again that unity of the Church that
the Lord wanted."
The visit took place at a time of tension, in the wake of recent terrorist
attacks in Istanbul.
The Vatican representatives wished to express "the solidarity of the
Catholic Church and the guarantee of repeated prayer raised by the Pope for
the victims and for all those who live daily in fear," Bishop Farrell
explained.
Orthodox and Catholics have been divided since the Eastern schism of the
11th century. Mutual excommunications were lifted in 1964, but the two
Churches have yet to find full unity.