c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) With the return by Pope John Paul II of the venerated icon of the Mother of God of Kazan to Moscow, the Vatican can look to improved relations with the Russian Orthodox Church.

A papal delegation presented the icon to Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexey II on Sunday (Aug. 29) at a solemn, three-hour ceremony celebrated with incense and sacred music in the Cathedral of the Dormition of Mary, the church inside the Kremlin in which Russia’s czars were crowned and patriarchs are enthroned. Sunday was the Orthodox Feast of the Dormition, the equivalent of the Catholic Feast of the Assumption marking the end of the Virgin Mary’s life on earth.

Alexey made clear he did not consider that the icon, a 300-year-old copy of the lost 16th century original, warranted an invitation to the 84-year-old Roman Catholic pontiff to make a historic visit to Moscow. First, he said, disputes over the Catholic presence in traditional Orthodox territory must be settled.

But the patriarch said he sent the pope “our great thanks for the gift that testifies to the will of the Vatican to return to relations of respect between our churches and also the intention of our aiding each other.”

Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls, a member of the delegation that carried the icon from the Vatican to the Kremlin on a special Italian Air Force flight, called the day “historic.” The delegation was led by Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, and included Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington.

“A true hope has opened for facing the historical problems that exist between Catholics and Orthodox in a different way,” Navarro-Valls said. “I see it from the many contacts, from the language that has been used in these days.”

The Catholic and Orthodox churches have been divided since the Great Schism of 1054. New strains arose after the fall of communism over what the Moscow Patriarchate sees as Catholics proselytizing in its territory and over contested property in western Ukraine.

Sending the icon on its way with a ceremony of veneration in the Vatican last Wednesday (Aug. 25), the pope said he returned the sacred painting of the Madonna and Child to show his firm commitment to reconciliation.

Visions of the Virgin are supposed to have led to the discovery in 1579 of the original icon, called the Kazanskya, buried under an oven in a burned-out house in the Volga River city of Kazan 500 miles east of Moscow. Miracles attributed to it and its copies include saving Moscow from the Polish army in 1616, the defeat of Napoleonic forces in 1812 and the lifting of the Nazi siege of Leningrad during World War II.

The pope’s copy, which first appeared in the West in the 1920s, has hung in his private study since 1993, the gift of an association of American Catholics called the Blue Army of Fatima.

“The bishop of Rome has prayed before this sacred icon, asking that the day may come when we will be united and able to proclaim to the world with one voice and in visible communion the salvation of our one Lord and his triumph over the evil and impious forces which seek to damage our faith and our witness of unity,” John Paul said in a message delivered to Alexey along with the icon.

Alexey said he will keep the icon for now in his personal chapel. He said it may be moved later to a monastery that would be built on the site of the discovery of the original _ “where at the moment there unfortunately is a tobacco factory.”

DEA/RB END POLK