The purpose of the Crete meeting was to prepare a working document in the run-up to the forthcoming plenary meeting of the Joint Commission for Dialogue, due to take place in Cyprus in 2009, on the invitation of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus. The document reads the release is "consistent" with the work that has already been carried out by the latest plenary session of Ravenna (in 2007), which focussed on: "The role of the Bishop of Rome in the communion of the Church in the first millennium". However, in Crete too as it happened in Ravenna last year , the delegates of the Patriarchate of Moscow did not appear in the list of participants. They did not take part in it, because the meeting was attended by the Orthodox Church of Estonia, whose "independence" is a debated and unsolved issue between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Patriarchate of Moscow. The planned participation of the Patriarch of Moscow, Alexius II, in the meeting of the primates of the autocephalous Orthodox Churches, due to take place in Istanbul (where the Ecumenical patriarchate, and therefore Patriarch Bartholomew I, are based) on 11th and 12th October, is very promising.
