Address on the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Mutual Lifting of the Anathemas of 1054
An address given in the patriarchal church of St George in Istanbul on 7 December 2025, in which the Ecumenical Patriarch says what the act of 1965 achieved and that it did not restore full communion between the Orthodox and Catholic churches.
Bartholomew I spoke sixty years to the day after the declaration of Paul VI and Athenagoras I, to a congregation that included a representative of the apostolic nuncio in Turkey. In the second paragraph he calls the lifting of the anathemas a token of a new beginning that gave momentum to the “dialogue of love”, and then states its limit: it points toward the restoration of full communion between the two churches and does not constitute it. He quotes the declaration’s own words that the act is not sufficient to end the old and more recent differences.
It is cited in Rome and Constantinople Lift the Anathemas of 1054 as the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s own reading of the act, given on its own website. It is a statement made two generations later, by a successor of Athenagoras.
Cited in
- 7 December 1965, firm date