Ecumenical

Source: Orthodox Church Media Network

November 26, 2010

Metropolitan Hilarion

“Each day brings us closer to this meeting between the Pope and Patriarch,” head of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, told journalists in Moscow.

“Right now we are not prepared to make known the date, nor are we engaged in any concrete preparations for the meeting, but we are certainly getting closer to it. It is a calendar and astronomical fact,” he said.

The work carried out by the Russian Church with the Catholic Church is aimed “improving the general climate and achieving a higher level of mutual understanding,” he added.

I’m not sure if the Pope is speaking of the Byzantine Rite Catholics or the Orthodox Churches here, but the admission of a distinctive tradition is good.

Source: Catholic Culture

The Eastern Catholic churches should protect and maintain their own distinctive traditions, Pope Benedict XVI said on October 9 during an audience with participants in a conference on the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches.

“In maintaining Catholic communion the Eastern Catholic Churches had no intention of renouncing faithfulness to their own tradition,” the Pope remarked. He said that the canon laws of the Eastern churches should contribute to the effort of “preserving their legal heritage and nourishing their traditions, which are a treasure for the whole Church.”

Pope Benedict also observed that the canon law of the Eastern Catholic churches traces its origin back to the sacri canones of early Christianity. Because the Orthodox churches draw their own canon law from the same source, he said, the canonical traditions of the Eastern Catholic churches “can make a specific and important contribution to the progress of ecumenism.”

See my notes in the post immediately preceding this one.

Source:

As has been stressed by the chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s department for external church relations, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, the working document of the Joint International Commission for Orthodox-Catholic Dialogue, publicized so widely by some media, does not reflect the attitude of the Orthodox side to the problem of primacy of the bishop of Rome and can be viewed only as a purely auxiliary paper for further work.

Contrary to allegations in the press, the Orthodox-Catholic Commission meeting in Vienna has made no ‘breakthrough’ whatsoever. The entire meeting was devoted to a discussion on the role of the bishop of Rome in the first millennium. The Commission’s coordinating committee had drafted a document on this issue, which was discussed last year in Cyprus. A rough draft of this document ‘leaked’ into the mass media and was published.
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Address by Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk Chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations to the Annual Nicean Club Dinner (Lambeth Palace, 9 September 2010)

Speech removed until a corrected version arrives.

I was informed that the speech by Met. Hilarion that I posted contains some (mostly minor) errors. Since I want to be as accurate as possible, I have removed the first translation and will post the corrected version as soon as I receive it. You can read the first version by following the link above.