uniate churches

Deprecated: trim(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type string is deprecated in /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-content/plugins/sexybookmarks/public.php on line 388

Deprecated: trim(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type string is deprecated in /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-content/plugins/sexybookmarks/public.php on line 394

Deprecated: trim(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type string is deprecated in /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-content/plugins/sexybookmarks/public.php on line 400

From Interfax (2009-12-16):

Pope Benedict and Archbishop Hilarion

Moscow — The Moscow Patriarchate is grateful to Pope Benedict XVI for understanding problems between the two Churches and not pressing on with visiting Russia and meeting with the Patriarch.

“Pope Benedict XVI perfectly understands the existing difficulties and therefore is not pressing on his meeting with the Patriarch, not to mention visiting Russia, as was done under his predecessor. We are grateful to him for this,” the head of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk said in an interview published in Der Spiegel, whose Russian translation the Department for External Church Relations has published on its website.

The Russian Orthodox Church does not rule out the possibility of a meeting between the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia and the Pope, but believes that it should be preceded by the resolution of the problems between them rather than be turned into “just a protocol meeting and handshakes between TV cameras.”

“We want a breakthrough in our relations. When the situation in western Ukraine improves radically, when we, the Orthodox and the Catholics, agree once and for all that we are not adversaries gaining believers over from each other, then a meeting between the Pope and the Moscow Patriarch will be possible,” he said.

Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Greek Catholics in western Ukraine “seized hundreds of Orthodox churches, and thousands of Orthodox believers were actually thrown out into the street,” Archbishop Hilarion said.

Sandro Magister offers analysis of an interview with Cardinal Kasper in “L’Osservatore Romano” on November 15 in which the cardinal discusses Anglicans heading to Rome and the reaction of the Orthodox.

In Cyprus, the news that the Catholic Church is ready to incorporate groups coming from Anglicanism also put the Orthodox on alert. Their fear is that a “Uniate” Church of the Anglican rite will be established and added to the “Uniate” Churches of the various Eastern rites: these are Churches obedient to the pope of Rome but in everything else the equals and rivals of the Orthodox.

[ … ]

“In Cyprus, in order to avoid misunderstandings, I immediately told our Orthodox counterparts that this is not a matter of proselytism or a new Uniatism. […] Uniatism is an historical phenomenon involving the Eastern Churches, while the Anglicans are from the Latin tradition. The Balamand document of 1993 is still valid, according to which this is a phenomenon of the past that took place in unrepeatable circumstances. It is not a method for the present or the future. The Orthodox were mainly interested in understanding the nature of the personal ordinariates for the Anglicans, and I clarified that this is not a matter of a Church ‘sui iuris’, and therefore there will not be the head of a Church, but an ordinary with delegated powers.”

In simpler terms: while a “Uniate” Church has its own structured hierarchy, with a patriarch and territorial dioceses, none of this will apply to the former Anglican “personal ordinariates,” which will provide pastoral care for the faithful but without their own ecclesiastical territory, a little bit like the military ordinariates.

Read Anglicans and Orthodox — Cardinal Kasper Between a Rock and a Hard Place on Chiesa

Moscow thanks Pope for not pressing on meeting

Kasper: Anglicans not Uniates