A new era?

“He even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak” (Mk 7:37) is the theme of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity that opened yesterday, 18 January, and that will end on the 25th. This year the Week follows some significant ecumenical events which revived dialogue between the Christian churches in 2006. In an interview with SirEurope (cf. SIR 4/2007), Cardinal Walter Kasper, President of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity, listed them as follows: “First of all, the international dialogue with all the Orthodox Churches was resumed. Then there was the Pope’s visit to Turkey, marked by the meeting with the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I at Istanbul. That was followed by the visit to Rome of the Archbishop of Athens Christodoulos, which was truly an historic event. In addition, we also made progress in dialogue with the Churches of the Reformation with the visit to the Vatican of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. It was truly a very rich year and we are grateful to the Lord for it”. Altogether an excellent preparation for the key event in 2007, the Third European Ecumenical Assembly (Sibiu, Romania, 4-9 September). TURKEY. As explained by Father RUBEN TIERRABLANCA , of the ecumenical fraternity of Istanbul, the reverberations of Benedict XVI’s visit to Turkey are still being felt and offer new stimuli. “We feel – he tells SIR – the freshness of a new era after this historic visit. And the annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity in our local church gives us the chance to express this deep desire of Jesus: “that they may all be one”. In this spirit the ecumenical commission of the Churches present in Istanbul met to organize a kind of ecumenical pilgrimage to the various churches”. “We also anticipated the Week by a few days – he points out – to have more time at our disposal and to meet together every evening. We began on 14 January with the first meeting organized by the Catholic Church of Latin rite in the chapel of the Austrian lycée of St. George run by the Lazarist Fathers. Other churches that are opening their doors to all the Christians of Istanbul during this week are: the Greek-Orthodox church (St. Constantine), the Armenian apostolic church (St. Vartanants), some Protestant communities, and the church of the patriarchal Vicariate of the Syrian orthodox. We in the Catholic Church will have another day of prayer in the church of the Sacred Heart, of Syrian rite”. BULGARIA. Ecumenical meetings and prayers are also taking place in Bulgaria. In the diocese of Nicopoli, for example, during this Week for Christian Unity there will be ecumenical prayers with Orthodox and Protestant representatives. An event of major importance is the Sunday mass of 21 January in the Cathedral of Russe, “St Paul of the Cross”, where the parish priest Walter Gora has invited Nicolaj, Protestant pastor of the local Methodist church, to give the homily. ROMANIA. “The vocation of the Church of Christ is to bring peace. Christians are called by the Head of the Church, the Lord Jesus Christ, to preach peace and to practice it with good works together with all those who share the universal virtues such as goodness, truth and justice”. That’s a passage from the message for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity issued by the Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church, TEOCTIST . “From a religious point of view – he writes – Romania is a kind of Europe in miniature, thanks to the good relations that subsist between the Orthodox Church and the other churches and confessions. This way of living and cooperating together between our Churches will help us to overcome the tendencies of secularisation and agnosticism, exemplified by those who want to remove religion from the life of society in the name of false appeals to freedom of conscience. ENGLAND. The meeting between the Anglican Rowan Williams and Benedict XVI seems to have revived ecumenical dialogue also in England, where the Churches are engaged in various activities, especially promoted by the ecumenical association “Churches Together in Britain and Ireland”. The Christian churches, Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostals and members of the united Reformed churches will thus pray together in the Baptist church of Loughborough, a town in the Midlands, on Sunday 21 January. “There’s no doubt that ecumenical relations have improved in a significant way compared with what they were thirty or forty years ago, when it was inconceivable even to pray together”, explains the parish priest of St. Mary’s, Father Philip. “Today the priests of the various churches meet together every two or three months and relations between us are excellent”. According to ELENA CURTI , assistant editor of the Catholic weekly “The Tablet”, among the most read by Catholics and Protestants, “some parishes have excellent ecumenical relations with other Christian churches and working together becomes almost second nature. They organize joint services and moments of shared prayer also at Christmas, at Easter and on the Sunday when the dead of the two world wars are commemorated. According TO ANDREW FALEY , general secretary for ecumenical relations of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, “this year the Week is looking in particular at a deeper way of praying”.