And speaking of Mexico, Pope Francis said, “My greatest desire is to pause” in front of the tilma, the cloak bearing the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
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While the Vatican has improve relations with some elements of Orthodox Christianity, “the Russian Church accused Catholics of trying to convert Russians after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989”, according to CNN.
Kirill leads the most powerful of the 14 independent Orthodox churches.
Cuban President Raul Castro and Cardinal Jaime Ortega, the Catholic Church’s highest representative in Cuba, greeted the pope as he got off the plane.
He noted that not only would the meeting be about reconciliation “after 1,000 years of separation between Europe’s largest Christian denominations”, but “it is also an enticing hint at both churches’ concern about the fate of Christian communities in the Middle East”. Before his appointment he had been the head of the Russian Orthodox Church’s department for relations with other churches, where he was regarded as being more open to warmer ties with Rome than his predecessors. “Not all are atheists”.
Francis inscribed a book Diaz had brought: “Thank you for your example”.
“I heartily thank Your Holiness for changing the date of our visit to Cuba when I could not come at your first invitation”, he added. “Having said that, this is still a very, very important step”.
Francis gave a strong push to the Colombian negotiators while he was in Cuba past year, telling them they don’t have the right to abandon peace efforts.
Their meeting taking place in Havana’s airport “symbolizes the stopover nature of this”, Padgett says, “that it’s really just sort of a brief encounter”.
Traveling to Mexico for a six-day visit, the pope is stopping briefly in Cuba to meet with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow at the Havana airport.
Nestor Ponguta Puerto, a radio journalist from Colombia, gave Pope Francis two golden bags of Colombia’s finest coffee and asked the pope when he would visit the South American country. “I can see it maybe getting to where they are much, much nicer to each other than they have ever been, but deep, deep down still hating each other’s guts”, he said.
Popes have dreamed of visiting Russian Federation but the circumstances continue to dim any hope of a papal visit anytime soon.
Francis’s arrival in Mexico on Friday evening was set to be a luminous affair, with hundreds of thousands of well-wishers expected to line the 12-mile (19-kilometer) route from the airport to the Vatican ambassador’s residence in Mexico City.
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“Now what’s left is Colombia”, Castro told reporters after the pope boarded his plane for Mexico.
