Cardinal, Orthodox metropolitan address international conference on Council of Nicaea
June 06, 2025
The Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity.is sponsoring a four-day ecumenical conference, organized by the International Orthodox Theological Association and the Angelicum’s Institute for Ecumenical Studies, on the 1700th anniversary the First Council of Nicaea, the first of the 21 ecumenical councils recognized by the Catholic Church.
Pope Leo will receive participants in the conference, “Nicaea and the Church of the Third Millennium: Towards Catholic-Orthodox Unity“ (program, videos), on June 7, the conference’s final day.
“The creed of the Council of Nicaea is not merely the result of theological reflection, but the expression of a joint, more precisely, synodal struggle of bishops for an orthodox and doxologically appropriate formulation of the Christian faith,” Cardinal Kurt Koch, the dicastery’s prefect, said on the conference’s opening day.
Cardinal Koch also alluded to the council’s decree on the celebration of Easter.
“The endeavor to find a common date for Easter is an important pastoral concern, particularly for families of different denominations, and in light of the increasing mobility of people today. Above all, a shared celebration of Easter would bear more credible witness to the profound conviction of the Christian faith that Easter is not only the oldest but also the central and most important feast of Christianity,” he said.
Orthodox Metropolitan Job of Pisidia said that “the Nicene Creed does not represent a confession of faith at a particular moment in the history of the Church but rather manifests the confession of faith that transcends the limits of time and space.” The creed “became a universal confession of the faith confessed by the one Church, received from Christ through the apostles and handed down by the holy fathers.”
Metropolitan Job noted that “all Christians today, without exception, determine the date of Easter according to the Nicene rule,” but with some using the Gregorian calendar, and others the Julian calendar.
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Further information:
- Ecumenical Conference on Nicaea at the Angelicum (Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity)
- Council of Nicaea anniversary is call to Christian unity, speakers say (CNS)
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