VATICAN (CNS: The Christian saints in heaven enjoy full unity and should inspire all Christians to continue to pray and work together for the unity of the Churches, Pope Francis told Catholicos Awa III, the patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, based in Iraq.
The pope said, during their November 9 meeting, that the unity in faith that Christian Churches are seeking through their ecumenical theological dialogues “has already been achieved by the saints of our Churches.”
He also announced that the feast of St. Isaac of Nineveh would be added to the Roman Martyrology, calling him “one of the most venerated fathers of the Syro-Oriental tradition, acknowledged as a teacher and a saint by all traditions.” The saint was a seventh-century bishop and theologian who died in Nineveh, near what is Mosul, Iraq, today.
The Roman Martyrology is organised as a calendar, listing the saints and blesseds whose feasts are celebrated by the Catholic Church each day and provides a small biography of each. More than 6,500 individual names and close to 7,000 unnamed martyred “companions” are catalogued.
The saints “are our best guides on the path toward full communion,” the Pope Francis told the group.
He said he decided to add St. Isaac to the Catholic calendar “with the agreement of Your Holiness and the patriarch of the Chaldean [Catholic] Church and encouraged by the recent synod of the Catholic Church on synodality, which noted that the example of the saints of other Churches is ‘a gift that we can accept by including their commemoration in our liturgical calendar.’”
[St. Isaac of Nineveh]…one of the most venerated fathers of the Syro-Oriental tradition, acknowledged as a teacher and a saint by all traditions Pope Francis
Catholicos Awa’s visit to the Vatican marked the 30th anniversary of the common Christological declaration signed by Pope St. John Paul II and Catholicos Dinkha IV, “which ended 1,500 years of doctrinal controversy regarding the Council of Ephesus,” Pope Francis said. “That historic declaration recognised the legitimacy and accuracy of the varied expressions of our common Christological faith as formulated by the Fathers in the Nicene Creed” regarding how Christ was both fully human and fully divine.
The pope said that divided Christians must continue to pray together and work together as they await full communion, and that “theological dialogue is indispensable in our journey toward unity, since the unity we yearn for is unity in faith.”
However, he stressed that “the dialogue of truth must never be separated from the dialogue of charity and the dialogue of life. In this way, it is a complete and human dialogue.”
On November 11, Pope Francis welcomed members of the synod of the Malankara Mar Thoma Syrian Church in India, to the Vatican for the first time.
“Your Church, heir to both the Syriac tradition of St. Thomas Christians and the Reformed tradition, rightly calls itself a ‘bridge Church’ between East and West,” Pope Francis told the bishops.
Therefore, as our recent synod proposed, I hope that one day we can celebrate an ecumenical synod on evangelisation—all together
Pope Francis
As the world’s Christians seek unity, the pope said, they must cooperate in a “synodal” way, recognising each other’s baptism and the gifts that flow from it, which should be shared to strengthen all Christians.
The final document of the recent Catholic Synod of Bishops on synodality encouraged “ecumenical synodal practices, up to and including forms of consultation and discernment on matters of shared and urgent concern,” the pope noted.
Emphasising again the need for theological dialogue, which the Vatican launched with the Malankara Mar Thoma Syrian Church only a year ago, Pope Francis told them that “in the meantime, we must walk together, pray together and work together. All together. All together.”
Jesus prayed that all his disciples would be one so that the world would believe. “I am convinced that working together to witness to the Risen Christ is the best way to bring us closer together,” the pope said.
“Therefore, as our recent synod proposed, I hope that one day we can celebrate an ecumenical synod on evangelisation—all together,” he said. “And this synod will be to pledge, to pray, to reflect and to commit together to a better Christian witness, ‘so that the world may believe.’”
