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Archives > The Top Ten People of 2006: #1 & #2
Top Ten People of the Year: #1 & #2
Every January Inside the Vatican names top ten "People of the Year." This Newsflash features 2006's number 1 and 2. We will be updating you each day with two new profiles from our "Top 10" for 2006.
ANONYMOUS #1
BY INSIDE THE VATICAN STAFF
We have no picture for our Number 1 "Person of the Year" because we don’t know who he or she is. The person is anonymous. And there are dozens of these anonymous people, hundreds, thousands. They are those who work for religious freedom throughout the world, and whose names cannot be made public because they themselves might be in danger if their identities were known. So we leave these courageous souls to their hiddenness, adding our prayers to those of Pope Benedict XVI, that they may continue courageously to hold fast to the Catholic faith amid all difficulties.
Pope Benedict XVI on December 26, the day after Christmas (Feast of St. Stephen, the first martyr in the history of the Church) paid tribute to Christians who are persecuted for their faith, including Catholics who suffer because of their loyalty to the pontiff, in an apparent reference to the underground Church in China.
"We entrust to Mary all those who are persecuted and suffer, in various ways, for paying witness to, and being in service to, the Gospel.
"With special spiritual closeness, I am thinking as well of those Catholics who keep their own loyalty to Peter’s See without yielding to compromise, sometimes at the price of grave suffering.
"All the Church admires their example and prays so that they will have the strength to persevere, knowing that their tribulations are the source of victory, even if at the moment they can appear to be a failure." Benedict XVI, December 26, 2006
The bishops’ conference of Chile has declared November 19 to be a day of prayer for the persecuted Church throughout the world.
The bishops said that starting this year, the last Sunday of November would be designated in Chile as a day of prayer for Catholics around the world suffering persecution and martyrdom for the faith.
BARTHOLOMEW I #2
BY MAURIZIO DI GIACOMO
Bartholomew I, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), will turn 67 in February. During 2006, he was one of the great protagonists on the international religious scene after he invited the Pope to visit him, and greeted him warmly (see photo). For this reason, we make Bartholomew one of our "Top Ten" people of 2006.
Photo: Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Pope Benedict XVI exchange greetings during a visit to Holy Spirit Cathedral in Istanbul, Turkey, December 1. (CNS photo/L’Osservatore Romano) - by Maurizio di Giacomo
Bartholomew I, a Turkish citizen, was ordained a deacon on August 13, 1961, when John XXIII (1958-1963) was Pope. He studied at the Ecumenical Institute of Bossey, Switzerland, and at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, where he received his doctorate. His thesis was on "The Codification of the Canons and Decrees of the Orthodox Church."
He wrote his thesis under the direction of the Czechoslovakian Jesuit Father Thomas Spidlik, who taught Eastern spirituality at the Pontifical Oriental Institute. In 2003, Pope John Paul II made Spidlik a cardinal. After that, a major university in largely Orthodox Romania awarded Spidlik an honorary doctorate, saying, "Though Spidlik is not Orthodox, he knows Orthodox spirituality better than we do." And it was Spidlik who, in April 2005, gave one of the two homilies in the Sistine Chapel prior to the voting for the new Pope, though Spidlik himself could not vote because he had turned 80 in 2003.
In 1968, with Paul VI now Pope, the future Bartholomew I was elected the vice-rector of the Orthodox Theological Faculty of Halki, on an island in the Bosphorus not far from Istanbul. In March 1984 he became a member of the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in Turkey. On October 22, 1991, with John Paul II now Pope, Bartholomew was elected archbishop of Constantinople and Ecumenical Patriarch and assumed the name
Bartholomew I. He speaks Turkish, Latin, Italian and English. In 1994, Bartholomew I, at the invitation of Pope John Paul, wrote the meditation for the Good Friday Via Crucis that the first Polish Pope in the Church’s history recited in the shadow of the Colosseum. Bartholomew’s meditation was rooted in the mystical tradition of Byzantine spirituality.
On June 29, 1995, for the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, Bartholomew made his first visit to Rome as Ecumenical Patriarch. Sixteen years had passed since Pope John Paul II had visited the Phanar -- the area where the Orthodox Patriarchate is located in Istanbul -- on November 30, 1979. (At the time of John Paul’s visit, an unknown Turk named Ali Agca publicly threatened to assassinate the Pope; on May 13, 1981, in St. Peter’s Square, he came very near to doing so.)
Seven years after that first visit to Rome, in 2002, Bartholomew was at the center of another initiative without precedent. Visiting the Patriarch of Venice, Bartholomew was connected to Pope John Paul II in his private apartment in the Vatican via video hook-up. The two signed a "Common Declaration" which invited Catholic and Orthodox faithful to work together for the defense of the environment.
Bartholomew I has faced some difficult problems in recent years. He wrote to Pope John Paul on November 29, 2003, asking the Pope not to grant recognition to a Greek Catholic Patriarchate in Ukraine (which is largely Orthodox). Otherwise, there would be a "strong reaction from all the Orthodox Churches," Bartholomew wrote. And up until the present, Rome has not given that recognition.
Bartholomew’s last visit to Rome was at the end of June in 2004, when John Paul II was still alive. On July 1, he celebrated a Mass in the Church of San Teodoro Megalomartire, which John Paul, in a sign of dialogue and openness, had given for the liturgical use of the Greek Orthodox community in Rome. That 2004 visit concluded with another common declaration signed by the Patriarch and the Pope, recognizing that much progress had been made toward that full unity desired by Christ, though many problems remained open. The method to deal with the problems was said to be "a dialogue in charity."
And so we come to the year 2006, just ended.
During Pope Benedict’s visit to Turkey (November 28- December 1), the Pope and Bartholomew signed a common declaration containing four chief points:
(1) the proclamation of the Gospel to a world that often gives the impression that it has forgotten God; (2) favoring a European "unity" open to Christian values; (3) the defense of human rights and above all the right to religious liberty; and (4) collaboration to work for peace to the Middle East.
During the liturgy on November 30, there was a moment when Pope Benedict left his place and exchanged a kiss of peace with Bartholomew. Monsignor Eleuterio Fortino, an official on the Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity, says this never occurred before in the context of a liturgy.
Before the visit was over, Bartholomew made a proposal to the Pope which has not yet been made public. Some observers believe he suggested that the two meet in Ravenna in March to jointly chair a meeting of theologians who are trying to work out doctrinal differences between the two Churches. If such a meeting were to occur, the reunion of East and West would be closer yet.
Top Ten People: #3 & #4
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Inside The Vatican (ISSN 1068-8579) is a Catholic news magazine, published monthly except July
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