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5 September 2007 05/09/2007 17:30

Press release No. 008 (EN)5 September 2007

BARTHOLOMEW, KASPER, KIRILL AND HUBER MEET THE MEDIA



Four leading Christians, speakers at the 3rd European Ecumenical Assembly (EEA3) during its first morning session, took questions at press conferences on Wednesday afternoon. His All Holiness Bartholomew, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, appeared prior to departure for an environmental symposium in Greenland. Another news conference featured His Eminence Metropolitan Kirill, chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate?s department of external church relations, His Eminence Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, and Bishop Wolfgang Huber, chair of the council of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD).

 

Asked about climate change, Patriarch Bartholomew said that stewardship of the earth ?is a general question that applies to all, regardless of faith, regardless of background?. But for Christians, ?the ecological problem is a moral and theological problem.? The patriarch reaffirmed the role of the ecumenical movement, including EEA3, in addressing matters of both faith and action.

 

Metropolitan Kirill asserted that this is ?the time for a critical review of this movement?, calling for a higher priority in the churches? common agenda for ?the moral basis of our relationship to one another?. The cause of many crises today, he argued, is sin. And it is the churches that are called to be communities of healing from sin. ?The churches must send the world a strong signal? based on ?the authentic, apostolic Tradition that helped to shape Europe from the beginning.?

 

Cardinal Kasper and Bishop Huber focused on apparent disagreements following the Vatican?s July 2007 clarification of Catholic teachings on the nature of the church. Kasper said that, in reiterating that other communities ?were not churches in the proper sense, we did not mean that these others were somehow false churches. We meant that the EKD or the Church of England, for example, have a different understanding of what the church is.? He endorsed the current discussion on ?the nature and mission of the church? that is being coordinated by the international theological Commission on Faith and Order.

 

Bishop Huber regretted the negative phrasing of the Vatican?s statement in speaking of those who were deemed ?not churches in the proper sense?. He was encouraged to hear Cardinal Kasper?s more positive description of communities with their own understanding of what it means to be the church. ?We continue on our journey together,? Huber said, ?with the Holy Spirit leading us.?




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