Kyril will be there for an official visit; Francis will fly off later that day for Mexico, where he will spend six days.
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As the Vatican was announcing the February 12 date for the meeting of the pope and patriarch in Cuba, the Russian Orthodox also held a news conference to speak about it.
The Vatican announced Friday that Pope Francis will meet Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill later this month in Cuba.
“The encounter has been under preparation for a long time – it wasn’t improvised”, Lombardi said.
In a briefing in Moscow, a spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Ilarion, said it hoped the meeting will “open a new page in relations between the two churches”.
Metropolitan Illarion, the Russian cleric in charge of foreign affairs, said the main topic on the agenda would be persecution of Christians worldwide.
The meeting has been in the works for years and will be aimed at a further thaw in relations that was marked, perhaps most notably, by a visit to the Vatican by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2013.
Francis has an unusually close relationship with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, the symbolic head of the worldwide Orthodox church.
About two-thirds of the world’s Orthodox Christians belong to the Russian Orthodox Church, or about 200 million.
The Eastern and Western Churches split in the Great Schism of 1054, primarily over the issue of papal authority.
The Vatican insisted the Catholic Church rejects proselytism, which it defines as actively seeking converts from another Christian community, including through pressure or offering enticements.
But the Russian Orthodox Church has always kept its distance from Rome. From there, they will head to the presidential room of the airport, where Francis and Kirill will have a lengthy private conversation and sign a joint declaration.
Archpriest Dr. Alexander F.C. Webster of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia also welcomed the meeting and its focus on persecution.
He will also lead a liturgy in the St. Paul’s Cathedral of the Antioch patriarchate.
The Vatican recognized there were some instances of excessive zeal early on, but rejected the use of the term “proselytism” as a blanket description for the re-establishment of the Ukrainian Catholic Church.
The Orthodox Church is made up of more than 10 separate churches.
One particularly sore point is the fate of church properties that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin confiscated from Eastern Rite Catholics in Ukraine and gave to the Russian Orthodox there.
The signing, Lombardi said, will signify “a dialogue that can overcome previous obstacles”.
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Ever since Kirill took the helm of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2009, the church has enjoyed increasingly close ties with the Kremlin that critics have dismissed as the de-facto merging of the state and the church.
