Ecumenical

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.

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“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

From the Moscow Patriarchate, Nov. 12, 2009:

Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk

During his meeting with foreign media people on 11 November 2009, Archbishop Hilarion spoke on burning issues of inter-Christian relations. He said in particular that considerable improvements took shape in relations with the Roman Catholic Church in recent years. ‘There is a regular mechanism of mutual consultations and high-level visits… We can state that we are moving towards the moment when the preparation of a meeting between the Pope of Rome and the Patriarch of Moscow will become possible. I would like to underline that we have no concrete plans concerning the venue and date of this meetings but the both sides show a desire to prepare it’, he said.

According to His Eminence Hilarion, this meeting should serve to find ‘a common platform’ for issues of bilateral relations, which are still disputable or divisive. ‘As soon as it is found and appropriate agreements are prepared to be signed by the two Churches, this meeting will become possible’, he said.

‘The most important problem in our relations is that of Western Ukraine and the actions of the Greek-Catholic structures, which destroyed the fragile inter-confessional balance in the early 1990s to create the still remaining grave situation’, the archbishop said, reminding the journalists that during the last years of the Soviet Union’s existence, the Greek Catholics began to capture Orthodox churches en masse. These actions entailed violence, bloodshed and mutual accusations as many Orthodox churches were seized to remain in the hands of the Greek-Catholics to this day. Continue reading →