Week 1-7 february:
• First meeting ever of Catholic pope and Russian patriarch
Pope Francis and the head of the Russian Orthodox Church will take place in Cuba next week.
• It could be a historic step towards healing the 1,000-year-old rift between the Western and Eastern branches of Christianity.
• The Vatican and the Moscow Patriarchate announced on Friday that Francis will stop in Cuba on Feb. 12 on his way to Mexico to hold talks with Patriarch Kirill, the first in history between a Roman Catholic pope and a Russian Orthodox patriarch.
• Modern popes have met in the past with the Istanbul-based ecumenical patriarchs, the spiritual leaders of Eastern Orthodoxy, which split with Rome in 1054.
• Those patriarchs play a largely symbolic role, while the rich Russian church wields real influence because it counts some 165 million of the world’s 250 million Orthodox Christians.
• The Vatican said the leaders would hold several hours of private talks at Havana airport, deliver public speeches and sign a joint statement.
• The meeting was brokered by Cuban President Raul Castro, who hosted the pope in Cuba last year.
• Significantly, the Vatican had helped arrange the recent rapprochement between Cuba and the United States.
• long-standing differences between the two churches would remain, most notably a row over the Eastern Rite church in Ukraine that is allied with Rome.
• But they will be put aside so that Kirill and Francis could work together against the persecution of Christians in the Middle East. Both Francis and Kirill have often decried their oppression and killing by Islamist militants.
• The Russian Church has accused Catholics of trying to convert people from Orthodoxy after the break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, a charge the Vatican has denied.
• One particularly sore point is the fate of church properties that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin confiscated from Eastern Rite Catholics in Ukraine and gave to the Russian Orthodox there.
• After the call of communism, Eastern Rite Catholics took back many church properties, mostly in western Ukraine.