We reported on Wednesday that Metropolitan Kirill, the external relations chief of the Moscow Patriarchate, has been making very positive comments about relations between the Russian Orthodox and the Roman Catholic churches. “We now have a positive tendency — we have moved on from a severe frost to a thaw,” he told journalists in Moscow on Tuesday.

Now he’s said it directly to the Vatican, in an interview with the pope’s own paper L’Osservatore Romano (at the upper right of the PDF, in Italian). The Vatican daily on Thursday has an unusual front-page interview with Kirill where he spoke again of a thaw. “The big chill is over and it’s thawing time,” he said. The rest of the short interview repeats earlier statements about how the two churches share the same spiritual and moral valules and should work together to tackle the many problems facing humanity today.

Recent high-level contacts between the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches are starting to show some results. It’s still in the atmospheric stage, but the comments from Moscow are now much more positive than they used to be. The latest came on Tuesday from Metropolitan Kirill, the external relations chief of the Moscow Patriarchate, in a very Russian turn of phrase — “We now have a positive tendency — we have moved on from a severe frost to a thaw.”

Pope Benedict has been wooing the Orthodox churches from the start of his papacy and would like to become the first Roman pontiff ever to meet a Russian patriarch. The current patriarch, Alexiy II, tested the Catholic waters with a visit earlier this month to Paris, where he met Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard and other French prelates. He spoke about “emerging cooperation” between the two churches, without going into too many details. Speaking to journalists the next day, Kirill added a clearer assessment. “We have achieved some very positive results recently,” he said.

So does the frost-to-thaw image add anything? For journalists weighing every word these men say, it pushes the story just a little bit further. It was another departure from the wooden responses we used to hear in the past. That usually signals some real movement behind the scenes. When will we see the next step?

The Russian Orthodox Church has published an embargoed statement from a Catholic- Orthodox dialogue session that it walked out of in protest this month. The Web site of the Church’s representation to European institutions in Brussels posted the text along with a commentary saying it would give its opinion of the statement later. The statement was not due to be released until November 15. According to the French Catholic news service I.Media, its early publication evoked surprise and disappointment at the Vatican department for ecumenical relations, as well as concern this could compromise the continuing talks.

The statement is interesting because Orthodox churches supporting it recognised the primacy of the bishop of Rome, i.e. the Roman Catholic pope. We already mentioned this breakthrough in this delicate ecumenical dialogue in a post on October 17, quoting two participants. The text says the bishop of Rome is the protos, or first among the patriarchs of Christian churches. “They disagree, however, on the interpretation of the historical evidence from this era regarding the prerogatives of the bishop of Rome as protos, a matter that was already understood in different ways in the first millennium,” it said. “It remains for the question of the role of the bishop of Rome in the communion of all the Churches to be studied in greater depth.”

Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev of Vienna, the Russian Orthodox representative to the European Union, said in an interview on the website that the absence of his Church made the work of this International Mixed Commission problematic. “The Moscow Patriarchate represents more than a half of world Orthodox Christianity,” he said. “Without it, the Catholic-Orthodox dialogue will in fact be a dialogue of the Catholic Church with less than a half of the Orthodox Church.”

Hilarian said he hoped a solution could be found by the time the commission meets in about two years.

P.S. Here’s the Catholic News Service story on the statement.

One of the fascinating aspects about reporting on religion is that the timeframes are far longer than most topics news agencies cover. Experts debate the fine points of little-known issues and progress can be slower than a snail’s pace. But it’s sometimes interesting to take a look at where they’re going.

A recent meeting of the International Mixed Commission for theological dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church in Ravenna, Italy ended with a short communique that said: “The theme of the next plenary session, the date and location of which are shortly to be decided, is: “The role of the bishop of Rome in the communion of the Church in the first millennium.” Pope Benedict also mentioned this last week in his audience but didn’t elaborate on it.

Two participants at the talks have now fleshed that out a bit. These talks between the Vatican and the Orthodox churches, which broke from Rome and rejected the primacy or authority of the pope in the Great Schism of 1054, are now slowly getting down to discussing the crux of the problem. If Catholics and Orthodox are to achieve some kind of unity, something Pope Benedict has put high on his agenda, they have to figure out the role the pope would play.

Bishop Gérard Daucourt, bishop of the diocese of Nanterre just outside Paris, told the French Catholic daily La Croix that “for the first time, the two churches agree on the primacy of the Bishop of Rome. We now agree to recognise that two elements — collegiality and primacy — should exist at three levels of the Church — local, regional and universal. This is very important because, for the first time, the representatives of the Orthodox churches accept this form of primacy on a universal level that the Bishop of Rome could have … Until now, the Orthodox agreed to consider the Bishop of Rome as the primus inter pares (literally: first among equals). This time, it goes further, because we’re talking about authority.”

He said that if the Orthodox recognised some sort of papal authority, even a very weak one, the Vatican would have to show greater respect for collegiality (giving bishops a greater say in governing the Church) and “local Churches” (i.e. the different Orthodox churches).

Monsignor Eleuterio Fortino, under-secretary at the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, told Vatican Radio (here in Italian) that the experts had started to discuss “an issue that is essential in the dialogue between Catholics and Orthodox, a difficult issue”. He explained: “We’re starting to study in detail the evolution of the role of the Bishop of Rome in the Church and how it was expressed in the first millennium.” Back then, all bishops recognised the pope but had considerable autonomy in their own regions.

In 1976, when he was still Father Joseph Ratzinger teaching theology in Regensburg, the present pope said in a speech about ecumenism that “what was possible during a whole millennium can not be impossible today … On the doctrine of the primacy, Rome must not require more from the East than what was formulated and lived out during the first millennium.”

As Cardinal Ratzinger, Benedict was deeply involved in the 1999 Catholic-Lutheran agreement that resolved doctrinal disputes that led to the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. That didn’t bring the two churches back together again in any organisational sense, but it resolved a long-standing dispute and made for better relations. It looks like Benedict now wants to reach back even further into history to improve relations with the Orthodox.

But not too quickly… Fortino told Vatican Radio the next full meeting of the commission would be “in two years, in the autumn of 2009.” And then they’ll have to study the papacy in the second millennium, he said.