Eastern Catholic leaders are remembering Pope Francis for bringing significant attention to their churches and traditions throughout his papacy, in a legacy marked by fraternity and many firsts, while marked with some tensions at times.
The late pope was “a fan of the East” and called for Latin Catholics to learn from Eastern Catholic churches near them, said Ines A Murzaku, professor of ecclesiastical history and founding chair of the Department of Catholic Studies at Seton Hall University.
Advancing that dynamic were the late pope’s calling of the Synod on Synodality, and his 2014 lifting of a previous ban on the ordination of married men in Eastern churches located in North America and Australia.
However, amid Russia’s war on Ukraine, the late pope also struggled to navigate what religious history scholar Anatolii Babynskyi called a “tightrope walk” with the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
Pope Francis’ 2021 visit to Iraq—the first made by any pope—was “a brave act of magnanimity” that “marked a turning point” for the country’s Christian minority, Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Bashar M Warda of Irbil, Iraq, said.
Pope Francis also urged unity among Syro-Malabar Catholics, riven by a painful liturgical dispute. For Armenian Catholics, he acknowledged the horrors of the Armenian genocide, and named the 10th-century Armenian monk St Gregory of Narek as a doctor of the church.
Pope Francis summed up his view of Eastern Catholics, saying, “The Christian East allows us to draw from ancient and ever new sources of spirituality; these become fresh springs that bring vitality to the church.”