By Fr. Michel Kubler, A.A., director of the Center

I am not going to overwhelm you with the long list of conferences  and other activities held at the Center this year, but I would like to highlight one that happened this past autumn to mark the Year of the Consecrated Life. The evening featured the presence of an Orthodox nun and a Catholic sister (the superior general of our Oblate Sisters of the Assumption, who happens to be Romanian). As hard as you might find this to believe, for the Catholics in attendance it was the first time that most of them had ever heard an Orthodox nun speak and vice versa for the Orthodox in attendance for a Catholic sister!… This is just to give you an example of the role that our Center can and must play, not just to resolve the contentious theological issues that exist between the churches, but also simply to allow their members to get to know each other so that they might respect and perhaps one day love one another and eventually move closer to a day of communion!

Another outstanding presentation took place with the renowned French-Lebanese geo-political expert, Joseph Maïla, who spoke about the tragedy of Christians in the Near East: a complex history, with a sad present and a very uncertain future… and a region of the world not that far from us.

One interesting initiative of the Center --- in order to enrich our programming we have set up a remarkable planning committee made up of some of the leading intellectual and ecclesial figures in the area who will work with Fr. Lucian and me; there are Catholics from both rites (Latin and Greek), Protestants and Orthodox represented. Their enthusiasm in accepting our request to serve on this committee is a real honor for us and their suggestions have opened up some previously unimagined horizons!

Let me point out one final piece of good news in developing our relationships with the Orthodox world. Our Congolese brother, Fr. Jean-Marie Kambale Mwamba, defended his master’s degree in Orthodox theology with flying colors. Not only was this a linguistic, cultural, and confessional challenge; but the very fact that his academic achievement was so well received by our Orthodox brothers makes our own outreach efforts more credible.