Ecumenical Contacts and the Prior’s Ministry of Preaching

H.B. Christodoulos, archbishop of Athens and all Greece with the prior br Enzo

At the beginning of December, at the invitation of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, brother Enzo participated in the ecumenical liturgy celebrated in San Paolo fuori le Mura on the occasion of the meeting of His Beatitude Christodoulos, archbishop of Athens and All Greece, with Benedict XVI, the first visit of a primate of the Church of Greece to the bishop of Rome.

Our prior had the opportunity to meet the archbishop again in a private conversation during his visit to Greece for a talk at the Italian Cultural Institute in Thessalonica. In Athens he was warmly received also by igumen Jakovos and the community of the Petraki monastery.
Brother Enzo travelled also to Addis-Abeba for several meetings on the religious life with the men and women religious present in Ethiopia. This was also a precious opportunity for him to meet patriarch Paulos and the faithful of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, of ancient tradition. He was impressed by the great human dignity of this people and their profound faith, due, among other things, to their receiving a religious upbringing from birth.
More recently, the prior travelled to Brussels, Belgium, to preach a retreat to the Jesuits of the Belgian province on “Vocations to the Religious Life”, and to Lille, France, at the invitation of bishop Gérard Defois, to give a retreat to priests, deacons, and seminarians of the diocese on the topic of ars celebrandi.