Today Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Pope Francis will meet at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to commemorate a meeting in the Holy Land fifty years ago by their revered predecessors, Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras and Pope Paul VI. The historic meeting in 1964 marked the beginning of a new era in the relations between the Churches of Rome and Constantinople, and indirectly between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy as a whole. The significance of that event can only be fully appreciated if placed in the context of a millennium dominated by theological estrangement and mutual mistrust between the two great traditions of the Church. This prayer service is expected to be a strong symbolic confirmation of the commitment and determination to continue the path, which the two great Church leaders inaugurated half a century ago. Their contemporary witness is in the same spirit of love and faithfulness to the truth of the Gospel, as was transmitted to us by the great Fathers of the Church. Moreover, the problems facing humanity throughout the world call for cooperative leadership between these leaders of Christianity.
The faithful can follow the events on: www.apostolicpilgrimage.org
http://www.goarch.org/news/apostolicpilgrimage
