c. 2004 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ Centuries-old bitterness over the sack of Constantinople during the Crusades has cast a small shadow on a major gesture intended by Pope John Paul II to bring Catholics and Orthodox Christians a step closer to unity.

At a solemn ceremony in St. Peter’s Basilica on Saturday (Nov. 27), the pope presented to Bartholomew I, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, relics of two 4th century saints who were bishops of Constantinople and doctors of the Orthodox Church and are venerated by Catholics as well as Orthodox.

Bartholomew, the spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians, embraced and kissed the 84-year-old John Paul and said that his “brotherly gesture” showed that “love, justice and peace” can help to overcome the 1,000-year-old schism between Catholics and Orthodox.

But the patriarch’s warm words were in sharp contrast to a statement issued almost simultaneously by Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls, who denied reports that the pope was returning the bones in “reparation” for the church’s role in their theft from Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade to the Holy Land.

The spokesman said that John Paul’s gesture was not meant as “a way for the pope to ask pardon” for the theft and that the ceremony marked “the return _ not the restoration” of the relics to Istanbul, the modern day Constantinople.

The Vatican spokesman took issue with news reports that John Paul’s gesture is a reparation and a way for the pope to ask the ecumenical patriarch’s pardon on the part of the Catholic Church for the theft of the relics during the Crusade of the 13th century. The reports appeared in the Western as well as Eastern press.

While the clarification by the pope’s spokesman made it clear old wounds were not totally healed, the pope’s actions, and the way they were received, amounted to an ecumenical step forward.

John Paul has made the quest for Christian unity a major theme of his papacy and has placed particular emphasis on ending the Great Schism that has divided Catholics and Orthodox since 1054. His relations with Bartholomew are far more cordial than with leaders of the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches, who have frequently rebuffed his overtures.

In August, the pope sent back to Moscow a venerated copy of the icon of the Madonna of Kazan, which appeared to ease relations with Patriarch Alexey II of Moscow and All Russia somewhat but did not win him an invitation to visit Russia.

The relics of John Chrysostom (347-407) and Gregory of Nazianus (329-389), known also as Gregory the Theologian, are considered of far greater importance, in part because the saints lived at a time when the churches were still united.

Bartholomew asked John Paul for their return when he led an Orthodox delegation to the Vatican on June 29 for the Catholic Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul and commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the historic meeting in Jerusalem of Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Atenagora. That opened the door to dialogue.

The pope agreed to return the relics but because of his frail health declined an invitation to himself deliver them to Bartholomew at his seat at Fanar in Istanbul during celebrations of the Orthodox Feast of St. Andrew on Nov. 30.

John Paul and Bartholomew presided together over an ecumenical liturgy of the word, which included prayers, chanting and singing in Latin and in Greek from both the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.

“I will never tire of firmly and resolutely seeking this communion among the disciples of Christ,” the pope said in a letter to Bartholomew, which was read aloud before the white alabaster caskets containing the relics were consigned to Bartholomew.

The pope’s ability to enunciate words is impaired by Parkinson’s disease, and he did not speak during the ceremony.

Delivering the homily, the white-bearded, ecumenical patriarch called the return of the saints’ bones “a sacred act, which repairs an ecclesiastical anomaly and injustice.”

“This fraternal gesture of the Church of Ancient Rome confirms that insurmountable problems do not exist in the Church of Christ when love, justice and peace meet in the sacred diaconate of reconciliation and unity,” Bartholomew said.

During Bartholomew’s visit to Rome in June, John Paul expressed explicit regret over the sack of Constantinople, which happened in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade.

The Vatican sought to distance the transfer of the relics to Rome from the sack.

The remains of Gregory of Nazianus were brought to Rome in the 8th century to save them from destruction by iconoclasts, who rejected the veneration of sacred images as superstition, and John Chrysostom’s relics probably came to Rome “at the time of the Latin rule of Constantinople (1204 to 1258),” it said.

The Vatican turned over to Bartholomew only about half of the bones of the saints, who along with St. Basil the Great have a Catholic feast day on Sept. 13. The rest of the relics will remain in St. Peter’s Basilica.

MO/RB END RNS