Bartholomew I

ISTANBUL — Bartholomew I, spiritual leader of 250 million Orthodox Christians, says a meeting with Pope Francis in Jerusalem this month will help move the two churches closer to ending their nearly 1,000-year divide.

In an interview in his Istanbul office, Bartholomew also praised Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for improving rights for Christians but said pointedly, “it is not enough.”

The meetings between the ecumenical patriarch and the leader of the world’s Roman Catholics on May 25-26 will commemorate the historic visit of their predecessors 50 years ago that launched a dialogue aimed at ending the two churches’ schism in 1054.

“We shall say through our meeting and our prayer that it is the intention of both of us to work further for Christian unity and reconciliation,” Bartholomew said.

Although the Orthodox and Catholic churches remain estranged on key issues, including married clergy and the centralized power of the Vatican, there have been moves toward closer understanding, beginning with the 1964 meeting between Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras in Jerusalem.

Following the meeting, mutual excommunication edicts were dropped, and a Catholic-Orthodox Joint Declaration of 1965 called for greater harmony.

Echoing that declaration, Bartholomew said the road to unity remains long, but that Pope Francis’s acceptance of the invitation to meet in Jerusalem demonstrates that both leaders want to end the divide.

“When it will take place, we don’t know; how it will take place, we don’t know. Only God knows,” he said.

In the interview, Bartholomew expressed disappointment that Erdogan had not re-opened the Theological School of Halki, the Orthodox Church’s most important seminary. Bartholomew himself spent seven years as a student and another four more as an assistant to the dean at the grounds on an island in the sea of Marmara. The school, whose doors were closed in 1971 under a Turkish law that required private higher education to be controlled by the state, awaits the return of students.

Many expected that the seminary would be reopened last year as part of a package of reforms aimed at boosting minority rights in Turkey.

“It is a matter of human rights and especially of religious freedom,” Bartholomew said.