Press release at the conclusion
XVIII International Ecumenical Conference
Christians should know how to open those systems of human relations that tend to close in upon themselves, in order to give space to the Spirit’s transfiguring energy, who in them and through them vivifies the universe
COMMUNION AND SOLITUDE
Monastery of Bose, 8-11 September 2010
Bose, 20 September 2010
“Communion and solitude” is the pair treated in the paper of the 18th International Ecumenical Conference held at the Monastery of Bose from 8 to 11 September 2010. The conference, organized in collaboration with the Orthodox Churches, for almost twenty years has been an important occasion for dialogue on the basic themes of the spiritual life, where the traditions of Christian East and West intersect the profound expectations of modern man. The course of he conference, in four intense days of study and fraternal encounter, has reflected on the ways the spiritual tradition of the Churches of the East can still today offer a sensible word to the searching and expectations of modern men and women.
Theologians, historians, philosophers, scholars, and official representatives at the highest level of the Orthodox Churches, of the Catholic Church, and of the Churches of the Reform, together with many other persons participated in the work of the conference.
The messages of the Churches
In his warm greeting to the participants patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople recalled the prophetic quality for Christian unity of the cenobitic and eremitical life, which do not cease to be present in the Churches. The monk, who is “separated from all and united with all”, according to the saying of Evagrius, and who is always “with the others, although not together with them” (Barsanuphius and John of Gaza), is a living memory of the teaching that “solitude and silence” offer for “entering into a relation and being in communion with others”.
The message of patriarch Kirill of Moscow in its turn showed how the dimensions of solitude and communion find a model of harmonious interpenetration in the very life of Jesus as it is given us in the Gospel narrative. Pope Benedict XVI, in the message that was given to the conference through cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, invited the participants “to contemplate in Christ the perfect model of harmony between communion and solitude in which exists personally the Triune God”.
The many other messages for the most part converged in underlining the universally human dimension of a spiritual equilibrium between solitude and communion, which in the Christian experience, particularly in the monastic, finds its possible realization. We may mention the messages of metropolitan Volodymyr of Kiev and all Ukraine, metropolitan Filaret, patriarchal exarch of Belarus, archbishop Ieronimos of Athens, the catholikos of all the Armenians Karekin II, the rector of the Kiev Theological Academy, archbishop Antonij, archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury, the secretary of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Olav Friske Tveit, and of the presidents of important departments of the Catholic Church: archbishop Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for the promotion of Christian unity, cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference.