The Speech of His Beatitude Daniel, Patriarch of Romania, at the solemn meeting of the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church, Synodal Hall, Patriarchal Residence in Bucharest, 24 November 2018:
Your Holiness,
On behalf of the members of the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church, we welcome you at this solemn meeting of the Holy Synod of our Church.
On this blessed occasion too, we wish to express our appreciation for the good cooperation between the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Romanian Orthodox Church, both in the preparation and the works during the Holy and Great Synod of the Orthodox Church in Crete, as well as in other international inter-Orthodox and inter-Christian meetings.
At the same time, we thank you once again for the fact that, by Your Holiness’ generosity, we have a Romanian Orthodox Community in Istanbul hosted in the church of the Holy Martyr Paraskevi.
We also appreciate Your Holiness’ efforts in promoting, in the context of today’s world, both the administrative freedom of the Autocephalous Orthodox Churches and the synodality and pan-Orthodox communion, uniting freedom with responsibility, for the good of the Church of Christ. Besides, during the almost three decades since the political and social changes in our country, since 1989, the Romanian people felt this necessity of manifestation of the communion that comes out of the sense of restored freedom and the duty of assumed responsibility.
In the light of fraternal communion and of pastoral co-responsibility for the good of Orthodoxy, we pray God to bestow His rich gifts upon Your Holiness and continue to strengthen you to be a diligent missionary-messenger and tireless promoter of unity of contemporary Orthodoxy, in an increasingly secularised, fragmented and troubled world.
With these thoughts of high esteem, we brotherly greet you once again, Your Holiness, in this historic Synodal Hall of our Romanian Orthodox Church.
† Daniel
Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church
Photo courtesy of: Mircea Florescu / Basilica.ro