Vatican
City, 17 September 2012 (VIS) – Yesterday evening the Holy Father met with
Orthodox Patriarchs, representatives of Protestant communities and Catholic
Patriarchs of Lebanon. The encounter took place at the Syrian Catholic
Patriarchate in Charfet, Beirut, famous for its library which contains more
than 3,000 manuscripts in Syriac and Arabic.
Having
listened to some welcome remarks addressed to him by His Beatitude Ignace
Youssif III Younan, Patriarch of Antioch of the Syrians, the Holy Father
expressed his thanks to those present who, he said, “represent the
diversity of the Church in the East. … My thoughts also go to the Coptic
Orthodox Church of Egypt and to the Ethiopian Orthodox who have had the recent
sadness of losing their respective Patriarchs. I wish to assure them of my
fraternal closeness and of my prayers”.
Benedict
XVI continued: “Allow me to acknowledge here the testimony of faith shown
by the Syrian Antiochene Church in the course of its glorious history, a
testimony to an ardent love for Christ, which has caused it to write some
heroic pages of this history, right up to the present, by remaining committed
to the faith even to the point of martyrdom. I encourage this Church to be for
the peoples of the region a sign of the peace that comes from God as well as a
light that keeps their hope alive. I extend this encouragement to all the
Churches and ecclesial communities present in the region”.
“Our
encounter this evening”, he went on, “is an eloquent sign of our
profound desire to respond to the call of Christ, ‘that all may be one’. In
these unstable times, so inclined to the violence which your region knows so
well, it is even more necessary that Christ’s disciples give an authentic
witness to their unity, so that the world may believe in their message of love,
peace and reconciliation. This is a message that all Christians, and we in
particular, have been commissioned to hand on to the world, a message of
inestimable value in the present context of the Middle East.
“Let
us work without ceasing so that the love of Christ may lead us little by little
into full communion with each other”, the Pope added. “In this
regard, by means of common prayer and mutual commitment, we must constantly
return to our one Lord and Saviour. For, as I wrote in the Apostolic
Exhortation ‘Ecclesia in Medio Oriente’ which I have the pleasure of consigning
to you, ‘Jesus draws into unity those who believe in and love Him; He gives
them the Spirit of His Father as well as Mary, His mother'”.
The Holy Father concluded his remarks by
entrusting the members of the various Churches and communities to the Blessed
Virgin. “May she intercede with her Son for us, so that we may be
delivered from every evil and from all forms of violence, and so that the
Middle East may at last know a time of reconciliation and peace. May the words
of Jesus that I have so often cited during this journey – My peace I give to
you – be for all of us the common sign that we will give in the name of Christ
to the peoples of this beloved region, which longs to see those words
fulfilled!”