I noted an article last month, in the Catholic Herald published on line in the UK, about a visit by Cardinal Kurt Koch to St. Petersburg and Moscow. You can read about it here:
The Cardinal speaks of improvements in relations between Orthodoxy in Russia and the Catholic Church, although there are, as one Catholic cleric residing in Russia puts it, “impediments.”
As anyone who knows something about the history of the Churches can tell you, these relations have been more than difficult. Orthodoxy in Russia is national, patriotic, an inheritor of a great spiritual tradition, and, as a Catholic priest in Moscow told us: a true Church.
We acknowledge as Catholics that the Orthodox Church possesses true sacraments and true apostolic succession.
And yet, we are divided, and have been for long.
Somehow – and I don’t know how – but somehow this must change, because, as brothers and sisters in Christ, as people who can affirm that Jesus of Nazareth, true God and true man, rose in the flesh from the dead for us, not just some of us but for all of us – we need each other and must come together to defend and spread the truth about human destiny and God’s sacrificial love for us.
It is not only that the people of the Churches need each other, but that the world needs a united, missionary Church for all peoples.
On my desk is a small three-folded card I picked up in Moscow as the Soviet Union was falling. Printed on it is the Nicene Creed in Church Slavonic. On the central panel is a reproduction of Andrei Rubliev’s icon of the Holy Trinity.
For all I know martyrs, or the sons and grandsons of martyrs, printed that card.
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