17th Annual Meeting of the Saint Irenaeus Joint Orthodox-Catholic Working Group
The Saint Irenaeus Joint Orthodox-Catholic Working Group gathered for its seventeenth annual meeting from 6 to 10 October 2021 at the Institute for Ecumenical Studies of the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum) in Rome. The 2021 meeting was chaired by the Orthodox co-president Metropolitan Serafim (Joantă) of Germany, Central and Northern Europe (Romanian Orthodox Church) and by the Catholic co-president Bishop Gerhard Feige of Magdeburg. The meeting was preceded by a pre-conference at the Angelicum discussing the group’s common study “Serving Communion: Re-thinking the Relationship between Primacy and Synodality” (2018). The Working Group was warmly welcomed by Pope Francis, who at the audience expressed his gratitude for its work on synodality and announced that he would be proclaiming Saint Irenaeus of Lyons as a Doctor of the Church.
Dr. Paul Meyendorff, Emeritus Professor of Liturgical Theology at Saint Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, has been a member of the group from its inception in 2004. The Saint Irenaeus Working Group, an unofficial dialogue assembling 13 Orthodox and 13 Catholic theologians, was founded at a time when the official international Orthodox-Catholic was experiencing difficulties. The Orthodox side includes representatives from Antioch, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Serbia, Russia, and the United States.
A photo gallery can be viewed on the OCA website.