Welcome Address to the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I
The address with which Pope John Paul II received Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople in Rome on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul 2004. Its third paragraph speaks of the sack of Constantinople eight hundred years earlier.
The Ecumenical Patriarch visited Rome for the feast of Saints Peter and Paul in June 2004, forty years after Paul VI and Athenagoras I had met in Jerusalem. In the third paragraph of his welcome John Paul II names April 1204 as a painful memory that weighs on the two churches, describes the crusading army as having taken and sacked Constantinople and shed the blood of fellow Christians, and says that he shares the indignation and sorrow of Innocent III.
It is cited as a statement of how the Catholic Church’s bishop of Rome spoke of 1204 at the beginning of the twenty-first century, addressed to the Orthodox patriarch of the city concerned.
Cited in
- April 1204, firm date