On October 31, Pope Francis will take part in a historic vespers service in Lund, Sweden. This service will be the inaugural service for the year leading up to the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017.
Every day until then, Pray Tell will be running a feature highlighting papal ecumenical gestures to frame this historic event.
Jerusalem was just the beginning. Over the months following this epochal event, the brother bishops communicated with one another, in addition to approving official dialogue. This official dialogue resulted in the Common Declaration of Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I, which was jointly issued on December 7, 1965. The Common Declaration not only reiterated the foundation of reconciliation that the dialogue was built on, but also abolished the more than 1,000 year old excommunications that transpired in the Great Schism of 1054. This dialogue of charity, as it was know, continued and resulted in another Common Declaration on October 28, 1967, which acknowledged the ongoing need for charity and dialogue between the two sister churches. This 1967 agreement was significant in that it came while Athenagoras was visiting the Rome, where he and Paul had a joint prayer service at the Vatican.
Paul VI had a similarly groundbreaking meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most. Rev. Michael Ramsey. Although John XXIII had privately received Ramsey’s predecessor in 1960, no Archbishop of Canterbury had had a formal meeting with the pope since before the English Reformation. On March 23 1966, Paul formally received Ramsey, ending centuries of (official) separation.
The two then held a brief prayer service in the Sistine Chapel, where Paul invited Ramsey to join him in the blessing. One then-seminarian recounted his story of being in attendance at this liturgy in The Tablet, and it was reprinted on Whispers in the Loggia:
The Pope stepped up to give his blessing, and clearly this part of the ceremony had not been rehearsed. He then signaled to Archbishop Ramsey, who was next to him at the altar, to give the blessing with him. Archbishop Ramsey was a bit nonplussed, and there may have been a language problem in the pope’s request. The pope then calmly took hold of Archbishop Ramsey’s arm and moved it into a blessing. The message got through!
The next day, the two again co-led a prayer service at St. Paul’s Outside the Walls where a Common Declaration was issued between the two calling for mutual charity and for the two churches to work together toward unity in “all those spheres of Church life where collaboration is likely to lead to a greater understanding and a deeper charity, and to strive in common to find solutions for all the great problems that face those who believe in Christ in the world of today.”
Afte
r the service at St. Paul’s before he was saying farewell to Ramsey, Paul took off his episcopal ring, which he had since he was Archbishop of Milan and gave it to Ramsey. This gesture of fraternal love brought Ramsey to tears. To this day, when the Archbishop of Canterbury is at the Vatican, he wears the Paul VI ring.
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