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Your Eminences and Excellencies,
Reverend Father President,
Reverend Fathers, distinguished Professors of the Pontifical Oriental Institute,
Dear students, alumni and friends of the Orientale,
Beloved brothers and sisters in Christ,
I. Prologue: a homecoming
“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits” (Ps. 103:2). With these words of the Psalmist we stand before you this morning, for there is no other way for us to begin than with thanksgiving to God. Only a few days ago, on 22 October, we marked the thirty-fifth anniversary of our election to the Ecumenical Throne. And today, 28 October, is itself an anniversary dear to every heart that longs for unity: fifty-nine years ago on this very day, in 1967, Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras of blessed memory signed here in Rome their Common Declaration. And now, almost sixty years after we left these halls with our doctorate, the Lord has granted us to return to our alma mater, to the house where our mind was formed in the discipline of the holy canons. We did not deserve this divine grace, and we receive it with a moved and grateful heart.
We thank you, Reverend Father President, for your kind invitation and for your warm words of welcome. We thank the professors, the staff and the students who have prepared this day with such care. And allow us to say a special word about the documentary exhibition “Return to the Alma Mater.” When we walked through it a little while ago, we confess that we had to stop more than once. There, in your archival documents and in our own photographs, we met a young deacon from Imvros we had almost forgotten: his registration booklet, his examination records, the letters of his professors, the first steps of a vocation that God would lead along paths he could not imagine. The exhibition traces our formation, our ecumenical commitment and the themes of our ministry. In truth, it shows how much of what we became was planted here.
This lectio is also the last station of a pilgrimage. For five days we have been in Rome, in Loreto and in Assisi, praying at holy places and meeting beloved brothers, first among them His Holiness Pope Leo XIV. And before entering this hall, we crossed the piazza to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. There we prayed at the tomb of another dear brother and friend, Pope Francis of blessed memory. Before and after every journey, he came to entrust himself to the icon of the Theotokos, the Salus Populi Romani, and it was his wish to rest there. We had the honour to be present at his funeral in April of last year. And so the Lord has drawn one more thread between our heart and this Institute: our friend sleeps in the Lord just across the square from the house where we studied. When we look from these windows towards Santa Maria Maggiore, we will now see not only the basilica of our student years, but the resting place of a brother with whom we walked, for twelve years, the road of reconciliation. May his memory be eternal!
Our theme this morning is the one that has accompanied us since we first entered this house: the holy canons of the Church. But allow us to say from the outset: this is not a typical lecture. It is more like a public confession. In our Orthodox tradition, confession is not only the acknowledgment of one’s faults; it is first of all the confession of God’s mercy, of what He has done in a life that did not deserve it. In that spirit, we wish to speak to you in two voices. The first is the voice of memory, because a homecoming without memory would be a visit only. The second is the voice of the canonist, because this is a house of scholarship, and you have the right to expect from an alumnus not only gratitude, but also an account of what he did with what he received.
II. A deacon from Imvros at the Orientale
Our relationship with Canon Law began on the island of Halki in the Sea of Marmara. In the last year of our Bachelor studies at the Theological School of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, in 1961, we wrote our degree thesis on the reconstitution of a dissolved marriage, under the guidance of our professor of Canon Law, the late Grand Economos Father Georgios Anastasiadis. That same year we were ordained deacon and received the name Bartholomew. Then came two years of military service. And in December of 1963, by the decision of Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras and the Holy and Sacred Synod, we were sent to Europe for postgraduate studies, with a scholarship from the Patriarchate. In the preface to our dissertation we called this a mission of five years. We still remember it as a mission, and we still feel gratitude towards that great Patriarch, who believed in the young people.
But why Rome, and why the Orientale? Here we must remember with gratitude Professor Hamilcar Alivizatos of the University of Athens, the most eminent Greek canonist of his generation. It was he who advised that the Pontifical Oriental Institute was the ideal place for our studies in Canon Law. He knew that no other institution in the world offered a doctoral programme in the canonical tradition of the Christian East. And he was right. Later he gave us something even more precious: the theme of our dissertation, the codification of the holy canons. In 1965 he had himself proposed that the Academy of Athens undertake this task. He saw in a young deacon someone who could carry the idea further. He did not live to see our book printed; he fell asleep in the Lord in 1969. In our dissertation he is the scholar we cite most often, and always with great respect.
So it was that on 3 December 1963 Father Joseph Gill, the then Rector of the Orientale, signed our registration as an ordinary student. We have seen the little brown booklet, the Libellus Inscriptionis, in your exhibition. We were one of only three Orthodox students in the Institute that year. And we were fortunate in our timing: in July 1963 the Institute had just created its special canonical section. We thus belonged to the first group in the history of the Orientale to obtain the Baccalaureate and then the Licentiate in Oriental Canon Law.
Allow an old student to remember his teachers: Father Jan Řezáč, who taught us the general norms and the law of marriage; Father Clemente Pujol, who taught us the law of religious and the sacraments; Father Charles de Clercq, who opened to us the history of the sources of Byzantine and Oriental Canon Law; and so many others, who taught us Roman and Byzantine Law, the life of the Christian communities of the Near East, ecumenism, and even Islamic Law. These were not only courses. They were a whole vision of the Christian East, taught by men who had given their lives to it.
And everything was in Latin. The lectures were given in the official language of the Roman Catholic Church, and our examinations, written and oral, took place in Latin, before a board of professors. For a young man from Imvros whose mother tongue was Greek, this was no small trial. In the first weeks we sat in the lectures and then, in our room, went through our notes word by word with a dictionary that we still keep as a memento of our effort, trying to understand. In February 1964 we were examined in our first two courses, and by God’s grace we received the highest marks. Father Pierre Duprey (1922–2007) of the White Fathers, himself an alumnus of this Institute and then Under-Secretary of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, who had welcomed us in Rome, never tired of telling everyone: “Our Bartholomew learned Latin in two months and passed his exams!” We are not sure it was quite so simple. Afterwards we settled in, we came to love Rome deeply. We love her still. But Latin taught us precision. It taught us that a canonist must weigh every word, because words carry the life of persons. And when we look at the grades in your archive, we can only smile: our lowest mark was a seven, in Public Ecclesiastical Law. The Lord has a sense of humour, for we have spent the rest of our life dealing with exactly that subject, the relations of the Church with states and governments.
Those were also the years of the Second Vatican Council. Rome was full of bishops, theologians and observers, and we followed the discussions with great interest. In January 1964, during our first year, Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras and Pope Paul VI met in Jerusalem. On 7 December 1965, during our third year, the anathemas of 1054 were mutually lifted in Rome and in Constantinople on the same day. We were a student here when the ice of nine centuries began to melt. Paul VI was the first Bishop of Rome we met in person; we were received by him at the end of each academic year of our studies here. Is it surprising that a young deacon who lived these events in this house became, for the rest of his life, a servant of inter-Christian dialogue?
We completed the coursework of the three academic years from 1963 to 1966. Then, before turning fully to the dissertation, we spent six months at the Ecumenical Institute of Bossey, near Geneva, the academic house of the World Council of Churches, whose director was a Greek, the great theologian Professor Nikos Nissiotis, of blessed memory. After Switzerland we followed once more the advice of Professor Alivizatos, who had drawn our path in two words: “Rome–Munich.” In Munich we spent a year and a half, first learning German at the Goethe Institute and then at the University, where we deepened our method and studied the modern codifications of the Autocephalous Orthodox Churches. In Rome as in Munich, we served and prayed at the Divine Liturgy in our Orthodox churches there; the scholar never stopped being a deacon. In 1968, after five years in Europe, we returned home.
Our guide in all this was the late Father Ivan Žužek. He taught us the law of processes and penal law, the philosophy of law, and, many may not know this, an introductory course to the Russian language. In 1967 he became Rector of this Institute, and he was our Doktorvater. Father Ivan was a man marked by suffering: as a young adult in Slovenia he had escaped death at the very edge of an execution, and there his vocation was born. He was a Jesuit of the Byzantine rite, who prayed in Church Slavonic until his death. He guided us with prudence and with trust, and he gave his corrections generously. A few years later Pope Paul VI called him to serve as Secretary of the commission that prepared the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, promulgated in 1990. We like to think that our work together on an Orthodox code was, for him too, a small preparation for that great task. He founded, with Professor Alivizatos, the Society for the Law of the Eastern Churches, born in this house in 1969, and we had the joy of being among its founders, serving as its inaugural Vice-President. When our book appeared, he reviewed it with great kindness. In later years he called us “the most frequently quoted proponent” of an Orthodox code. We remember him also with Father Sophronius Mudry, the second reader of our thesis. Father Ivan fell asleep in the Lord in 2004. Today we bow before his memory with filial gratitude.
Then came December 1968. We still have the letter of Father Řezáč, dated 21 November, explaining the rules with typical Roman exactness: first a lectio doctoralis, whose topic would be given to the candidate only two days earlier, and only then the defence, “on Saturday the 21st.” And so it was. On 18 December we gave our doctoral lecture on a question of the law of marriage. On Saturday 21 December 1968 we defended our dissertation before Fathers Žužek, Mudry, Wuyts and their colleagues, and we received our doctorate cum laude. The rules also required fifty printed copies in grey covers, bearing the name of the Institute. Our book was published by the Patriarchal Institute for Patristic Studies in Thessaloniki, and the letters we exchanged in 1970 with the Institute’s Director show that even a cover could be a small ecumenical question. The publishers agreed to print “Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum” on the special copies for Rome, but asked to keep their own series name above it. “You understand, Father Bartholomew,” wrote the then Director, Professor Evangelos Chrysos, “that the matter is not simple,” given “our friends of the Catholic Church and of the Church of Greece.” How far we have come since then! On 9 July 1970 the printing was finished, the copies for Rome were sent, and in August of that year we were formally proclaimed Doctor. As you see, the Orientale taught us patience too.
III. The dissertation: A Common Code for the Orthodox Churches
Our dissertation was published in Greek under the title On the Codification of the Sacred Canons and the Canonical Provisions in the Orthodox Church. Its main thesis can be put in one sentence: the Orthodox Church needs one common code of Canon Law, prepared by her canonists and confirmed by her bishops in council, because there can be no real renewal of her life without the revision of her legislation.
Why was a code necessary? Because of both the quantity and the quality of the canons. Our corpus contains some 770 ancient canons, from the third to the ninth century. Some contradict each other, some repeat each other, some have fallen into disuse because of later custom or later canons. Yet the Church had never decided officially which canons still apply. We dared to write that the Church herself had contributed to this disorder, by keeping canons no longer applicable. How can the faithful be asked to observe the canons as a whole, when they cannot distinguish the living from the dead?
The heart of the argument was a theological one. Some said that canons, like dogmas, are eternal and unchangeable. We answered that the canons would indeed be unchangeable like the dogmas, if they were based only on divine law. But the law of the Church is a divine-human law, ius divinum-humanum, because the Church is not only invisible but also visible. Only the fundamental laws given by the Lord and the Apostles, or those that express the very essence of the Church, cannot change. The other canons were born of the needs of a particular time. They may be modified or even abrogated when they no longer serve the purpose for which they were issued, but only, as canon 12 of the Council in Trullo teaches, for evident benefit and urgent necessity, and for the salvation of the people.
From this followed our proposal, in five points:
1. One code, not many. Some argued that each Autocephalous Church should have its own code. We disagreed. The Orthodox Church is not a federation of Churches but one Church, the Body of Christ, and she has one law, whose main sources are common to all. Many codes would weaken unity; one common code would strengthen it.
2. A revised corpus. The code would include only canons of order and discipline. Canons with similar content would be unified around the fundamental one. Canons whose reason no longer exists would leave the text for the footnotes, because ratio legis est anima legis, yet they keep their historical value. Others, especially those on penal matters and on relations with other Christians, would be modified “on a more realistic and human basis.”
3. A clear structure. Following the threefold authority of Christ, the code would have an introduction and three parts: governance, the sanctifying work of the Church, and her teaching and mission.
4. Greek as the original language of the Code, with translations into the language of every Orthodox people, as our tradition has always offered its spiritual riches to each nation in its own tongue.
5. Promulgation by a council. Only the bishops gathered in council can codify the canons, since a law can be revised only by an authority equal to the one that issued it. Scholars may prepare the text; only the Church can make it law, for quod omnes tangit, ab omnibus approbari debet.
There was one more element, which we did not then imagine would shape our whole life. We wrote that Canon Law “can facilitate ecumenical dialogue and must not obstruct it.” We even proposed that an Orthodox code should consider, as an aid, the Code for the Oriental Catholics and even the Latin Codex Iuris Canonici. And we cited the words of the late Archimandrite Victor Pospishil: “There is no discipline of the sacred sciences as amenable to ecumenical endeavours as canon law.” You will understand why we smile when we read these lines today.
Our appeal was not heeded at the time. In 1976 the codification was removed from the agenda of the future Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church. But a good idea does not die because it is postponed. Half a century later, both admirers and critics read our dissertation to find in it the principles that guide our decisions today. We accept this, and we say it openly: the principles we learned and formulated here have remained the same throughout our life and ministry.
IV. Halki: a chair that was never taken, a hope that is alive
When we left Rome, the plans of the Mother Church for us were clear. We were to return to Halki and, in time, to succeed our own teacher, Father Georgios Anastasiadis, in the chair of Canon Law. We returned in 1968 and were appointed assistant to the Scholarch, the Dean of the School. In October 1969 we were ordained to the priesthood. We prepared our lectures, we published our dissertation with a preface signed “Halki, March 1970,” and we dreamed of teaching to young Orthodox clergy what we had received here.
God had other plans. In 1971 the Theological School of Halki was closed under the legislation of the Turkish state on private institutions of higher education. Our professorship ended before it began. We confess that the closure of our School was a deep wound, for us and for the Ecumenical Patriarchate. A theological school is the place where a Church prepares her future; to close it is to make a Church’s tomorrow uncertain.
And yet, as so often in the life of the Church, a closed door became an open one elsewhere. In July 1972 Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios of blessed memory was elected, and he called us to direct his newly established Private Office. In December 1973 we were elected Metropolitan of Philadelphia (Asia Minor), and we kept that office at the Patriarch’s side. For almost eighteen years, until our election as Elder Metropolitan of Chalcedon in January 1990, we served at the heart of the life of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. A year and a half later, on 22 October 1991, the Holy and Sacred Synod called us to the Throne of St Andrew.
We did not become a professor of Canon Law. But we came to understand that our classroom had simply moved. At the Phanar we saw Canon Law not in books but in life: in the decisions of the Holy and Sacred Synod, in the relations between the Autocephalous Churches, in pastoral cases where the canons had to be applied to real persons with real wounds, in the long preparation of the Holy and Great Council. In a sense, the Orientale prepared us not for an academic chair, but for a Throne whose first duty is to guard the canonical order of the Orthodox Church.
Nevertheless, Halki remained in our heart. For fifty-five years we have prayed and worked for its reopening. Today we can speak not only of a wound but also of a hope. Recently we met with the President of the Republic of Türkiye, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate has entered into renewed and encouraging conversations with the Ministry of National Education and the Council of Higher Education. We receive this development with sincere gratitude, and we encourage every hand that is working to bring it to completion.
Allow us, then, a dream in this house of dreams that came true. If God grants that Halki opens again, and if He grants us the strength, how would we wish Canon Law to be taught there? Let us offer four brief thoughts, as an old student who never had the chance to be a professor.
1. From the sources. Students would read the ancient canons in their original Greek, in their historical setting, with the great Byzantine commentators, Zonaras, Balsamon, Aristenos, and Blastares, and with the modern collections, primarily the Pedalion (“Rudder”) of St Nicodemos the Hagiorite. One cannot interpret what one has not read.
2. As a theology of the Church. We would teach the canons not as a code of penalties, but as the faith of the Church expressed in the form of order, as applied ecclesiology.
3. Through cases. We would bring to the classroom the real questions of pastoral life, as the professors of this house did in their seminars, and ask the students: what serves the salvation of this person?
4. In communion with sister institutions. We would wish Halki to be a meeting place: open to students from all the Orthodox Autocephalous Churches and from other Christian traditions, and bound by friendship and exchange with other schools such as this eminent Institute. It would be a great joy for us if one day professors of the Orientale taught at Halki, and students of Halki came to study here, as we once did.
V. Orthodox Canon Law in the twenty-first century: four convictions
And now, as you would expect at a lectio, allow the canonist to speak. After almost six decades with the canons, as student, as Director of the Private Patriarchal Office and Metropolitan, and since 1991 as the Ecumenical Patriarch, we would summarise our vision for Orthodox Canon Law in our century in four convictions:
1. The common core of one canonical tradition
Our first conviction is that the canons are the common core of the Orthodox canonical tradition, binding on and shared by all the Autocephalous Churches. Each local Church legislates for itself through its charters and statutes. But this is secondary law. It must always conform to the primary law of the holy canons, which belong to no single Church because they belong to the whole Church. The unity of the Orthodox Church is a unity of faith, of sacraments and also of canonical order.
We say this with particular emphasis today, because our times have shown how fragile this unity can be when the canonical order is weakened, or when it is bent to serve national or political interests. The Orthodox Church condemned this temptation in 1872 under the name of ethnophyletism. A common canonical consciousness is the best defence against it. The Holy and Great Council of Crete in 2016, over which we had the honour to preside, reminded the Churches that their dialogues and their pastoral decisions rest on “the canonical principles of Orthodox ecclesiology.” The Ecumenical Patriarchate, faithful to its responsibility, sees itself as the guarantor of these common principles, not as their owner.
This is why we believe that the proposal of our dissertation keeps its value. The codification was removed from the conciliar agenda in 1976, and we accept the decisions of the Church. But the reasons that made it necessary have not disappeared. Our Churches, now present on every continent, need a common canonical language more than ever. The Roman Catholic Church, with the Latin Code of 1983 and the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches of 1990, has shown that a vast and diverse canonical heritage can be gathered without being betrayed. Father Žužek, who spent eighteen years of his life on that Eastern Code, would agree. We do not ask for haste. We ask that Orthodox canonists begin, patiently and together, the scholarly work that one day the Church, in council, may receive.
2. Canon Law in the service of Christian unity: juridical ecumenism
Our second conviction concerns the dialogue among Christians. For a long time the canons were seen as walls: borders that marked who is inside and who is outside the Church. We do not deny that the canons protect the identity of the Church. But we have never accepted that they exist to keep Christians apart. In our dissertation we wrote that Canon Law must facilitate, not obstruct, the ecumenical dialogue, and we have not changed our mind.
The theological dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church confirmed this. The Ravenna Statement of 2007 declared that full communion requires “reciprocal recognition of canonical legislations in their legitimate diversities.” Ecclesiology is not only a doctrine; it lives in institutions, in synods, in primacy and synodality, in rules on marriage and on the reception of the sacraments. Where our laws differ, our dialogue must address them. Where our laws converge, they already reveal a unity deeper than we think.
This vision was not born yesterday. Fifty-nine years ago today, on 28 October 1967, at the close of Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras’ historic visit to Rome, he and Pope Paul VI signed their Common Declaration, as we already highlighted in the beginning of our lectio. We were then a young deacon in Munich, working on the codification of the canons. The two Primates spoke of their Churches “rediscovering themselves still more as sister Churches,” and they asked that “the true dialogue of charity” be “at the basis of all relations” between them. But they did something more, which a canonist cannot overlook. They declared themselves “ready to study concrete ways of solving pastoral problems,” and “especially those connected with marriages between Catholics and Orthodox.” And they encouraged Catholic and Orthodox scholars to work together “in the fields of historical studies, of studies in the traditions of the Churches, of patristics, of liturgy.”
So, in one of the founding texts of our rapprochement, the canons already appear not as a wall but as a common task. The question of mixed marriages that Paul VI and Athenagoras placed before us was taken up, half a century later, by the Holy and Great Council of Crete, which entrusted it to the oikonomia of each Autocephalous Church, guided by “the principles of the holy canons.” And the scholarly cooperation they blessed is exactly what this Institute has offered for more than a century. On this anniversary, in this house, we make their commitment our own once more.
In September 2019, in this very Institute, at the fiftieth anniversary of the Society for the Law of the Eastern Churches, we spoke of “juridical ecumenism”: the comparative study and practical use of the canons and laws of the Churches in the service of unity. We referred to the Statement of Principles of Christian Law, prepared in 2016 by jurists and theologians of ten Christian traditions, as a means to fill “the historical juridical deficit in the ecumenical enterprise.” A few days later Pope Francis, receiving the members of the Society, said that Canon Law “is not only an aid to ecumenical dialogue, but also an essential dimension” of it. The Pope of Rome expressed, from the Chair of Peter, what a young Orthodox deacon had written in this house fifty years before.
Juridical ecumenism does not replace the dialogue of love and the dialogue of truth. It complements them. It gives them a concrete ground: the shared heritage of the canons of the first millennium, the councils we hold in common, the principles that the Gospel itself inspires. Last year, at Nicaea, we celebrated with Pope Leo XIV the seventeen-hundredth anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council. Its creed is shared; let us not forget that its canons are shared too! They stand at the head of our common canonical tradition. And allow us to share a personal joy: today, by God’s providence, both the Bishop of Rome and the Archbishop of New Rome – Constantinople are canonists by training. Perhaps this is a sign that the hour of juridical ecumenism has come.
3. Canon Law in the service of the human person: a law of personhood
Our third conviction is the most important. The canons exist for the salvation of the human person. This is their ultimate purpose. The last canon of the Latin Code says it in Latin: salus animarum suprema lex. Canon 102 of the Council in Trullo says it in Greek: the one entrusted with pastoral authority must seek “to bring back the lost sheep and to heal the one wounded by the serpent.”
Here lies the meaning of oikonomia, which we have long called “the essence of the Orthodox Church.” Oikonomia is not a loophole in the law, and it is not simply a relaxation of the rule, like the Latin dispensatio, applied in the same way to all similar cases. It is the prudent pastoral stewardship by which the Church applies the canons, sometimes with strictness and sometimes with leniency, “to individuals as persons, each of whom has his uniqueness and particular value before God.” The Church does not judge in advance and in general, but in every case separately, “since for each of us the Son of God took flesh and was sacrificed.”
The late Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon taught us to speak of a “law of personhood.” To be a person is to exist in communion, as the Persons of the Holy Trinity exist in communion, and at the same time to be unique, unrepeatable and irreplaceable. He wrote that nothing which turns a person into a means towards an end is acceptable, even if that end is holy, “because nothing is holier than the person.” A Canon Law of personhood is therefore a law that serves communion and respects uniqueness. It is never applied mechanically. It always asks: who is this person standing before the Church, and what will heal him?
4. Where law and theology meet
Our fourth conviction concerns the nature of our discipline itself. Canon Law stands at the intersection of law and theology, and it must remain there. Among modern Orthodox canonists we see two temptations. Some treat the canons as a logical system of legal norms, like a modern civil code, separated from theology. This leads to legalism, which places the law above the person and the community. Others see in the canons only symbols of spiritual realities, as if law had no place in the Church of grace. This leads to antinomianism, which forgets that the Church is also a visible body with order and responsibility.
Our tradition, however, shows that the law of the Church is ius divinum-humanum: neither a merely human law, nor a law without history, for, as we wrote in our dissertation, the Church “is not only invisible but visible as well.” We first learned this balance here. As a student we translated into Greek an article of the renowned Jesuit canonist Ladislas Örsy (1921–2025) on Theology and Canon Law, and we quoted it in our dissertation: the laws of the Church should be “both the laws of the Spirit of Christ and the common laws of a human society, desiring to live a peaceful and orderly life.” This is why the canonist must be both jurist and theologian. A canonist without theology becomes a bureaucrat. A theologian without law becomes a dreamer. The Church needs neither; she needs servants who know that every canon begins and ends with God, as the first canon of Trullo says, and that every canon is applied to a person whom God loves.
VI. What the Orientale means to us
Dear friends, before we conclude, allow us to answer a question we have often been asked: what does the Orientale mean for Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew?
First, it is a house of scholarship. For more than a century, since its foundation in 1917, this Institute has served the Christian East with a seriousness that has few equals. Its Faculty of Eastern Canon Law, founded in 1971 under the rectorship of Father Žužek, remains unique in the world. Here the canons of our common tradition are read in their original languages and with respect for their spirit. We say this as an Orthodox canonist: the Church of Rome has given the whole Christian world a great gift by keeping this house alive. We encourage you to continue, especially in difficult times, and we encourage our Orthodox Autocephalous Churches to send their young people here, as Patriarch Athenagoras once sent us.
Second, it is a house of encounter. When we arrived, three Orthodox students sat in classrooms full of Eastern Catholic and Latin clergy. Nobody asked us to be anything other than what we were. Our professors, Jesuits most of them, loved the East more than many Easterners did. They taught us our own tradition with care and without polemics. It was here that we learned that one can be fully Orthodox and at the same time a friend. This experience prepared us for every dialogue of our life.
Third, and above all, it is a house of memory and of gratitude. Here our mind was formed. Here we met the teachers who shaped our thinking. Here, in the years of Vatican II, we saw with our own eyes the beginning of reconciliation between our sister Churches. We left with a doctorate, but we also left with a vocation. We may truly say that whatever service we have offered the Church in the field of the holy canons began within these walls.
VII. Conclusion: thanksgiving
Almost sixty years ago, on a Saturday before Christmas, a young deacon defended his thesis in this house, not knowing where God would lead him. He imagined a chair at Halki. God gave him instead the Throne of St Andrew. He imagined teaching the canons to a few students. God gave him the task of guarding them for the whole Orthodox Church and of offering them to the dialogue with all Christians. Today the same man returns, older and, we hope, a little wiser, to say one word: thank you!
Thank you to God, the giver of every good gift. Thank you to Patriarch Athenagoras, who sent us, and who fifty-nine years ago today set his signature beside that of Paul VI on the path of reconciliation. Thank you to Hamilcar Alivizatos, who showed us the way. Thank you to Father Ivan Žužek and to all our professors, who taught us with patience. Thank you to Pope Francis, the friend whose tomb we venerated this morning. And thank you, dear Father President, dear professors and students, for this unforgettable welcome and for the exhibition that gave us back our youth.
We pray that the Lord will soon open again the doors of Halki, so that our young people may study there as we once studied here. We pray that the Orthodox Autocephalous Churches may rediscover the common treasure of their canons. We pray that our two sister Churches, bound by so many shared canons, may one day share again the one Cup. And we pray that this Institute may continue to be what it was for us: a school of the Christian East, a place of encounter, and a home.
May the grace and the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, through the intercessions of the All-Holy Theotokos, whose great Basilica stands across this square, be with you all. Amen.
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