Evensong at Abbey marks end of icons

REPRESENTATIVES from Rome and Constantinople will attend Evensong at Westminster Abbey on Monday to mark the 1500th Anniversary of the Seventh Ecumenical Council.
Cardinal Willebrands, head of the Vatican Secretariat for Christian Unity who is in this country to receive an Honourary Oxford Doctorate of Divinity for his services to ecumenism, will attend Evensong with a Metropolitan from Istanbul representing Demetrios 1, the Oecumenical Patriarch.
The Seventh Ecumenical Council marked the end of the "iconoclastic controversy" which arose over the use of icons in Christian worship. Protestants and to some extent Catholics have been wary of the use of icons in worship because of the opinion that they detract from worship due to God alone.
After Evensong Professor Henry Chadwick of Peterhouse, Cambridge will deliver an address on the council which provided a charter for Christian art in Mosaic and fresco by allowing worship of this sort.