Pope plans trip to Athens in footsteps of St Paul

From Bruce Johnston in Rome AFTER Yi ARS of opposition to Rome, the Greek Orthodox Church has given its blessing to a visit by the Pope to Athens, it has emerged.
According to Rome's H Messaggero, the visit will take place on May 9 and 10.
The newspaper said the trip would form the final part of a pilgrimage in the footsteps of St Paul, which will first take in Damascus and Malta.
The effect of the Athens visit, the paper added, would be one which had "more value as an ecumenical message than a new encyclical".
Greek Orthodox leaders were initially believed to have been opposed to a papal visit. But reports suggest they agreed after pressure from the Greek government. However, the matter must still go before the Greek Orthodox Church's Holy Synod for approval.
The precise form of the papal pilgrimage remains uncertain. i Messaggero said there was no chance of the Pope being welcomed as universal pastor of the Catholic Church.
Instead, he could be admitted either as a believer, or as the head of the Vatican state.
The paper said that the Pope had expressed his willingness to disrobe himself of his papal vestments and to go and pray on his knees at the Aeropagus hill in Athens "as a simple Christian".
The hill, where St Paul proclaimed Christianity in AD51, has often featured in John Paul ll's teaching, as a symbol of the secular culture of the modem world.
After pouring his energies into the Church's Jubilee celebrations, the Pope, 80, was now keen to return to the problem of trying to draw the Eastern and Western churches closer together.
His past attempts at rapprochement have met a frosty reception in some Orthodox churches, especially Russia's.
But a papal visit now being planned for the Ukraine on June 23 and 27, will make the prospect of a trip to Moscow, which has long been thwarted by a hostile Russian Orthodox leadership, a more distinct possibility. According to the Pope's biographer, George Weigel, Catholic-Orthodox dialogue experienced a particularly difficult period between spring and autumn 1997.
Hopes for a long-awaited meeting between the Pope and Patriarch Alexei II, Russian Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow, were dashed in June, though there was a suggestion they could meet after the Pontiff had visited Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.
In Witness to Hope, Weigel wrote that the prospects of either meeting collapsed after Bartholomew refused to rush the event. The Orthodox churches later blamed the Vatican and also accused the Catholic Church of "proselytising".
Patriarch Bartholomew also claimed, during a lecture tour of the United States, that "ontological" differences blocked full communion.