ROME - MOSCOW RELATIONS
ON 1st DECEMBER, it was announced that the “Russian Orthodox Church has published a book in Italian and Russian with texts from Benedict XVI on the culture of Europe. This is the first time the Moscow Patriarchate is publishing a compilation of texts from a Pope. It is titled “Europe, Spiritual Homeland,” and includes addresses by Joseph Ratzinger during the course of more than a decade.… The volume will be introduced by the chairman of the Department of External Affairs of the Moscow Patriarchate, Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev. ‘This book is an event of unprecedented historic scope in the millennial history of Catholics and Russian Orthodox,’ explained the editor of the book, Pierluca Azzaro. ‘But before and above all, it is a great testimony of love of Christ and between Christians. From this love springs -- should spring -- European culture in all its manifold expressions: a living culture, imbued with an authentically creative moral energy, all together geared to the building of a good future for all. Europe -- the Pope, and Archbishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk in the beautiful introduction, tell us -- is a cultural continent that with its two wings, the Church of the East and of the West, rises above the narrow duality Russia-Western Europe,’ he said. ‘Europe is thus presented to our eyes as the common “spiritual homeland,” according to the beautiful expression used by the Pope in his last journey to the Czech Republic.’ Azzaro contended that only by jointly rediscovering and reaffirming this ‘vital dimension of Europe’ will a ‘downward decline’ be warded off. A vice-chairman of the patriarchate’s department of external affairs, Hieromonk Philip (Riabykh), said the book is a ‘testimony of the absolute identity of views and positions between the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church in regard to modern social processes’” (Source: Zenit). This seems the clearest endorsement by high representatives, though doubtless not by the vast majority of the faithful of the Moscow Patriarchate, of the modern papal theory which sees the Roman Catholic communion and the Orthodox Church as two lungs in the one body, and it is yet further evidence of the accelerating rapprochement between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Vatican.
