Third European Ecumenical Assembly to be held in Romania in the early September

Moscow, August 30, Interfax - The Third European Ecumenical Assembly on the theme ‘The light of Christi shines upon all - Hope for renewal and unity in Europe’ will be held in Sibiu, Romania, on September 4 to 9.

‘We would like this assembly to answer many questions that challenge Christians in today’s Europe,’ the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate secretary for inter-Christian relations Fr. Igor Vyzhanov told Interfax on Thursday.

According to him, there will be 2,500 people attending the event.

The assembly should become ‘a place not only for saying splendid but useless words, but rather for elaborating a common strategy for Christians facing common challenges,’ Vyzhanov said.

He called the Sibiu 2007 ‘an Orthodox stage’ of the inter-Christian dialogue since Romanian people are mostly Orthodox.

The priest noted that there have already been meetings in Rome in January 2006 (‘a Catholic stage’) and in Wittenberg in February 2007 (‘a Protestant stage’).

Another important phase, he said, was a meeting of European, CIS, and Baltic church leaders in the late February 2007 in Moscow.

This meeting revealed that ‘most Christian bodies of the former Soviet Union adhere to traditional values and healthy conservatism,’ he said.

The Third European Ecumenical Assembly is organized jointly by the Conference of the European Churches that unites mostly Orthodox and Protestant Christians, and the Roman Catholic Council of European Bishops’ Conferences.

So the assembly will embrace all European Christian denominations. ‘The meeting will be very representative and I wish our voice be heard in Europe,’ the priest said.