The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, flew from icy Moscow to the warmth of Havana on Thursday for an historic meeting at the airport with Pope Francis. This was the first time leaders of these two great Christian churches have met, much less embraced, in almost 1,000 years, after long and bitter divisions over dogmatic and canonical issues.
But momentous as the meeting may appear in ecclesiastical terms, much of the impetus for it was purely political at a moment of dangerous confrontations and delicate diplomacy between Russia and the West. As some influential voices in Moscow have started talking about the risk of a Third World War, the pope and the patriarch spoke of the need to protect "the future of human civilization."
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