Vatican Insider: Benedict XVI and Kirill could be a step closer to meeting

Hopes for a meeting between Pope Benedict XVI and the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, Kirill, are rising:

A direct intervention, an unmediated contact. With his call to the Vatican in recent days, the chairman of the Department for External Relations of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk has placed himself at the forefront of an unexpected attempt to accelerate dealings between the Holy See and the Patriarchate of Moscow. He made a clarification which was not on the agenda, to facilitate the meeting between Benedict XVI and the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, Kirill. An historic "face to face" meeting that now seems less distant.

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During the present pontificate, relations have improved considerably between the Church of Rome and the bulk of Orthodoxy, represented by the Russian church. Both are increasingly in agreement about wanting to deal with what they consider to be the prime duty of Christians in Europe: a new evangelization of all those who are far from the faith. It is for this purpose that the Pope has decided to devote a specific Office of the Roman Curia to the new evangelisation.

In practice, however, there is one obstacle: the Ukraine. For Russians, the Ukraine is their birthplace. Russia arose in Kiev more than a millennium ago from the Viking principality of Rus', and it was there that it converted to Christianity; that is where the archetypes of its faith, art, liturgy, and monasticism lie. But the Ukraine is also home to the most populous Eastern rite Catholic Church in the world, with more than five million faithful . . . What the Orthodox Russians fear is that Rome will decide to elevate the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church to a Patriarchate. Indeed, nothing is more intolerable to the Russian ecclesiology than a "Roman" and rival patriarchy in a territory where there is already an Orthodox patriarchate . . . So these are the facts: if Rome shows that it does not want to elevate the Greek Ukranian Church to the patriarchate, then a meeting between the Russian Patriarch and Pope Benedict XVI can be held.

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Compared to the “big chill” between Moscow and Rome during the pontificate of the Pole, Karol Wojtyla, a lot of resistance to the Holy See in recent years has vanished . . .

Kirill I, Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus'