Meeting between Kasper and Kirill” “

“Right from the start of his pontificate the Pope has declared that this is his fundamental priority. We are here to see what kind of new steps we can take”, said Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, on visiting Moscow at the end of June. There he had a series of meetings and talks with the Patriarchate of Moscow and the leaders of the Catholic Church in Russia. Commenting on the possibility of meeting Patriarch Alexis II, the Cardinal said during an interview with the Catholic press agency AsiaNews: “I have made no request to meet him since we are still at the start of our work”. The meeting with Metropolitan Kirill, second in the hierarchy of the Orthodox Patriarchate, however, was eagerly awaited. The meeting, which was supposed to be brief according to the communiqué put out by the hierarchy in Moscow, in actual fact ran to three hours, as the Ria-Novosti agency reported. Father Vsevolod Ciaplin, right-hand man of Metropolitan Kirill, did not go into detail about the substance of the talks. He observed however that both sides were unanimous in underlining “the special importance of cooperation between the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches in affirming the Christian spiritual and moral values among individuals, in families and in society, in a period in which the peoples, in Europe and in the world, are suffering from a moral crisis and from the imposition of a secularised conception of the world”. Nor did Father Ciaplin fail to advert to the concerns of the Patriarchate of Moscow in response to what are perceived to be acts of Catholic proselytism in territories considered historically Orthodox. In particular Metropolitan Kirill re-asserted, “in an explicit way and with firmness, the opposition of the Russian Church to any proposal for the transfer “of the seat of the head of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic community” from the Western city of Lviv, a traditionally Catholic enclave of the Ukraine, to Kiev, cradle of Muscovite Orthodoxy. “Such a transfer – said Ciaplin – would represent a grave obstacle for the development of amicable relations between the two Churches hoped for both by Patriarch Alexis II and by the new pope Benedict XVI and necessary for our faithful, and for the peoples of Europe and the world”. “The Catholic delegation – concluded the spokesman of the Patriarchate – took note of our position”.