Benedict XVI's pontificate
'decisive' for ecumenical dialog,
Cardinal Kasper says
Translated from
July 3, 2009
"The pontificate of Benedict XVI, which has been welcomed with enthusiasm by the Orthodox Churches since he is a connoisseur of the theology of the Fathers of the Church, has been decisive for the recent positive turn in the ecumenical dialog", according to Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.
Kasper was in Vienna for a meeting with the Pro Oriente Foundation arranged by the Archdiocese of Vienna.
The German cardinal spoke about the present status of the dialog between the Eastern and Western Churches and the efforts that had been necessary to reach the present state of rapprochement, particularly what he called the turning-point reached in the past few years.
The next meeting of the mixed international commission for theological dialog between the Catholic and Orthodox churches will take place in Cyprus this October (last year's meeting was in Ravenna).
"No one reasonably expects that all problems will be resolved in Cyprus," he noted. "The distinctive developments [in the Catholic Church] during the second millennium [after the Great Schism of 1054) up to the Second Vatican Council loom as a huge obstacle still to be dealt with," he noted.
Thus, the mixed commission is now working on reaching some preliminary agreement based on the experience of the pre-Schism Church in the first millennium.
John Paul II in the encyclical Ut Unum Sint
('That they may be one', 1996) had suggested "a form of exercise of the primacy of Peter that is acceptable to both sides, starting from the substance of dogma" as practised in the Church of the first millennium.
Benedict XVI re-proposed this during his visit to the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul in November 2006.
[Last year, the mixed commission in Ravenna agreed to examine the role of the Pope in the first millennium in order to define it in a reunified Church. That is the specific task of the Cyprus meeting in October.
However, the Russian Orthodox Church did not sign on to that agreement because its delegation walked out before the meeting began, to protest what they called 'interference' by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in the Estonian Orthodox Church, over which the Patriarchate of Moscow claims jurisdiction.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 03/07/2009 11:50]