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Photo: Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I embrace.
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CWN - A bishop in Ethiopia has expressed horror at the looting of a Church compound, by a mob of "the people for whom, and with whom, we work closely."
Bishop Abraham Desta of Meki reported that a pastoral center in the Gighessa parish, the rectory, and a neighborhing Ursuline convent and clinic were thoroughly vandalized. Beds and bedding, office machines and generators, and even doors and windows were carried out of the church buildings. More than 13 tons of rice, wheat, and pasta was taken-- a year's worth of food for the complex-- along with livestock.
The mob attack occurred of February 19, while a conference on nursery education was being held, and the guests were quickly taken to safety. But the Ursuline sisters stayed with their patients at the clinic, until they too were driven out and the clinic was ransacked. "They have lost everything, except the precious gift of life that is being given freely by God almighty," the bishop said.
Bishop Desta said that he was unable to explain the reason for the attack. "Today there is a question in our hearts and minds: Why, Lord?" he said.
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CWN - Pro-family activists in Romania have collected more than 2 million signatures on a petition in support of a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
Only 500,000 signatures are required to begin the process of a constitutional amendment. But the Coalition for Family, composed of 23 different groups, said that it was deliberately collecting a number of signatures well above that minimum, to show the strength of support for the measure. The signatures collected represent more than 10% of Romania's total population.
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CWN - Pope Francis received the patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church in audience on February 29 and said that the blood of Christian martyrs is a summons to Christian unity.
With 41 million members, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is the largest of the Oriental Orthodox churches that ceased to be in full communion with the Holy See following the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon in 451. Its current patriarch, Abune Mathias, was elected in 2013.
“Just as in the early Church the shedding of the blood of martyrs became the seed of new Christians, so today the blood of the many martyrs of all the Churches has become the seed of Christian unity,” Pope Francis said.
“The martyrs and saints of all the ecclesial traditions are already one in Christ,” he continued. “Their names are inscribed in the one martyrologium of the Church of God. The ecumenism of the martyrs is a summons to us, here and now, to advance on the path to ever greater unity.”
Pope Francis added: "From the beginning, yours has been a Church of martyrs. Today too, you are witnessing a devastating outbreak of violence against Christians and other minorities in the Middle East and in some parts of Africa. We cannot fail, yet again, to implore those who govern the world’s political and economic life to promote a peaceful coexistence based on reciprocal respect and reconciliation, mutual forgiveness and solidarity."
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CWN - Patriarch Kirill of Moscow told reporters that he was “very frustrated” by Ukrainian Greek Catholic criticism of his February 12 joint declaration with Pope Francis, according to a Russian news report.
The patriarch made his remarks in Brazil as his trip to Latin America drew to a close.
“I am very frustrated by the negative reaction in Ukraine because this declaration also gives a chance for dialogue with the Greek Catholics,” he said. “If they operate within the paradigm outlined by this declaration, this is the foundation for normalization of the relations.”
Stating that the Eastern Catholics “spoke out directly against the Pope or, at least, against the position the Pope has taken,” Patriarch Kirill added that “instead of rejecting it at once, straight away, talking about the aggressor church, about having no fratricidal war, instead of using political clichés they should think and say: stop, stop, stop, it is opening a chance for us. But apparently, this is not the way people there are reasoning now.”
Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the leader of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, had told Catholic News Service that many of his people felt betrayed by the Pope’s support for the joint statement. At the same time, while expressing his own reservations about the statement, the Ukrainian prelate remarked that the Pope was “inviting us to lower our voices. You cannot have a dialogue shouting.”
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CWN - John X, the Orthodox patriarch of Antioch, and Theophilos III, the Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem, will meet in Cyprus in an attempt to resolve their jurisdictional dispute over the Orthodox faithful in Qatar, according to a French Orthodox site.
In 2014, the dispute led to a rupture in full Eucharistic communion between the patriarchs, and Archbishop Chrysostomos II of Cyprus has offered to help reconcile their differences before the pan-Orthodox synod takes place in June.
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CWN - In the final days of his journey to Latin America, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow traveled to Rio de Janeiro, where he prayed for persecuted Christians at the statute of Christ the Redeemer.
Catholics and Orthodox Christians “still have some doctrinal disagreements, but no one is preventing us from fighting, hand in hand, to end the persecutions, the ousting of Christian values, to end the de-Christianization of the 21st-century human civilization,” the Interfax news service quoted him as saying.
The patriarch lamented the situation in Europe:
where an evil political force disguised as tolerance is ousting Christianity out of the public life; when people are banned from wearing, in public places, and especially at the workplace, the cross that was laid upon them when they were baptized; when some countries ban the use of the word ‘Christmas,’ and replace it with an incomprehensible one, or simply call it a ‘winter holiday’; when a country passes legislation that justifies the human sin in the refusal to understand marriage as a sacred union between man and woman; when humankind still suffers from a huge number of abortions killing children, from the ever increasing number of divorces.
References:
- Georgian Orthodox Church rejects ecumenical document for worldwide Orthodox council
- Patriarch Kirill: 'powerful forces' opposed meeting with Pope
- Ukrainian Catholic leader renews criticism of statement by Pope, Russian patriarch
- The bishops of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the USA Meet With the Ecumenical Patriarch