Pope, Yeltsin Exchange Views on Millennium

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and Pope John Paul II, aging, ailing superstars in the struggle against communism, clasped hands here Tuesday and chatted into the evening about the next millennium--an era each man expects to greet while fully in charge of his realm.

Their 50-minute meeting in the pope’s library, described by both sides as cordial, included topics ranging from European security to their fear of war in Iraq and ended with the Russian leader’s assurances that Roman Catholics will not suffer discrimination in his country.

Equally significant is what they did not discuss--a rift that frustrates the Polish pontiff’s dream of “total communion” between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox faiths and prevents him from visiting Russia, one of the last blank spaces on his globe-trotter’s map.

“Welcome,” said the white-robed pope in Russian, ushering his blue-suited guest into the third-floor library in the papal apartments. Then their translators went to work; John Paul’s was a Polish Jesuit priest who spent 10 years in a labor camp in Soviet Siberia.

The two Slavic leaders first met here in December 1991, days before the Soviet Union broke apart and Yeltsin moved into the Kremlin. The Russian Orthodox Church was reemerging from the shadows of Soviet atheism, and Western missionaries of many faiths were flocking to Russia to compete for followers.

To the Vatican’s dismay, Russia’s dominant church, a branch of the Eastern Orthodox faith, has gained semiofficial status under a 5-month-old law that limits the rights of other churches.

Blocking a reconciliation of faiths, Russian Orthodox leaders also refuse to return property their church gained when Soviet authorities closed Eastern Rite Catholic churches, mainly in Ukraine, which follow Orthodox rituals but are loyal to the Vatican.

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The dispute has produced an irony of history: John Paul, whose pilgrimages to Poland helped undermine the Soviet empire, was able last month to visit Catholics in one of its last outposts, Communist Cuba, but is still shut out of post-Soviet Russia.

Yeltsin noted before Tuesday’s meeting that the pope has a long-standing invitation to visit Moscow. But presidential spokesman Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky said that possibility didn’t arise in the meeting.

Such a visit, the aide said, “would require a fundamental change in relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Vatican.” He added that Yeltsin “does not want to interfere” but hopes that the two churches “have enough wisdom, patience and goodwill” to overcome the property dispute on their own.

Yeltsin did devote part of the meeting to defending the new law on religion, telling the pope that he had vetoed an earlier, more discriminatory bill to win a compromise with nationalists in Russia’s parliament. “He explained why, in his view, the law is favorable to all religions in Russia,” said Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls.

But a warmth between the two leaders was evident later when they joined more than 40 members of the Russian delegation in the ornate Clementine Hall for greetings and a gift exchange. Yeltsin got a knee-high bronze medallion depicting the Virgin and Christ child. He surprised the pope with a two-volume set of poems written by the future pontiff as a young man--and published for the first time in Russian for this occasion.

“We’re with you,” Naina I. Yeltsin, the president’s wife, told the pope as he patted her hand.

“I hope we go together into the third millennium” of Christianity, John Paul replied. “I’m glad to see your husband is in good form.”

Yeltsin and the pope are famous for their medical as well as their political histories. The Russian leader, 67, who had multiple heart bypass surgery in 1996, has looked stiff and sounded disoriented on this trip. He is zipping around Rome with two ambulances in his motorcade in case he falls ill.

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The pope, 10 years his senior, limps on a repaired hip, and his left hand quivers strongly with symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.

But both men appeared relaxed and attentive Tuesday and were clearly looking ahead. Yeltsin’s spokesman said they discussed “what the world would be like at the start of the next millennium.”

Some Kremlin aides have dropped hints that Yeltsin will seek a third presidential term in 2000 despite a constitutional two-term limit. The Vatican’s Millennium Committee announced Tuesday that John Paul intends to celebrate his 80th birthday, on May 18, 2000, ordaining priests.