On January 25, 2021, at the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, the Institute of Ecumenical Studies of the Ukrainian Catholic University held a webinar “Centenary of Orthodox Ecumenism”. During the seminar, Natalia Vasilevich made a report “Encyclical of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of 1920 and its role in forming the ecumenical ethos of the Orthodox Church”.

Natalia Vasilevich is a theologian, lawyer, doctoral student at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn (Germany), director of Centre Ecumena (Minsk, Belarus). For several years now, the researcher has been working on a topic related to the encyclical of the Constantinople Patriarchate “Unto all the Churches of Christ Wheresoever They Be”: the context of the uprising, the topics raised, the impact of the document, etc. The document, developed by a group of theologians of the Ecumenical Patriarchate led by Metropolitan Germanos (Strenopoulos) and adopted in 1920, founded the beginning of the official century-old history of Orthodox ecumenism.

The researcher mentioned that the encyclical was published in four languages: Greek, French, English and Russian. However, it was the English translation made from the Greek by W. A. Visser ’t Hooft in 1959 that made this document known in ecumenical circles. Even more: from this translation the following translations were made into Russian, French and again into Greek. The most significant innovation of Hooft’s translation, compared to the original Greek version, is the proposal to create a “League of Churches”.

The webinar was attended by experts and interested in the theme from Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and France.

Video of the event here (Russian-Ukrainian).