VATICAN CITY – Pope John Paul II returned the bones of two of the most revered saints in the Orthodox Church yesterday, part of a series of gestures aimed at healing a millennium of distance and distrust between the church's Eastern and Western rites.
The pope has made better relations between the branches of the church a priority of his long papacy, and both he and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, his spiritual counterpart among the world's Orthodox, spoke of reconciliation at a ceremony yesterday morning under the grand dome of St. Peter's.
Bartholomew I, seated at the altar next to the pope, said the return of the bones – revered as relics and packed in boxes of crystal and alabaster – showed that "in the Church of Christ, there exist no insurmountable problems when love, justice and peace meet."
But Vatican officials have made no secret of a more concrete goal than better relations: that the 84-year-old John Paul II might become the first pope to visit Russia.
John Paul II, who is Polish, is considered by some as one of the main forces in the collapse of communism in 1989.
In August, he returned an icon revered by the Russian Orthodox, and church officials from the Vatican and in Russia have worked to address one major issue of contention: allegations that the Roman Catholic Church is engaged in an effort to convert many Russian Orthodox. The Vatican denies the allegation.
The pope's gesture yesterday seemed less related to the specific improvement of relations with the Russian church, but involved relics of major significance to the Orthodox and Roman churches alike.
The remains are of two of the most important Orthodox patriarchs, St. John Chrysostom and St. Gregory of Nazianzus, archbishops of Constantinople who lived before the split between the Western and Eastern churches in 1054.
Both sets of remains had been interred for centuries in St. Peter's, and yesterday they were carried in elaborate boxes with yellow velvet to be blessed both by John Paul II and Bartholomew I, whose see is in Istanbul.
Although the pope said many of the prayers during the service, his homily was delivered by an aide, a practice that has become routine as he has grown increasingly frail. In his address, the pope called the return of the relics "a blessed occasion to purify our wounded memories, to cleanse our journey of reconciliation."
A portion of the men's remains will remain interred in St. Peter's.
The long tensions between the branches of the church surfaced in a small tiff over when the bones were actually brought to Rome.
The Orthodox contend that both men's remains were taken when crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204, one of the major early events in the two rites' division.
The Vatican differed strongly enough with that version that the pope's spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, issued a statement yesterday saying the bones of Gregory were brought to Rome in the eighth century, a time of persecution of Roman Catholics in Constantinople. He denied the pope was "asking pardon" for the removal of the bones, saying their return was a gesture of reconciliation.
Three years ago, the pope apologized for the Catholic Church's role in the sacking of Constantinople.
The Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empire ultimately collapsed when the Muslim Ottoman Turks conquered the city in 1453, but the Ecumenical Patriarchate remained in the city.
Constantinople is now Istanbul. After Bartholomew returned to Istanbul yesterday, bells rang out in celebration as the remains were carried in a candlelight procession into the Cathedral of St. George.
"For eight hundred years, these relics have been in exile," Bartholomew said at the service. "This gesture differentiates (Catholic leaders) from the deed of their predecessors eight centuries ago."
