By John Burger
“The light of the East has illumined the
universal Church, from the moment when ‘a rising sun’ appeared above us: Jesus
Christ, our Lord, whom all Christians invoke as the Redeemer of man and the
hope of the world.”
Thus began Pope John Paul II’s 1995 apostolic letter Orientale Lumen
(“Light of the East), which encourages Latin Catholics to better know the
traditions of the Christian East.
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The 17th annual Orientale Lumen Conference was held in Washington, D.C., June 17-20, 2013 |
Rather than collecting dust on a Vatican shelf, the letter has
continued to inspire a Washington, D.C.-based grassroots ecumenical movement
for almost two decades.
Initially planned as a single meeting to discuss John
Paul’s work, the Orientale Lumen
Conference has become an annual gathering open to anyone. In some
ways, it has kept the light of Orthodox-Catholic dialogue burning while
official dialogues have hit roadblocks.
And for that it has received acclaim from leaders in both the
Orthodox and Catholic Churches.
“Although you say your movement is grassroots, I’m convinced
it’s rooted in heaven and inspired by the Holy Spirit,” the Ecumenical
Patriarch, Bartholomew, Archbishop of Constantinople, told the apostolate on
its 10thanniversary.
“It’s exactly the kind of thing the ecumenical movement needs,”
said Paulist Father Ronald G. Roberson, a top ecumenical officer of the United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “People go home from these conferences
and talk to their friends,” said Father Roberson, who is associate director of
the U.S. bishops’ Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs. “The
hope is they go back and talk to people and it has a ripple effect. It’s an
excellent project. My initial pessimism was not wall-founded.”
That would have been in 1996, when Jack Figel, a Byzantine
Catholic from Fairfax, Va., and Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, who teaches at
Oxford, were planning the initial event.
Figel, who grew up in a Slovak family near Pittsburgh,
rediscovered his Eastern Christian roots when he was in college. In the early
1990s, he met a priest in England who wanted to revive publications of the
ecumenical Society of St. John Chrysostom.
The result was Eastern Churches
Journal. Later, when the priest, Father Serge Kelleher, and an
Orthodox bishop, Vsevolod of Scopelos, wanted to reprint a liturgical book from
17thcentury Kiev, Figel started Eastern
Christian Publications, which he still runs. ECP’s list includes
books, DVDs and CDs on ecumenism and Eastern Christianity.
Figel met Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware, a theologian and a
metropolitan in the Ecumenical Patriarchate, in 1996.
“Over dinner, I proposed the idea of holding an
open-to-the-public ecumenical meeting about Orientale Lumen,” Figel
recalled during a recent interview in Washington. “Bishop Kallistos immediately
agreed and even got his diary out and we planned the conference for June of
1997. I knew the dean here at Catholic University, Father Raymond Collins. I
went to him with the idea; he thought it was great. He said he would cosponsor
it as the dean of theology and religious studies.”
In the apostolic letter, John Paul reminded Christians that “a
particularly close link already binds” Catholics and Orthodox. “We have almost
everything in common; and above all, we have in common the true longing for
unity,” John Paul wrote.
Both Churches are apostolic in origin and have a valid
episcopate, priesthood and the seven sacraments.
The Pope pointed out that unity between Rome and Constantinople
endured“for the whole of the first millennium, despite difficulties. We have
increasingly learned that it was not so much an historical episode or a mere
question of preeminence that tore the fabric of unity, as it was a progressive
estrangement, so that the other's diversity was no longer perceived as a common
treasure, but as incompatibility.”
The Pontiff recommended “improving our knowledge of one another”
in order to grow in unity. “The children of the Catholic Church already know
the ways indicated by the Holy See for achieving this: to know the liturgy of
the Eastern Churches; to deepen their knowledge of the spiritual traditions of
the Fathers and Doctors of the Christian East, to follow the example of the
Eastern Churches for the inculturation of the Gospel message; to combat
tensions between Latins and Orientals and to encourage dialogue between
Catholics and the Orthodox…”
Just the things the Orientale Lumen Conferences have been doing
ever since.
The first conference featured Metropolitan Kallistos; Melkite
Catholic Bishop Nicholas Samra, and Bishop Basil Losten, then-eparch of the
Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church of Stamford, Conn, who said, "Beyond any
question,Orientale Lumen is the most important Catholic document on the
Eastern Churches since the Second Vatican Council.”
“Everyone who came—we had about a hundred people at that first
conference—said that this was a wonderful idea and that we should keep doing
it,” Figel said… (read
the full article at Catholic World Report)
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