Unify Europe’s Christians by Forgiveness, Pope Urges : Religion: John Paul opens a synod of bishops from East and West, asking for an end to historic differences.

Marking the fall of Communism with an unprecedented assembly of bishops from both sides of long-divided Europe, Pope John Paul II on Thursday urged Europeans to lay aside historic differences and seek unity in a re-Christianized Continent.

In his homily at an inaugural Mass for 137 bishop delegates from West and East Europe in St. Peter’s Basilica, John Paul called for “an act of pardon . . . at the end of this dramatic century” as preface to the rebirth of the full exercise of religious and social freedoms made possible by the end of the Cold War.

“In fact, we should always forgive, remembering that we, too, are in need of forgiveness,” the Pope said. “Through mutual comprehension and reciprocal forgiveness, we form evermore a single being . . . so that the old Christian Europe may believe more.”

The 71-year-old Polish pontiff summoned history’s first pan-European synod to expound his longstanding dream of a Continent united on Christian principles “from the Atlantic to the Urals, from the Mediterranean Sea to the North Pole.” About 300 million Roman Catholics live in those confines.

“May this synod gather all the needs to then give an answer that will move souls toward a new evangelization of Europe in this decisive historical moment,” the Pope prayed before an audience of the bishops--70 of them from Western Europe, 50 from East Europe, 17 as observers from other continents--and representatives of other Christian faiths.

Many of the East Europeans, newly free to practice their faith, are meeting with their Western colleagues for the first time at the two-week assembly, which stirred controversy even before it opened.

Leaders of the Russian, Serbian, Romanian and Bulgarian Orthodox churches rejected a papal invitation to attend. European Jewish leaders also expressed reservation about the synod’s goal of re-evangelization and its focus on Europe’s “Christian roots.”

“The fraternal spirit seems to be declining in relations between our churches. It is substituted by an aggressive proselytism that threatens to turn into a religious war,” Metropolitan Juvenal, the no-show Russian Orthodox leader, told the Italian Catholic weekly Famiglia Cristiana.

The four Orthodox churches boycotting the synod are the largest in their respective countries, and there is friction between them and minority Roman Catholics as all sides seek to recover status, identity and property lost in the Communist years.

In the Roman Catholic context, however, the synod is a milestone for a Continent where Christianity has prospered for 2,000 years despite nearly nonstop bloodshed and division.

“This synod is a significant event for the future of Europe. It is not only a political barrier that has fallen, but almost a century of silence has ended. It is important to talk,” Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the archbishop of Paris, told reporters on the synod’s eve.

John Paul, who announced the synod in 1990, instructed the bishops to focus on a series of basic questions now facing the European church. Chief among them is what East and West can offer one another in a time of continental transformation.

In a state-of-Europe address delivered in Latin at the synod’s opening session Thursday, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the vicar of Rome, told delegates that in Eastern Europe “scores of years of totalitarianism and atheism have not passed in vain.”

Millions behind the Iron Curtain clung to their religious convictions, he said. “Faith in God and . . . testimony of the church have been the sustenance and securest refuge of truth and freedom” in the dark years, he said.

Still, Ruini noted, the church faces a massive spiritual rebuilding job in formerly Communist countries. “Marxist ideology has failed, but leaves behind it widespread skepticism, selfishness, and a systematic destruction of the work ethic, responsibility and solidarity,” he said.

The Vatican moved quickly to restore diplomatic ties and church hierarchies in the new East, but bishops there now demand more money, priests and teachers of priests, to help woo back citizens weaned on official atheism. It is up to rich churches in the West to help their brethren in the East, the Vatican believes.

Yet, one of the ironies with which the Vatican wrestles is that people are flocking to newly opened churches in the poor East while millions stay away in ever-greater numbers from the rich churches in Western Europe.