Pope Leo XIV has appealed for peace in almost every talk he has given since his election on May 8, and today, May 14, he reassured the Christians of the Eastern churches and their pastors, “For my part, I will make every effort so that this peace may prevail.”
They had come for their Jubilee Year pilgrimage (May 12-14) and represented the 18 million faithful of the 23 Eastern Catholic Churches that are sui iuris, or self-governing, and in full communion with the bishop of Rome. Throughout history, these churches have preserved distinct liturgical rites, theology and traditions rooted in Eastern Christianity. As Vatican Media explained, most of them originated from historical reunions between Eastern Orthodox communities and the Roman Catholic Church, and they can be found across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, India and parts of Africa, with communities in diaspora worldwide.
Pope Leo was given an enthusiastic welcome from some 5,000 Eastern Christians in the Vatican’s audience hall. Many of them waved the flags of their war-torn home countries, including Lebanon, Syria, Ethiopia, the Holy Land and Ukraine, as well as India, where peace seems to have returned after a flare-up with Pakistan.
“The Holy See is always ready to help bring enemies together, face to face, to talk to one another, so that peoples everywhere may once more find hope and recover the dignity they deserve, the dignity of peace,” he told them.
“The peoples of our world desire peace,” Pope Leo XIV said, “and to their leaders I appeal with all my heart: Let us meet, let us talk, let us negotiate! War is never inevitable. Weapons can and must be silenced, for they do not resolve problems but only increase them.”
“Those who make history are the peacemakers, not those who sow seeds of suffering,” he reminded world leaders. “Our neighbors are not first our enemies, but our fellow human beings; not criminals to be hated, but other men and women with whom we can speak.”
He thanked God “for all those who, in silence, prayer and self-sacrifice, are sowing seeds of peace” and “for those Christians—Eastern and Latin alike—who, above all in the Middle East, persevere and remain in their homelands, resisting the temptation to abandon them.”
Many Christians have left these lands because of war, and many more would do so if they could. Leo insisted to the rulers of these countries, “Christians must be given the opportunity, and not just in words, to remain in their native lands with all the rights needed for a secure existence.”
Preserving the Christian East
The American-born pope began by greeting them with the words “He is truly risen!”—words, he said, that “Eastern Christians in many lands never tire of repeating during the Easter season, as they profess the very heart of our faith and hope.”
Those present in the audience hall cheered when, speaking in Italian, he told them, “I am happy to be with you and to devote one of the first audiences of my pontificate to the Eastern faithful.”
“You are precious in God’s eyes,” he told them and added: “Looking at you, I think of the diversity of your origins, your glorious history and the bitter sufferings that many of your communities have endured or continue to endure.”
He reaffirmed what Pope Francis said, namely that the Eastern Churches are to be “cherished and esteemed for the unique spiritual and sapiential traditions that they preserve, and for all that they have to say to us about the Christian life, synodality and the liturgy. We think of early Fathers, the councils and monasticism…inestimable treasures for the church.”
He recalled that Pope Leo XIII, who reigned from 1878 to 1903, was the first pope to devote a specific document “to the dignity of your churches, inspired above all by the fact that, in his words, ‘the work of human redemption began in the East.’”
Pope Leo said it is significant that several Eastern rite liturgies being celebrated in Rome during the Jubilee pilgrimage “continue to use the language of the Lord Jesus,” Aramaic. Like Leo XIII, he reaffirmed the importance for the whole church of preserving the “legitimate variety of Eastern liturgy and discipline.”
He recalled Leo XIII’s insistence that “preserving the Eastern rites is more important than is generally realized” and decreed that “any Latin rite missionary, whether a member of the secular or regular clergy, who by advice or support draws any Eastern rite Catholic to the Latin rite” ought to be “dismissed and removed from his office.”
Pope Leo XIV said he “willingly” reiterated that appeal “to preserve and promote the Christian East, especially in the diaspora.” He called on the Dicastery for the Eastern Churches, headed by the Italian cardinal Claudio Gugerotti, “to help me to define principles, norms and guidelines whereby Latin bishops can concretely support Eastern Catholics in the diaspora in their efforts to preserve their living traditions.”
“The church needs you,” Pope Leo told them. “The contribution that the Christian East can offer us today is immense,” he said. He told them, “We have great need to recover the sense of mystery that remains alive in your liturgies, liturgies that engage the human person in his or her entirety, that sing of the beauty of salvation and evoke a sense of wonder at how God’s majesty embraces our human frailty!”
He said it is “important to rediscover,” especially in the Christian West, “a sense of the primacy of God, the importance of mystagogy and the values so typical of Eastern spirituality: constant intercession, penance, fasting, and weeping for one’s own sins and for those of all humanity!”
He told the Eastern Christians and their pastors, “It is vital that you preserve your traditions without attenuating them, for the sake perhaps of practicality or convenience, lest they be corrupted by the mentality of consumerism and utilitarianism.”
He thanked these Christians of the East for being “lights in our world” and encouraged them “to be outstanding for your faith, hope and charity and nothing else.”
He prayed that their churches “be exemplary,” that their pastors “promote communion with integrity” and that their synods of bishops “be places of fraternity and authentic co-responsibility.”
He concluded by imparting his blessing to them and asking them to pray for the church and “to raise your powerful prayers of intercession for my ministry.”
At the end of the audience, he greeted individually the patriarchs and major archbishops of these 23 Eastern churches, including Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv-Halych, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church; Cardinal Louis Sako, the Iraq-based patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church; Indian Cardinal Baselios Cleemis Thottunkal, major archbishop of Trivandrum and head of the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church; as well as Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti, prefect of the Dicastery for Eastern Churches.
Material from Catholic News Service was used in this report.
