Pope Francis to meet head of Russian Orthodox Church in historic meeting

Pope Francis and the head of the Russian Orthodox Church will meet in Cuba next week in what could be a historic step towards healing the 1,000-year-old rift between the Western and Eastern branches of Christianity.

“Dear Armenian Christians, today, with hearts filled with pain but at the same time with great hope in the risen Lord, we recall the centenary of that tragic event, that vast and senseless slaughter whose cruelty your forebears had to endure”, he said, stressing, “It is necessary, and indeed a duty, to honor their memory, for whenever memory fades, it means that evil allows wounds to fester”. The patriarch will be on an official trip to Cuba and the pope will make the brief stop en route to Mexico, the churches said in a joint statement.

But he said these differences were being put aside so that Patriarch Kirill and Pope Francis could come together over persecution of Christians.

The National Catholic Reporter adds: “Both former popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI had tried to organize meetings with the Russian patriarchs of their eras, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, but had failed for a variety of reasons”.

The persecution of Christians – Catholic and Orthodox – in the Middle East and Africa, however, has helped bring the two churches closer, the Associated Press notes.

Pope Francis and the Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia will meet in Cuba on Feb 12. It is significant also because the Russian Orthodox Church is the largest church in the Orthodox communion of churches; it has over 90 million members out of a total of over 200 million faithful.

He said he would pray with them “so that the problems of violence, corruption and everything that you know that is happening resolves itself, because the Mexico of violence, of corruption, of drug-trafficking and cartels isn’t the Mexico that our mother (the Madonna) wants”. I hope you like it a lot! Those talks have now borne fruit and open important new horizons for Catholics and Orthodox on the road to Christian unity and in particular in the relations between the Catholic and Russian Orthodox Churches.

About 75 percent of Russia’s 144 million people call themselves Russian Orthodox, according to the latest polls, although only a fraction of them say they are observant.