Pope Francis Meets Patriarch Bartholomew I and Christians

From the outset, Pope Francis put his encounter with Patriarch Bartholomew 1, the Greek Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, at the centre of his pilgrimage.

Jun 13, 2014

By David M Neuhaus, SJ
From the outset, Pope Francis put his encounter with Patriarch Bartholomew 1, the Greek Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, at the centre of his pilgrimage. His primary motivation, as he said when he announced his visit to the Holy Land, was to commemorate the courageous meeting between Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras in 1964 and to push Catholic-Orthodox rapprochement forward. The magnificent scenes of the embrace of the two spiritual leaders — their greeting in the courtyard of the Church of the Resurrection, their standing alongside one another confessing their shared faith before the empty tomb, their veneration together of the place of the Crucifixion — are at the epicentre of this pilgrimage. It was while standing in front of the empty tomb of Christ that Pope Francis clearly and unequivocally defined the vocabulary, the grammar, the syntax of his prophetic imagination:

“Let us not allow ourselves to be robbed of the basis of our hope, which is this: Christos anesti! … We need to believe that, just as the stone before the tomb was cast aside, so too every obstacle to our full communion will also be removed. This will be a grace of resurrection, of which we can have a foretaste even today… Every time we reflect on the future of the Church in the light of her vocation to unity, the dawn of Easter breaks forth!”

This language frames the image of the embrace of two men who see in one another brother, friend and fellow disciple, even after centuries of division and polemic, rejection and exclusion. The past and the present are not thrown aside in an impulsive spiritual act, but neither are they permitted to blind one to the horizon that is revealed when God sends His Word and His Spirit on a mission of forgiveness, healing and reconciliation. This was not just a commemoration of the heroic embrace of Paul VI and Athenagoras, but also the iconic representation of what is possible if we have faith, a map of where we must head together, hand in hand.

In a moment of encounter, between himself, Patriarch Bartholomew I and all the heads of the Churches in Jerusalem, Pope Francis provided a key according to which all of the other stations in his pilgrimage could be understood: it is our willingness to come out of ourselves and move towards the ‘other’.

Pope Francis also came to the Holy Land as pastor of his flock. The four homilies addressed to the Christian faithful (at the Masses in Amman, Bethlehem [Manger Square] and Jerusalem [Cenacle], and the meeting with the religious men and woman at Gethsemane) were exhortations to the Christians to be ‘salt and light’ in their societies, witnesses to the possibilities on the horizon, builders of bridges to replace the walls.

He called on the Christians to take up the yoke of discipleship and go out as witnesses to the Risen Lord. Intimately and painfully aware of the constraints on Christian life in the Holy Land and throughout the region, the Pope insisted that the Christians carry out their mission with courage and joy.

Total Comments:0

Name
Email
Comments