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ADDRESS OF HIS HOLINESS SHENOUDA III
TO POPE PAUL VI AT END OF THEIR PRIVATE MEETING

5 May 1973

 

Your Holiness,

We feel happy, to meet to-day Your Holiness as the Supreme Head of the Roman Catholic Church in Christendom and to exchange with Your Holiness the holy kiss of peace, and to be in Rome, the great cosmopolitan city of vast and long history which definitely has left its print on the course of human history. The importance of Rome is not exclusively civic, as it had been for a long period the Capital of the Roman Empire. Its spiritual Superior, the Roman Pontiff, has had and still has a guiding role along the history of the Christian Church.

Here we wish to express our cordial gratitude to Your Holiness for Your kind invitation to us to come here to Rome and to the Vatican City and to enjoy this happy occasion of meeting each other.

We pray humbly that this meeting would have its far-reaching results in supporting and strengthening the friendly relations between our two Apostolic Churches.

We grasp the opportunity to thank you for the facilities Your Holiness has given to us and for the efforts your most venerable men have exerted, namely, their Eminences, their Excellencies and the Reverend Fathers among whom those who have received us at the airport and those who will accompany us during our stay in the Vatican City and Rome as guests of Your Holiness. We mention with great esteem the good amiable spirit of His Excellency the Apostolic Pro-Nuncio in Cairo; all those respectable men who did their best to make our trip an easy one and who, I am sure, will do their best as well to make our stay here in Rome and in the Vatican City most comfortable and pleasant until we go back to Cairo, carrying with us the holy relic of St. Athanasius the Great, the Apostolic, and with it the affections of love, esteem and endearment to Your Holiness.

Once more we thank Your Holiness in the love of our Lord Jesus Christ and we extend to Your Holiness our cordial invitation to come to Egypt that Your Holiness might see our beautiful country, of long glorious history, our religious archaic places and antiquities and our land once blessed by the flight of our Lord and our Lady into Egypt and recently by the apparitions of St. Mary at Zeitoun.

May the love of Christ bring us more and more together.

May, the peace of God which passes all understanding guard our hearts and thoughts in Christ Jesus and in His service, blamelessly and void of offence till the Day of His Appearing. Now unto Him be glory, majesty, dominion and power, before all time, and now, and for evermore.

Amen.

 

(Information Service 22 (1973/IV) p.3. Reproduced in special issue of Information Service 76 (1991/I) p.2).