Constantinople hierarch: This year the Pope is going to surprise all of us

Patriarch Bartholomew and Pope Francis. Photo: The Catholic Sun

In an interview with the French outlet Le Point, Metropolitan Emmanuel of the Constantinople Patriarchate announced that in May, joint celebrations with Catholics will take place in Istanbul to mark the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea. The Council, he said, “not only established the Creed – the universal rule of faith – but also defined the method for calculating the annual date of Easter.”

“Today, Eastern Christianity calculates the date of Pascha (Easter) according to the Julian calendar, while Western Christianity uses the Gregorian calendar, which means Christians do not celebrate the Resurrection of Christ together – except in rare instances when the dates coincide, as will happen this spring,” the hierarch emphasized.

He recalled that “the issue has been raised repeatedly, but the decision has constantly been postponed.” Now, however, the Constantinople Patriarchate hopes the Catholics will adopt the Julian method for calculating Easter.

“Last June, when I was in Rome for the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, after the solemn Mass, Pope Francis invited me to stand next to him with the pallium – a sign of primacy in the Latin tradition – and quietly said to me: ‘You’ll see, next year will bring us a big surprise.’ I understood that he was planning to use the anniversary of the Council of Nicaea to announce his intention to end this division, which harms both the unity of Christians and their common witness to the world,” the hierarch stated.

He also emphasized what he called a “special spiritual closeness” in the relationship between Patriarch Bartholomew and Pope Francis.

“Their cooperation is above all theological in nature, as it addresses a dual ecclesiological challenge: Orthodoxy needs to reconsider the significance of church centralization, characteristic of Catholicism, while Catholicism needs to more deeply embrace the principle of conciliarity inherent in the Orthodox tradition. These conclusions were reached respectively by the Pan-Orthodox Council in Crete in 2016 and the Synod of Catholic Bishops in Rome in 2023–2024,” said the Metropolitan of Chalcedon.

He highlighted that for the Constantinople Patriarchate, Pope Francis “is first and foremost a herald of Christian unity, for whom the living power of faith matters more than institutional frameworks.”

Earlier, the UOJ reported that, according to Patriarch Bartholomew, there was no formal schism between Rome and Constantinople in 1054, and the division between Orthodox and Catholics will disappear in the coming years.

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