During a momentous third day of his visit to the United States that included a White House meeting with President Joseph Biden, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew – the primary spiritual leader of the world’s estimated 300 million Orthodox Christians – met with Washington Cardinal Wilton Gregory on Oct. 25 in a chapel at Georgetown University where Orthodox students pray and worship.
And as a dramatic backdrop to his visit, a new icon at the chapel showing the apostles and brothers St. Andrew and St. Peter embracing each other reflected the fraternal ties between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, and also the brotherly friendship and shared work of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Pope Francis.
Greeting the Ecumenical Patriarch at the university’s Copley Crypt Chapel, Cardinal Gregory said, “Your presence here today among us reaffirms our mutual commitment to dialogue and to the work of Christian unity.”
Washington’s archbishop said he joined Pope Francis in congratulating Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew on the 30th anniversary of his election and said his visit there “is a blessing to Georgetown University, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington and to the nation’s capital. May our Lord Jesus Christ bless you in your ministry and your travels.”
Joined by about two dozen Georgetown students, along with Georgetown President John J. DeGioia and Orthodox clerics including Archbishop Elpidophoros of America, the Ecumenical Patriarch thanked the university for providing a worship space for the Orthodox community there.
He also noted that he had recently met with Pope Francis at the Vatican along with other religious leaders at a climate summit. The two have worked together on calling on people of the world to take measures to limit climate change and protect the environment. He noted that he attended Pope Francis’s inaugural Mass in 2013, becoming the first Ecumenical Patriarch to do so, and over the years they have met about 10 times.
“I was with him only a few days ago. We have a real brotherly friendship,” he said, later adding, “I’m very happy to collaborate with such a personality who belongs not only to the Roman Catholic Church but to all Christianity and humankind.”
At the chapel, Michael Psaros, whose family donated the chapel’s new icon of St. Andrew embracing St. Peter, explained that it was inspired by “the great encounter” between Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Pope Francis at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 2014.
“I was there,” Psaros said. “They embraced. His All-Holiness said, ‘My brother Peter.’ Pope Francis responded, ‘My brother Andrew.’”
Psaros called the icon “the ultimate ecumenical act by the oldest and most prestigious Catholic university in the United States to the Orthodox Church” and earlier explained it represented an “act of goodwill from the Western Church to the Eastern Church.”
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew was elected in October 1991 as the 270th archbishop of Constantinople, the 2,000 year-old church founded by St. Andrew. Pope Francis is the 265th successor to St. Peter as pope and as the bishop of Rome.
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew said an icon depicting that embrace of the apostles and brothers that was presented to Pope St. Paul VI is now in the headquarters of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity in Rome.
During the visit to the chapel, Georgetown’s president presented the Ecumenical Patriarch with a plate depicting the icon. Before the patriarch arrived, Psaros noted that he had engaged a noted iconographer, George Filippakis.
“Iconography is not painting. It’s writing. It’s an act of prayer,” he explained. Addressing the Orthodox students there, he said the new icon in their worship space at Georgetown “is really for you and for all the generations to come.”
After entering the chapel, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew signed the Gospel book that is used for Orthodox worship there, and as the gathering was about to end, students lined up to receive a personal blessing from him.
During his meeting with the patriarch, Cardinal Gregory mentioned that when he earlier served as archbishop of Atlanta, he participated in prayer services, dialogues and joint efforts with his friend, Metropolitan Alexios, the Greek Orthodox primate of Atlanta. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew gave Cardinal Gregory a pectoral cross as a gift.
As he was departing, the Ecumenical Patriarch could be heard telling the cardinal, “Your Eminence, I hope to see you in Constantinople, whenever you like!”
Reflecting on their meeting afterward, Cardinal Gregory said, “I felt very much like I was supporting the good works of Paul VI and the popes in between and Francis. They have all been very dedicated and committed to dialogue between the Orthodox and Catholic faiths.”
Later Father Charles Cortinovis, who serves as the cardinal’s priest secretary and also as the executive director of the Office of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs for the Archdiocese of Washington, said, “That a Catholic university would offer space for Orthodox worship is wonderful. It shows great respect for our Orthodox Christian brothers and sisters. It shows that we’re willing to work together.”
Noting the warmth of the visit between the patriarch and cardinal, he said he hoped the gathering “will lead to deepening Orthodox and Catholic collaboration locally, nationally and internationally.”
Reacting to the visit, Georgetown student Antonia Sames said that as someone who has grown up and remains an active member of the Orthodox Church, it was a “blessing to welcome His All-Holiness to our academic home. As our spiritual father, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew inspires us to strengthen our centuries-old faith amid the challenges of the modern day.”
Russian Orthodox Father David Pratt, the director of Orthodox Christian chaplaincy at Georgetown, later said it was a special blessing to have the Ecumenical Patriarch visit their worship space. The Orthodox leader presented him with a censor to use with incense at services there.
Father Pratt said the icons in the chapel “make us focus on beauty and salvation.”
At a dinner afterward at Georgetown University’s Copley Lounge, President DeGioia praised Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew for his leadership in ecumenical and interreligious dialogue and also noted that he is “known around the world as the Green Patriarch for his deep commitment to the environment.” Pope Francis’s ecological advocacy, including his encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, has been influenced by the patriarch.
Also at the dinner, Psaros, the donor of the chapel’s new icon, spoke about Georgetown University’s impact on his life.
“I am who I am because of my family the holy Orthodox Church and Georgetown University,” said Psaros, a 1989 graduate of the university who is a co-founder and co-managing partner of KPS Capital Partners, a leading global private equity firm. He also serves as the vice chairman of the Executive Board of Advisors of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.
Psaros announced that as a way to give back to the university and his church, he and his family are establishing an endowed Orthodox chaplaincy at Georgetown University named in Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew’s honor, so Orthodox priests can continue to serve students there now and in the future.
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who received an honorary degree at Georgetown in 1997 and spoke there in 2009, then addressed those at the dinner. He praised the university for confronting a tragic aspect of its history, its connection to slavery. In 1838, 272 enslaved men, women and children were sold by the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus to two Louisiana plantation owners, in order to ensure the financial survival of Georgetown College. In 2015, President DeGioia formed a Working Group on Slavery, Memory and Reconciliation at Georgetown University, which led to a formal apology from the Jesuits and the creation of the Descendants Truth and Reconciliation Foundation that will support educational opportunities and scholarships from early childhood education to higher education for descendants of the enslaved. The foundation will also support programs that advance racial healing.
“From afar, we have observed with keen interest how you have addressed issues of injustice in your own past, particularly as they related to the sad story of American slavery,” Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew said. “We have admired how you have been, not only willing to confront this painful legacy, but you have addressed it with redress in the present moment. This shows great courage and spiritual capacity, something that your students see and in which they find inspiration.”
The Orthodox leader said of such efforts, “This is not re-writing the past. It is righting the past. As an example, all of Christianity – Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestants – have had to confront issues of anti-Semitism and past sins against our Jewish brothers and sisters. We have found a way forward out of the morass of the past by honesty and truth-telling. You have done this with great determination here at Georgetown, and you deserve the praise and thanks of all.”
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew said in a similar way, people of faith must honestly address environmental justice and responsibility.
“Our ecological advocacy and witness is not an ephemeral exercise. The entire life of the Church is a calling to ecological awareness. It is mandated by the Gospel, which commands us to be ‘faithful and wise stewards’ of all with which God has entrusted us,” he said.
Concluding his remarks, the patriarch said, “May (we) ever live our lives with conviction of the truth, and with open hearts to God and our fellow human beings.”
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew arrived at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Oct. 23 to begin his 12-day official visit to the United States. He was greeted there by several ambassadors and Orthodox bishops, clergy and laity. The official visit, postponed from May 2020 because of the global pandemic, is his first visit to the United States since 2009. He thanked the nation’s Orthodox Christians, saying, “You, our most beloved sons and daughters, have transplanted the faith of the apostles upon this blessed continent.”
The next day, he didn’t feel well, which prevented him from leading a service at Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Washington. After following medical advice he was admitted to George Washington University Hospital, and after spending the night there, he was released from the hospital on the morning of Oct. 25. Later that day before his visit to Georgetown University, via Zoom he offered a blessing for an exhibition of Orthodox Christian Cultural Heritage at the Museum of the Bible. He also met with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the State Department and with President Joe Biden at the White House, where they discussed climate change and other issues.
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew will visit the University of Notre Dame on Oct. 28 and receive an honorary degree there. On Nov. 1, the American Jewish Committee will present its highest award to the Ecumenical Patriarch for interreligious relations and advancing Orthodox-Jewish relations. Then on Nov. 2, he is scheduled to preside at the opening of the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and National Shrine at Ground Zero in New York City.
