NEWS STORY: Praying for Christian Unity, Pope Sends Treasured Icon Back to Russia

c. 2004 Religion News Service VATICAN CITY _ Pope John Paul II on Wednesday (Aug. 25) kissed a treasured Russian icon and sent it back to Moscow as a sign of his affection for the Russian Orthodox Church and his desire to end 1,000 years of division between the Catholic and Orthodox worlds. The frail, […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ Pope John Paul II on Wednesday (Aug. 25) kissed a treasured Russian icon and sent it back to Moscow as a sign of his affection for the Russian Orthodox Church and his desire to end 1,000 years of division between the Catholic and Orthodox worlds.

The frail, 84-year-old pontiff expressed “special emotion” as he presided over a solemn celebration of the Liturgy of the Word for the veneration of the icon of the Mother of God of Kazan. He consigned the jewel-encrusted painting to a Vatican delegation that will carry it to Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexey II.


The icon’s antique image depicts the Christ child held upright by the Virgin Mary. John Paul said it spoke of his “affection” for the Russian Orthodox Church “and all the faithful entrusted” to it.

The pontiff referred to “the great spiritual tradition of which the Holy Russian Church is custodian.” He said it was “the desire and the firm intention of the Pope of Rome to progress together with them on the path of reciprocal knowledge and reconciliation to hasten the day of that full unity of believers for which the Lord Jesus ardently prayed.”

John Paul referred to himself in the third person in a prayer he wrote in Russian for the ceremony. The prayer, read by a Russian-speaking priest, said, “He asks you, Holy Mother, to intercede in order to hasten the time of full unity between East and West, of full communion among all Christians.”

A papal delegation will present the richly decorated wooden panel in the Kremlin on Saturday when the Russian Orthodox Church celebrates the Feast of the Dormition. Like the Catholic Church’s Feast of the Assumption on Aug. 15, the Orthodox feast marks the end of the earthly life of the Virgin Mary. Catholic doctrine holds that she was taken up body and soul into heaven while the Orthodox believe that she fell asleep in the Lord.

John Paul had hoped to deliver the icon himself in a visit to Russia that would mark a major step forward in relations between the churches separated by the Great Schism of 1054. He offered last summer to make a stop in Kazan en route to Mongolia to return the icon to its place of origin, but the Moscow Patriarchate protested, and the trip was canceled.

Alexey II has said repeatedly that he will not meet with the pope until they have resolved serious problems that have arisen between the churches following the fall of communism.

The Russian Orthodox Church accuses Catholics of seeking converts in its traditional territories, especially in Ukraine where the Eastern Rite Catholics and Russian Orthodox churches are also at odds over church property.


Earlier this month, Alexey said, in effect, that the icon _ one of many copies made in the late 17th and early 18th century of the original, 16th-century, miracle-working Madonna of Kazan _ was not a good enough bargaining chip to win a papal visit.

Because the pope’s icon “is only a copy,” he told the Itar-Tass news agency on Aug. 13, “there is no need at all for him to deliver it himself.”

But an aide to the patriarch spoke in a more conciliatory tone Tuesday. The Rev. Vsevolod Chaplin, deputy director of foreign relations, said that returning the icon “is without doubt a worthy act” that demonstrates “goodwill and a sense of justice.”

The original icon was discovered in Kazan in 1579. Led by visions of the Virgin Mary, a 9-year-old girl found it buried under an oven in a house destroyed by a fire that had swept the Volga River city 500 miles east of Moscow. Art historians believe it had been painted between 1540 and 1550.

The icon is credited with many miracles, including the defeat in 1612 of the Polish army that invaded Moscow on the death of the last czar of the Riurik dynasty. Taken from Kazan to Moscow, it was carried at the head of an army of peasants and beggars that prevailed over the Poles.

A thief stole the original icon in 1904 and when arrested claimed he had burned it after removing its decorations of gold, silver and gems. But the Russian Orthodox Church still devotes two feast days each year to it, marking its finding and the victory over the Poles.


The Vatican reported earlier this week that four Russian and four Vatican experts who examined the pope’s copy last year found it to be “an authentic icon attributable to a period not later than the first half of the 18th century.” They said its covering of silver gilt and precious stones indicated that “it was an object of worship and of particular veneration.”

John Lindsay Opie, professor of Byzantine art at the University of Rome and an expert on icons, said he considered the pope’s Madonna of Kazan to be “a poor, provincial copy,” one of thousands and with no evidence of miracle-working.

But he said that it and all other authentic copies are valued by the Orthodox Church and believed to have the potential to work miracles.

This is because the Orthodox Church has believed since the Seventh Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in 787 that just as Christ’s body and blood are materially present in the Eucharist, his form is present in sacred art.

MO/PH END POLK

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