We were delighted that both President Peres and President Abbas accepted the invitation of our brother, Pope Francis, to visit the Vatican in order to reflect on a peace initiative. We assure you that our wholehearted prayers will accompany them in their travels and their deliberations.

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew met today with Pope Francis on the Mount of Olives. At the site known as Viri Galilaei (Acts 1.11), the Patriarch and the Pontiff met for the third and final time during their joint pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Holy Land. It marked the conclusion of an historical pilgrimage and fraternal encounter.

His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and His Holiness Pope Francis celebrated a fifty-year milestone today, continuing the legacy of their predecessors Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras. Meeting at the Apostolic Delegation in the Old City of Jerusalem, the worldwide heads of the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Churches signed a Joint Declaration affirming their commitment to and anticipation of full sacramental unity in obedience to the commandment of Jesus Christ that his “disciples may be one.”

Our meeting, another encounter of the Bishops of the Churches of Rome and Constantinople founded respectively by the two Brothers the Apostles Peter and Andrew, is a source of profound spiritual joy for us. It presents a providential occasion to reflect on the depth and the authenticity of our existing bonds, themselves the fruit of a grace-filled journey on which the Lord has guided us since that blessed day of fifty years ago.

His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual leader of over 300 million Orthodox faithful worldwide, who is in Israel to meet with Pope Francis, today visited Bethlehem to venerate the sacred site of Christ’ s Birth and pray with its shrinking Christian population.

All who descend into the inner chamber of the museum are free to walk away when they chose, and return to the sunlight. Such was not the case for these 1.5 million children whose lives were taken from them through hatred and unspeakable violence.

It is our God-given mandate to bring discipleship to the world around us. And by discipleship, we mean the discipline bequeathed to us by our Lord to have compassion for one another and the natural environment. We are called and commanded to share with others the gifts that we have received and the joy that we have experienced on this Holy Mountain of Zion and in the Holy City of Jerusalem.

This meal comes at the end of a long journey, which began for Your Holiness at the West and for our Modesty in the East. We have arrived in the place where East and West converge, to the roots of our very existence as Christians, the place where our Lord was born, taught, suffered the Cross, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven and sent the Holy Spirit to constitute His Church.