Posted on 01/27/2016 6:27:19 AM PST by marshmallow
Moscow, January 26, Interfax - The assumptions about a possible meeting between Patriarch Kirill and Pope Francis in a Latin American country this February are baseless, the Synodal Department for External Church Relations told Interfax-Religion.
"The Patriarch and the Pope's Latin American visit programs do not intersect," the Russian Orthodox Church's spokesman for inter-Christian relations, Hieromonk Stefan (Igumnov) told the agency on Tuesday, commenting on recent rumors in the foreign press about a possibility of such a meeting during the two church leaders' visits to that region in February.
"The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church and the head of the Roman Catholic one will be visiting completely different countries, albeit on the same continent," the spokesman said.
Concurrently, he recalled that the subject of a meeting between the Moscow Patriarch and the Pope is raised in the media from time to time and was repeatedly commented upon by the Church officials who said that "a discussion of its possibility is invariably present on the agenda of the bilateral relations, but no specific time and place of such a meeting have yet been stipulated."
The Russians are terrified that they might look interested in meeting the pope. They had numerous opportunities with Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict and blew each and every time. It’s pathetic.
Or alternatively, they really don’t give a bleep about meeting the Pope.
“Or alternatively, they really don’t give a bleep about meeting the Pope.”
Oh, but they do: that’s why they’ve been talking about it and setting conditions for it for years and years already.
http://orthodoxeurope.org/page/7/1/37.aspx
By the way, in the late 90s and early 2000s there were plenty of articles in print where the Russian Orthodox talked about how they wanted help from the Catholic Church on dealing with materialism, consumerism, modernism, liberalism, etc. They wanted help with all that, but they didn’t want any Catholic dioceses in Russia (tough, we established them), and they didn’t want Catholics to reclaim their stolen churches in Ukraine or anywhere else (tough, we reclaimed them). The Eastern Orthodox have never blinked an eye as establishing new dioceses in the West, but if Catholics establish new dioceses in the East to minister to Catholics literally exiled by Russian/Communist/Orthodox authorities that was supposedly wrong. Oh, well, tough.
The Eastern Orthodox Churches are like women. They play hard to get. They’re emotional. They change the subject. They bring up past hurts from eons ago. And they never forget past wrongs, whether real or imagined, all the while having amnesia about their own past transgressions.
The Catholic Church, on the other hand, is like a man: logical, methodical, rational - sometimes to a fault - as always pointed out by the Eastern Orthodox lady of the house; often seeing problems as things to be worked out rather than graces to be received; and sometimes missing the mystical forest for the logical trees.
And nothing will change until everybody gets over themselves. There is no logical reason why the Patriarch of Moscow out of fraternal love should muster up the guts to meet the pope somewhere, sometime, somehow. The popes have been offering such a meeting for years. The Greeks have done it. The EC has done it. The Russians? Women playing hard to get.
When the pope meets Eastern Orthodox leaders there are ZERO protests in the West on the part of Catholics. In the East? Oh, the Orthodox make a show of their emotions:
http://www.edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/06/23/pope.background/index.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5oOmNe0GdU
Women. Emotional, overwrought women.
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