MEETING BETWEEN RUSSIAN ORTHODOX PATRIARCH AND THE POPE IS OFF

Fri 22 April 2022:

Pope Francis’s plan to meet with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill has been suspended, the pontifex told an Argentine newspaper.

Reuters reported last week that the pontifex was considering extending a trip to Lebanon in June to meet with Kirill who has been a staunch supporter of Russian’s invasion on Ukraine.

But Vatican’s diplomats have advised that such a meeting “could lend itself to much confusion at this moment,” Francis was cited as saying.

It would have been only their second meeting. Their first, in Cuba in 2016, was the first between a pope and a leader of the Russian Orthodox Church since the Great Schism that split Christianity into Eastern and Western branches in 1054.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill on Unity Day, Nov. 4, 2016, in Moscow. Photo courtesy of the Kremlin/Wikipedia/Creative Commons

On Tuesday, the head of the World Council of Churches is urged Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, to call for a cease-fire in Ukraine as Orthodox Christians celebrate Easter this weekend.

“People lost their trust and hope in politicians and in a possible peaceful negotiation and a ceasefire,” the Rev. Ioan Sauca, a Romanian Orthodox priest and acting general secretary of the World Council of Churches, wrote in a letter published Tuesday (April 19).

“We receive daily requests from the faithful in Russia and Ukraine but also from all over the world to contact Your Holiness and to ask to intervene and mediate for a peaceful solution, for dialogue rather than confrontation, for end to the fraternal blood shedding.”

Kirill has been widely criticized for first refusing to speak out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, then attempting to blame Western nations for the war and eventually calling it “a struggle that has not a physical, but a metaphysical significance.”

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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