Russian patriarch says icon's return is 'step in the right direction'

Published: 2004-08-31

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- In a written message, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II thanked Pope John Paul II for returning a Marian icon and said the gift was "a step in the right direction" toward resolving Catholic-Orthodox tensions. "I wholeheartedly thank you," the patriarch wrote to the pope after a Vatican delegation returned the icon of the Mother of God of Kazan during an Aug. 28 liturgy in Moscow. The text of Patriarch Alexy's letter to the pope was released Aug. 31 by the Vatican. The patriarch told the pope that the Moscow cathedral where the service took place was "overcrowded with the faithful who came on this sacred day to lift up their prayers to the Most Holy 'Theotokos,' (Mother of God)." The icon, an 18th-century copy of a 16th-century image of Mary and the child Jesus, was taken out of Russia in the early 1900s. A Catholic group in the United States bought it in 1970 and gave it to the pope in 1993.

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