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Your Eminence Gintaras Grušas, Archbishop of Vilnius, beloved brother in the Lord,
Your Eminences, Excellencies, Graces,
Reverend Fathers,
Esteemed audience,
Conveying the fraternal blessings of the Church of Constantinople, the Ecumenical Patriarchate, to all the participants of the World Apostolic Congress on Mercy, we have a duty, touching upon the agony of divided Christianity and traversing the centuries that accumulated successive wounds upon the body of the Church, to confront reality. If we excavate the historical subsoil, attempting to understand in the end the meaning of reconciliation, we perceive that the division of the Churches was produced chiefly by the transformation of theology itself into state ideology. Suffocatingly trapped was the message of salvation within geographical and political borders. Most frequently degraded is the concept of mercy, perhaps by an imperceptible but deeply rooted habit of the centuries, into a sentimental concession in the field of ecclesiastical geopolitics, into a diplomatic courtesy among hierarchs, losing entirely its radical character. The East and the West, at various historical junctures, required alterity exclusively to define their own identity.
