Vatican City, 24 January, 2025 / 12:40 pm (ACI Africa).
The Dicastery for the Eastern Churches has prepared a pastoral guide for the 2025 Jubilee of the Eastern Churches, to be celebrated May 12–14, in order to make known the richness of the Christian traditions of the Eastern world.
According to Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti, prefect of the Dicastery for the Eastern Churches, this is a tool designed to “integrate a new dimension to the Roman experience of pilgrimage” that will adapt the identity of the Eastern Churches “according to the spirituality of each one.”
In an interview with Vatican News, the cardinal specified that this document is addressed to the Eastern Churches, “indicating to them that there are specific riches in their traditions that the jubilee can bring out clearly … above all, in this moment of grave difficulties for all the Eastern Churches — Middle East, Ukraine, Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea.”
The guide — which can be found on the website of the dicastery — also includes part of the history of Rome during the reign of the Eastern Roman Empire, which culminated with the fall of Constantinople and the conquest of the rest of the Byzantine territories by the Ottoman Turks in the 15th century.
From this part of the document it is clear that the Church of Rome “has been strongly inhabited by Eastern communities that have long retained their own specificity.” In particular, Gugerotti provided interesting data such as the fact that there were “11 Greek popes and almost a dozen Syriacs,” which proves that “it was not a marginal presence.”