MOSCOW-VATICAN Jun-13-2006 (350 words) xxxi
Russian Orthodox invite top Vatican officials to July world summit
By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/storie ... 603390.htm
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow has invited top Vatican officials as well as the bishop of western Siberia to attend a World Summit of Religious Leaders July 3-5 in Russia's capital.
Through its interreligious council, the Moscow Patriarchate was organizing the initiative to bring together top religious leaders from a variety of spiritual traditions to discuss how world religions could help give a moral response to the challenges the world is facing.
Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow invited Cardinal Paul Poupard, head of the pontifical councils for Culture and for Interreligious Dialogue; Cardinal Walter Kasper, head of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity; and Bishop Joseph Werth of Russia's Novosibirsk-based Transfiguration Diocese.
The inclusion of Bishop Werth, a Russian citizen born in Kazakhstan, signaled an important gesture of rapprochement on the part of the patriarchate toward the Vatican.
The Russian Orthodox Church had criticized the Vatican in February 2002 after Pope John Paul II transformed four Russian church regions into dioceses, one of which was the former Apostolic Administration of Western Siberia, which became the Diocese of the Transfiguration in Novosibirsk, headed by Bishop Werth.
The Orthodox had accused the Vatican of a modern Catholic invasion of Russia while the Vatican said it was merely restoring church structures that existed before Soviet communism. The move put a further strain on an already tense ecumenical climate between the two churches.
Bishop Werth was the only bishop in Russia that the patriarchate invited to the summit.
Other officials invited by the patriarch to represent the Catholic Church included U.S. Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, retired archbishop of Washington; Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels of Mechelen-Brussels; Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna; and Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, Ireland.
The religious leaders representing Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism were expected to draw up a final statement to present to heads of state from the Group of Eight industrialized countries, scheduled to meet July 15-17 in St. Petersburg, Russia.