WP/AP: Pope Benedict Pledges to Mend Orthodox Rift

Benedict Pledges to Mend Orthodox Rift

By NICOLE WINFIELD
The Associated Press
Sunday, May 29, 2005; 9:43 AM


BARI, Italy -- Pope Benedict XVI visited this eastern Italian port on his first papal trip Sunday and pledged to make healing the 1,000-year-old rift with the Orthodox church a "fundamental" commitment of his papacy.

Benedict made the pledge in a city closely tied to the Orthodox church. Bari, on Italy's Adriatic coast, is considered a "bridge" between East and West and is home to the relics of St. Nicholas of Myra, a fourth century saint who is one of the most popular in both the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches.

Benedict referred to Bari as a "land of meeting and dialogue" with the Orthodox in his homily at a Mass that closed a national religious conference. It was his first pilgrimage outside Rome since being elected the 265th leader of the Roman Catholic Church on April 19.

"I want to repeat my willingness to assume as a fundamental commitment working to reconstitute the full and visible unity of all the followers of Christ, with all my energy," he said to applause from the estimated 200,000 people at the Mass.

Words aren't enough, he said, adding that "concrete gestures" were needed even from ordinary Catholics to reach out toward the Orthodox....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/29/AR2005052900166.html

although he wanted to. THe historic tension and distrust between the Polish and Russians precluded any attempt at reunification.

and not just report on his foreign junkets.

There are going to be a lot of quiet but bad changes in the church. Levanda is a master of secrecy.

and then Master Moon will make us all Moonies.

They'd be their own rite - like the Ukrainian rite, which is under the pope, but not part of the roman rite.

marry? How does he plan to address that issue? By using the same loophole that allows married protestant ministers to covert and become priests?

If he could bring the Orthodox church with its married priests into the Roman church, that would further pry open the door to allowing Roman Catholic men who are already married to become priests. It won't happen under this Pope, but it looks like he is setting the stage.

Ukrainian Catholic priests are currently married, as are Greek and other Byzaantine Catholic priests. Our priests have been married with children for the past dozen assignments. Our first priest had all 3 of his sons die in WWII.

The church already allows married priests - just not in the "roman" rite - which is by far the largest rite.

allowed to be married, but not marry.

If they enter the priesthood married, fine; if they enter single, fine.

If they desire to be married, they have to do it before they are elevated to Priest.

Bishops are always unmarried; the demands of the job would be too much for a family man.

priest-in-training in it (the guy was American, son of Russians, and wanted to improve his Russian).

He was desparately looking for a wife before he was ordained.

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But it ain't gonna happen.

The only way for the Church of Rome and the Orthodox Church to "unite" would be for the RCC to cease to exist in it's present form.

No more Universal Jurisdiction, no more Papal Infallibility, no more RCC doctrines like the immaculate conception, indulgences and special dispensations, satisfactionism, etc. (And a thousand other changes that I guarantee Roman Catholics will not make.)


Ratzinger would just be another Bishop, no different than, or superior to, any other.
It's all pretty much just empty rhetoric.

Unless Benedict is planning another crusade, perhaps?

(BTW - I'm Orthodox; I've heard this nonsense before. We have absolutely no desire to join, unite, or have really anything to do ecclesiastically with Rome. However, Rome would love to engulf us anyway...)

...it is empty rhetoric, and the attempt to heal the breech between these two churches, has been attempted by much greater minds than that of the current pope.

Anyway, as you stated, the Orthodox Church would never go along with this.

Pope Tells Journalists To Search For 'Truth'
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/23/AR2005042301372.html?nav=rss_world/europe

The Vatican has sought the intervention of the U.S. State Department to declare Pope Benedict XVI immune from a sexual abuse lawsuit filed here, according to court documents.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3201751

Vatican said Monday there was no investigation under way of allegations that the Mexican founder of a conservative religious order sexually abused seminarians
http://www.winktv.com/x466.xml?URL=http://localhost/APWIREFEED/d8a8vi600.xml

Vatican Reportedly Clears Priest
Vaca, a former priest, is one of at least eight men in Mexico and the United States who have accused the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado of molesting them when they were teenage seminary students in the 1940s, '50s and '60s.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/22/AR2005052200966.html?nav=rss_world/europe

Despite the horrific drumbeat of child molestation revelations, however, sensible Catholics hoping for a more transparent and less sexually repressed church shouldn't hold their breath. The new pope is not only a longtime leader of vicious church attacks on "evil" gays, he also has shamefully blamed the molestation scandal on the media.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/thenation/20050524/cm_thenation/20050606scheer0524_1

Vatican Accused of Child Molestation Cover-Up
http://atheism.about.com/b/a/098516.htm

Survivors Network says the overwhelming majority of its members have never sued and are too traumatized to do so. They say they adopted their tactics after bishops promised for years to take action against guilty clergy, then never did.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7463011/page/2

Pope's Nazi past
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7576505 /

???
I am waiting for the silent purge.

espically rural areas. This is because of the low number of priests in which they need every able body right now. If there was not a manpower crunch, you would expect this to happen. Instead, they will just weed out the more free thinkers in seminary and only let more "orthodox" RCC priests take over.

That would fit in with the leaner, more rigid style that Rome is promoting right now.

On a side note, check out this rant against any free thinking from a Cardnial in Peru:
http://www.cwnews.com/news/viewstory.cfm?recnum=37481

kissing the pope's hand(ring). Makes me sick, just as bad as american idol.

My Antiochian (arab) Orthodox fellow parishoners do the same every day, plus kiss on both cheeks (yeah, the men too...) in greeting and such. At least with us it's a cultural holdover - nobody freaks out about it (not saying that you are, mind you...). We kiss everything; the Gospel Book, the priests hand, lots and lots of Icons and each other. It's a very physical connection to many things.

It might indeed look strange to western eyes used to more "conservative" display in church.

the Orthodox Church believes the Catholics broke away from THEM, not the other way around (and if you look at a diagram of how the Church evolved, they're right--Orthodoxy was the first Church). Believe me, an Orthodox priest here and there may state that he thinks this is a good idea, but the people with power in Orthodoxy want to have nothing to do with them. The very most important thing to know about Orthodoxy is that they do not allow new interpretations or beliefs into the system. The Church in many ways is pretty much the same as it was hundreds of years ago, and they don't want to change that.

Yes, Orthodox priests can be married; however, only unmarried males may become bishops or higher. I think the rule is that you can get married before you are ordained; after that, you cannot marry, so you will see may young men studying for the priesthood getting married before their ordinations.

I was a member of an Orthodox church for a few years. The "cradles" who have been Orthodox their entire lives and come from an Orthodox background are very wary of any religion outside their church. I remember we had an Orthodox priest speak to the congregation who had converted from a fundamentalist background where they believed in being gifted in the Spirit and speaking in tongues, etc. Some of the members of my church never got over him--they were uphappy with the "dangerous precident" being set of allowing non-orthodox beliefs to somehow get filtered into the Church. Having a more traditional Christian upbringing, I didn't see anything wrong--it wasn't overt, he merely mentioned some things. His teachings and beliefs were consistent with Orthodoxy, but people talked for weeks about it.

Anyway, my point is that I doubt anything will come of this. The Orthodox Church has not been willing so far to get back together with the Catholics--I don't see anything changing on that front. They cherish their Church too much to do anything that might alter it.

And you're right about letting in outside heterodox beliefs; the Church is death on the matter. That's probably why it has survived relatively unchanged since the first century.

Yes, I'm still infuriated over his role in covering up for child rapists. It's this condition I have.

Healing rifts are important, but I think healing the childrens' lives you helped destroy is also important.

There are several, I believe, pretty much independent. I've known Russian, Macedonian, and Greek orthodox, and they were fairly adamant about being either Russian, Macedonian, or Greek.

...just divided along national distinctions. The US is still technically mission territory. The Russians got here first on the west coast and the Arabs, Greeks, Poles, etc. each brought their Church here when they emigrated. It's really a unique and sometimes confusing arrangement here. The Russian Revolution exacerbated it even more.

All canonical Orthodox share the same doctrines and beliefs as one Church, but there are some cultural and ethnic differences between the different jurisdictions.