On May 31, 2019, Pope Francis met with Romanian Orthodox Patriarch Daniel and the Permanent Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church at the Palace of the Patriarchate in Bucharest. Below is the full text of the words he addressed to all those present:Your Holiness, Venerable Metropolitans and Bishops of the Holy Synod, Cristos a înviat! [Christ is risen!] The Lord’s resurrection is the very heart of the apostolic preaching handed down and preserved by our Churches. On the day of Easter, the Apostles rejoiced to see the Risen Lord (cf. Jn 20:20). In this Easter season, I too rejoice to see a reflection of him, dear Brothers, in your own faces. Twenty years ago, before this Holy Synod, Pope John Paul II said, “I have come to contemplate the Face of Christ etched in your Church; I have come to venerate this suffering Face, the pledge to you of new hope” (Address to Patriarch Teoctist and the Holy Synod, 8 May 1999: Insegnamenti XXII.1 [1999], 938). Today I too have come here as a pilgrim, a pilgrim brother, desirous of seeing the Lord’s face in the faces of my Brothers. As now I look at you, I offer you heartfelt thanks for your welcome. The bonds of faith that unite us go back to the Apostles, the witnesses of the risen Jesus, and in particular to the bond between Peter and Andrew, who according to tradition brought the faith to these lands. Blood brothers (cf. Mk 1:16-18), they were also in an exceptional way brothers in shedding their blood for the Lord. They remind us that there exists a fraternity of blood that precedes us and, like a silent and life-giving stream flowing down the centuries, has never ceased to nourish and sustain us on our journey. Here, as in so many other places nowadays, you have experienced the passover of death and resurrection: how man sons and daughters of this country, from various Churches and Christian communities, knew the Friday of persecution, endured the Saturday of silence and experienced the Sunday of rebirth. How many were the martyrs and confessors of the faith! In recent times, how many, from different confessions, stood side by side in prisons to support one another in turn! Today their example stands before us and before the young, who did not experience those dramatic conditions. What they suffered for, even to the sacrifice of their lives, is too precious an inheritance to be disregarded or tarnished. It is a shared inheritance and it summons us to remain close to our brothers and sisters who share it. United to Christ in suffering and sorrows, and united to Christ in the resurrection, so that “we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:4). Your Holiness, dear Brother, twenty-five years ago, the meeting between our Predecessors was an Easter gift, an event that contributed not only to renewed relations between Orthodox and Catholics in Romania, but also to the Orthodox-Catholic dialogue in general. That visit, the first of a Bishop of Rome to a country of Orthodox majority, opened the way to other similar events. Here I remember with gratitude Patriarch Teoctist. How can we fail to recall the spontaneous cry “Unitate, unitate!” that was raised here in Bucharest in those days! It was a proclamation of hope rising up from the people of God, a prophecy that inaugurated a new time: the time of journeying together in the rediscovery and revival of the fraternity that even now unites us. And this is already unitate. Journeying together with the strength of memory. Not the memory of wrongs endured and inflicted, judgments and prejudices, excommunications that enclose us in a vicious circle and bring only barrenness. Rather, the memory of roots: the first centuries when the Gospel, preached with boldness and prophetic spirit, encountered and enlightened new peoples and cultures; the first centuries of the martyrs, of the Fathers and the confessors of the faith, the holiness daily lived out and witnessed to by so many simple persons who share the same Christ. Those first centuries of parrhesia and prophecy. Thank God, our roots are sound, sound and sure, and, even if their growth has undergone the twists and turns of time, we are called, like the Psalmist, to remember with gratitude all that the Lord has done in our midst and to raise to him a song of praise for each other (cf. Ps 77:6.12-13). The remembrance of steps taken and completed together encourages us to advance to the future in the awareness – certainly – of our differences, but above all in thanksgiving for a family atmosphere to be rediscovered and a memory of communion to be revived, that, like a lamp, can light up the steps of our journey.
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Pope Francis addressed an interreligious meeting at the Istiqlal Mosque in Jakarta, on the second day of his Apostolic Visit to Indonesia.