1330 Acta Apostolicae Sedis - Commentarium Officiale

II

Ad Suam Sanctitatem Bartholomaeum I, Patriarcham Oecumenicum, occasione Festi Sancti Andreae

To His Holiness Bartholomaios Archbishop of Constantinople Ecumenical Patriarch

Your Holiness, Beloved Brother in Christ,

A year has passed since we celebrated together, in the Patriarchal Church

in the Phanar, the feast of Saint Andrew, the first-called Apostle and brother

of Saint Peter. The occasion was a moment of grace which permitted me to

renew and to deepen, in shared prayer and personal encounter, the bonds

of friendship with you and with the Church over which you preside. It was

with joy that I also experienced the vitality of a Church which unceasingly

professes, celebrates and offers witness to faith in Jesus Christ, our one

Lord and Saviour. I am pleased once again to send a delegation of the Holy

See to the Patronal celebrations as a tangible sign of my fraternal affection

and the spiritual closeness of the Church of Rome to Your Holiness, as

well as to the members of the Holy Synod, the clergy, monks and all the

faithful of the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

In our profound communion of faith and charity, and grateful for all

that God has accomplished for us, I recall the fiftieth anniversary on 7

December 2015 of the Joint Catholic-Orthodox Declaration of Pope Paul VI

and the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I which expressed the decision

to remove from memory and from the midst of the Church the excommuni-

cations of 1054. The memory of the mutual sentences of excommunication,

together with the offensive words, groundless reproaches, and reprehensible

gestures on both sides, which accompanied the sad events of this period,

represented for many centuries an obstacle to rapprochement in charity

between Catholics and Orthodox. Attentive to the will of our Lord Jesus

Christ, who prayed to the Father on the eve of his Passion that his dis-

ciples "may be one" ( Jn 17: 21), Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras

I consigned these painful memories to oblivion. Since then, the logic of

antagonism, mistrust and hostility that had been symbolized by the mutual