Pope departs for Cuba, first stop before Mexico

Kirill, on a longer stay, will also visit Cuba’s small Russian Orthodox Church, built between 2004 to 2008 and attended by Russian holdovers from the decades of Soviet influence in Cuba.

Pope Francis boards an airplane at Rome’s Fiumicino airport on his way to a week-long trip to Mexico, Friday, Feb. 12, 2016.

Pope Francis on Friday greeted Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill with a hug and an exclamation of “finally”, thus ending an 1000-year schism between the two churches.

The 79-year-old Francis, in white robes and a skullcap, and Kirill, 69, in black robes and a white headdress, exchanged kisses and embraced before sitting down smiling for the historic meeting at Havana airport.

Pope Francis and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill on Friday (Feb 12) called on the global community to protect Christians under assault in the Middle East in apparent reference to violence by the militant group Islamic State.

And Francis also confirmed that the Vatican was preparing to schedule a visit to Colombia next year, if peace talks between the government and rebel forces continue as planned. The meeting, which took place in Cuba, resulted in a 30-point statement in which the two heads of Christianity declared that they “are not competitors, but brothers”.

Many Orthodox observers view Kirill’s willingness to sit down with a pope as an attempt to assert Russian Federation at a time when Moscow has been isolated. Patriarch Kirill is visiting Cuba, Brazil and Paraguay.

Their meeting, announced just a week ago, also carried political overtones, coming at a time of Russian disagreements with the West over Syria and Ukraine.

The Eastern, or Orthodox Church, has about 225 million followers, with the Moscow Patriarch having about 160 million adherents – the largest of all of the Orthodoxy’s 15 congregations.

“This isn’t benevolence”, said George Demacopoulos, the Greek-Orthodox chairman of Orthodox Christian studies at Fordham University in NY.

Patriarch Kirill is not the leader of Orthodox Christianity. But in a Twitter message, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, the acknowledged “first among equals” of Orthodox patriarchs, welcomed the meeting in Cuba. Those include Protestants, Evangelicals, Lutherans or Free Church congregations and make up, as non-Catholics and non-Orthodox, the majority of the more than 225 million Christians living in the USA.

More recently, fighting in Ukraine has brought tension between the Orthodox church and the Roman Catholic church.

“We can be hopeful that it will mark the beginning of a new stage in relations” between the churches, said Paulist Fr. Ronald Roberson, associate director of the USA bishops’ Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.

“It will certainly forge relations within Orthodoxy: We still don’t have contact with a lot of Orthodox patriarchs, and this meeting could help develop intra-Orthodox relations”, he said.