THE Pope hinted yesterday that he hoped that the return to Russia of a revered Orthodox icon will enable him to travel to Moscow, fulfilling one of his last remaining ambitions.
At an elaborate ceremony in the Vatican tinged with Byzantine chants used in the Russian Church, the Pope gave the icon of the Madonna of Kazan to a delegation that will take it to Russia tomorrow after public veneration in Rome.
The Pope hopes that the gesture will start a thaw in icy Roman Catholic-Orthodox relations and help to heal the thousand-year East-West schism in the Church.
At 84 and suffering from Parkinson’s disease and arthritis, the widely travelled pontiff still harbours hopes of making an official visit to Moscow.
Although he has a standing invitation from a succession of Soviet and Russian leaders, including President Putin, his desire to travel to the home of the largest and most influential Church of world orthodoxy has been stymied by strained relations between the Vatican and the Russian Church. The icon will be delivered by Cardinal Walter Kasper, head of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, to Alexei II, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch, at the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Kremlin on Saturday. The Pope had hoped to return the icon himself by visiting Kazan last year, but the plan was shelved when Alexei II made clear his opposition.
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The Madonna of Kazan has mystical significance for Russians, who believe that it helped to secure Russian victories in a series of battles over the centuries against Poles, Tatars and Swedes.
It has equally powerful symbolism for the Pope, to whom it represents the Virgin Mary’s prediction in the Prophecies of Fatima, vouchsafed in a vision to children at Fatima in Portugal in 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, that after enduring the horrors of communism Russia would revert to Christianity. While the present icon is thought to be an early 18th- century copy rather than the 13th-century original — now lost — it remains an “object of faith and veneration”.
The icon was stolen in the 1920s and ended up on the international art market. After a period in a private English collection in the 1950s, it was exhibited in New York and bought in 1970 by an American Catholic organisation, which first lent it to the shrine at Fatima and then donated it to the Pope in 1993. It has been in his private chapel ever since.
Yesterday the Pope praised “Holy Russia” for remaining faithful to Chistianity during the communist era and said that he hoped that he and the Russian Patriarch could “walk together down the path of reconciliation” toward “full union between Christians of East and West”.