Your Eminence and Beloved Brother in Christ, Walter Cardinal Kasper, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, and Honorable Members of the Delegation of the Sister Church of Rome,
Your Eminences,
Honorable Archon Grand Deputy and Archons of the Great Church of Christ,
Your Excellencies,
Beloved Brothers and Children in the Lord,
Celebrating today the blessed memory of St. Andrew, the First-called Apostle, the founder of our Church, we first express our admiration and joy because it is through His prayers and blessings that our Church grew and was glorified, was persecuted and survived, and still lives and exists to this very day. The little leaven of the first few believers, through the uncreated energy of the Holy Spirit, leavened such a multitude of persons and peoples, and cultivated to a great spiritual depth and width the ferment of the Most Holy Church of Constantinople, so that she was be able to carry on her shoulders the great responsibility in matters of the church that have been commissioned to her through the decisions of the Ecumenical Synods.
We then would like to express our gratitude to God for the fact that He makes us worthy of ministering this Church that has been persecuted for centuries and undergone many trials and tribulations. However, she has also proven true the words of God to Apostle Paul “my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2Cor 12:9).
In such a joyful state of wonder, gladness and gratitude we feel deeply your brotherly love, Your Excellency Cardinal Kasper, as well as the love of our very beloved brother His Holiness, Pope of Rome Benedict XVI, who has sent this official Delegation, and we would like to thank all of you wholeheartedly for coming here today to celebrate with us.
Our brotherly feelings are however, permeated by sorrow that comes from the fact that we have still not succeeded to partake from the one Bread and to drink from the same Cup, that in accord with the Apostle, we, who are many, might be one body (1Cor 10:17). Sincerely, we experience both ontologically and existentially intensely this sorrow of spiritual separation, a separation more painful than any other separation.
It is for the accomplishment of this desired unity of all in Christ that we deeply pray to God, but we also urge to our fellow man a productive, good faith dialogue.
Our Lord Jesus Christ is knocking unceasingly on the doors of the hearts of all people, waiting for them to open, so that He will enter them and bring them the peace that is above all, the knowledge of the truth, life and freedom. Our prayer is in harmony with His work. We ask that He may ever invite all people to Himself, to joy and freedom, to life and eternity.
Our invitation for dialogue addresses all people, regardless of faith or standing, and its final goal is for all to learn the truth that is in Christ and to taste the great delight that derives from knowing Christ. This can only be attained if we replace the division that exists in our hearts for one another for the purpose of unifying in Christ with all, a unity which is the fullness of love and joy.
Certainly, the course for the unification of all has levels and stages of progress, and is an issue, that goes beyond the lifetime of many.
First of all, there is the need to soften widespread human adversity and gradually to create relations of mutual acceptance and tolerance and, even better trust.
The anticipated goal of this dialogue is not the personal victory of one side of the participants over the other; the goal is to discover a ray of truth and commonly accept it. The discovery and acceptance of the first ray of truth should then lead to the discovery of yet another one, and so on. The more the mind of a human being is enlightened, the more he discovers that peaceful coexistence with his fellow human beings is beneficial to all.
The fullness of the truth however, cannot be obtained or ensured by means of accuracy in its expression, because it is chiefly an ontological reality; it is an experience in Christ; it is Christ. Living in Christ cannot be achieved only by means of intellect. It also requires a genuine grafting into Him, as in a well-cultured olive tree (Rom 11:23), the communion of His body and spirit (1Cor 10:16), the ascent to Mt. Tabor and participation in the Transfiguration (Matt 17:2-6), so that we will be enlightened by the uncreated divine light and recognize Jesus, who is walking with us in a different guise and is known “in the Breaking of the Bread” (Lk 24:35).
All these do not render necessary the correctness of the formulation of the truth. However, they make clear that the formulation cannot fully express and substitute reality. The formulation palisades the boundaries beyond which truth ceases to exist, but the full knowledge of truth, i.e. the ontological participation in it, is not given only to the one knowing its formulation and analysis.
Nevertheless, the Holy Fathers expressed with much zeal and attention the dogmatic Terms of the Holy Ecumenical Synods in an effort to protect us from an inadvertent overstepping of the boundaries of truth and a fall in the realm of error and deception.
Therefore, the terms simply denote the truth; they do not embody it. In spite of that, they are necessary and useful, and their understanding helps (especially if it is combined with love, faith, prayer and other virtues) in the preparation for the acceptance of the great event of the real encounter of the soul with Christ and her incorporation into His body. Then the truth is being lived and all discussions concerning this issue cease.
Once the truth is lived, then she transforms the one who experiences her into a herald of the Gospel of peace and salvation, saying together with the Apostle “woe unto me, if I preach not the gospel”(1Cor 9:16).
With regards to this matter, one of the contemporary ascetics, confirming through his experience the unceasing experiential tradition of the Church, says: “The Christian…once he finds Christ, once he knows Christ, once Christ enters his insignificant soul and he feels Him, he then wants to call out and tell it ‘on the mountain’, he wants to talk about Christ, what Christ is: you love Christ and prefer nothing else to His love. Christ is everything, He is the source of life, He is everything. Everything beautiful and good exists in Christ”.
Our effort to develop dialogues is, as proven from the aforementioned, an effort that aims at its final stage to know the person and the love of Christ. It does however, have to pass through the previous stages of getting to know and loving our fellow men, finding common ground, and points of reference and communication among them, as it is said by the Apostle who has become all things to all men that he might by all means save some (1Cor 9:22).
Our effort in this, although it is of course pleasing in the eyes of God, Who wants the unity of all in Christ, is being judged and criticized in many ways.
Some, who belong already to the Church, fear that the invitation that we extend to the heterodox for unity, and to those of different faith for a peaceful coexistence, conceals concession to the truth. They believe that this entails acceptance of syncretism, or even that the unity is pursued within the framework of abandoning certain truths in order to agree on others and therefore to unite.
This is not true; because the unity of Christians is not possible to be achieved outside the one and only Jesus Christ, Who does not accept contradictory or different accounts and descriptions, the personal and sole expresser of the truth, of the self-truth. It is not possible for us to be united, if we ignore the face of Christ, and all that it expresses.
Therefore, if we try to find human expressions of the truth, that, due to their conciseness or even their obscurity, give the impression that we are in agreement, we will not be successful in our unity. This will be because in such a case we simply deceive ourselves, by creating an apparent unity, underneath which we assiduously cover our disagreement. It is however, impossible for the concealed disagreement to remain forever in secret. Sooner or later the time will come when it will surface and it will thus reveal the decayed and decrepit nature of a hollow unity.
Some show their disbelief in the sincerity of those in dialogue. They suspect that traps have been set in place by our counterparts in the dialogues, to snare us, so that they can win whatever they desire to our detriment. We cannot of course rule out the possibility of a collocutor being dishonest and pretentious. We however, have our hopes in God Who knows our sincerity, that he will not allow us to hurt the truth in case we become victims of insincere collocutors.
Others refer to cases of the historical past, during which similar dialogues failed, and they claim that this will repeat itself with the dialogues of our times. Thus, they come to their conclusion that the new dialogues are in vain because they are destined to fail. If however, even one soul benefits from these dialogues and returns from her erroneous path to the truth of Christ, our hard work is worth it, because the one soul is worth more than the entire world.
There are also those who support the idea that the dialogues are nothing but the deceptive way of the devil to seduce us through his arguments and to turn us towards his gilded deceptions, as has been the case for many who while they began with the purpose to vitiate the enemy’s arguments, being tempted by what was promised to them were finally taken over by the enemy.
Indeed, there are in the course of history such incidents, but we fear not, for we do not depend on our own strength to remain in the truth, but on the irresistible power of God. It is Him that we beseech to protect and safeguard the collocutors who have the right and sound knowledge, from being seduced into the errors of their brothers. Moreover, it is not proper and right for fear to become the advisor in our actions, “because greater is he that is in us, than he that is in the world” (1Jh 4:4).
Thinking in this manner, we have as our advisor St John of the Ladder, who advises us to never get tired of conversing with those who in good faith are asking from us the reason of the hope that we have within us. We have as our role model the one whom we celebrate and honor today, our patron saint, St Andrew the Apostle, the First-called, and all the Apostles throughout the centuries, who courageously conversed with our idolatrous forefathers and with all those who held heterogeneous beliefs and called them to the knowledge of Christ.
Being aware of the reservations, we desire the dialogue with all: Christians who belong to the same denomination and those who are heterodox; people of the same faith and those of a different faith; so that we might reach a better understanding of one-another, and develop peaceful relations; so that one day we may realize the much-desired peaceful coexistence of humanity. If then we are asked to provide an individual with the opportunity to meet Christ, inviting that person to see Him living in the Church, we will do so with joy. The manner and goal of each dialogue differs of course according to the situation, but the disposition is always peaceful and friendly.
As far as the Theological Dialogue with the respected and beloved Roman Catholic Church is concerned, we have the desire to continue it, having overcome the obstacles that have arisen, with the intervention of the new Primate of the Church of Rome. The honorable and beloved, His Holiness Benedict XVI Pope of Rome, certainly desires the cultivation of the good relations between us, as well as the promotion of the cooperation and in due time the unity of the Churches. We anticipate his visit here with honor and joy, once his obligations and responsibilities will allow him to do that.
We also express our happiness for the mutual lifting of the excommunications that took place the 7th of December 1965, forty years ago and brought about a change in the climate of the relations of the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Christians, and allowed the restoration of peace between them, as well as the beginning and continuation of the dialogue, regardless of some obstacles in the process.
A dialogue that is dispassionate and without any prejudices can be only beneficial, despite the hesitations that some may have, being afraid of the tensions of the past, which had then led to the anathemas that have already been lifted. In any case, it is beyond any doubt that a deviated course of a thousand years cannot converge into unity overnight. But we ought to have that convergence into unity as a vision and work hard for its realization. It is in this direction that the participation of representatives of the one Church to conferences and meetings of members of the other Church aims at. An example of this is the recent Conference of the Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church that came together to discuss the topic of the Holy Eucharist. That Conference was attended by our representative, His Eminence and beloved brother, Metropolitan John of Pergamon, who is also co-president together with Your Eminence, in the Joint Commission of our Theological Dialogue. Such was also the case when You, Your Eminence our brother attended our recent Inter-religious Conference here on the topic of Peace and Tolerance.
We would like to thank wholeheartedly His Holiness the Pope of Rome Benedict XVI for participating in our joy through his Delegation, as well as all those who participate in the celebration of this Feast Day of the Throne of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and we invoke on all the grace and the abundant mercy of God, through the intercessions of our honored patron St Andrew, the Apostle, the First-Called. Amen.
