In his tireless work for Christian unity, St. John Paul II often expressed the hope that Christianity in its third millennium might “breathe again” with its “two lungs:” West and East, Latin and Byzantine. It was a noble aspiration. And when he first visited Orthodoxy’s ecumenical patriarchate of Constantinople in 1979, perhaps the successor of Peter imagined that his heartfelt desire to concelebrate the Eucharist with the successor of Andrew would be realized in his lifetime.
It wasn’t to be, but not for lack of trying on John Paul’s part. Contentions within Orthodoxy; Russian Orthodox resentments (and worse) over John Paul II’s pivotal role in the Revolution of 1989; and a deeply engrained sense among some Orthodox Christians that not-being-in-full-communion-with-the-bishop-of-Rome is a defining element in Orthodox identity—all these conspired to frustrate John Paul’s desire that the East/West fracture formalized at the beginning of the second millennium (in 1054), could be healed by the Great Jubilee of 2000, so that Rome and Constantinople might undertake the new evangelization in the third millennium, together.
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