During his Apostolic Visit to Romania in October 2025, His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew observed the 140th anniversary of the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s granting of Autocephaly to the Romanian Orthodox Church, as well as the 100th anniversary of the Romanian Church’s elevation to Patriarchate status. In the course of these commemorations, His All-Holiness offered some insightful reflections about the very nature of the life of the Church.
“These feasts and commemorations,” the Ecumenical Patriarch stated, “are tied to the very life of the Church and are identified with the mystery of faith in Christ, which is continually renewed within the Church.” As a result, he continued, every such celebration is not just the marking of the passage of time, but bears an eschatological dimension that “offers a vision for the future.”
His All-Holiness then made a profound statement with an enduring and universal relevance: “The entire life of the Church,” he said, “is a continuous celebration. Its center is our Lord Jesus Christ, Who, being forever celebrated in the Holy Eucharist, renews the whole world, unites past, present, and future, and continually calls humanity to share in eternal life.”
Contrasting with this continuous celebration is the commotion of modern life. Speaking in Thessaloniki in late September 2025, His All-Holiness called upon his hearers to “put on the saving Orthodox faith and teaching and strive to excel in works of orthopraxis, works of sanctification and salvation, works of spiritual progress.”
The Ecumenical Patriarch emphasized that this was all the more crucial for people to do in our day, because “our time is a time of surface appearance, frivolous crises, distractions, empty talk, turbulence, and preoccupation with what is secondary, fleeting, external, and of no real value. This whole situation, ineffective and fruitless as it is, only deepens the uncertainty and anxiety of modern man.”
The Church, His All-Holiness said, offers the remedy to this human restlessness and unease: “The crucial, the salvific, the healthy, the God-loving, the truly useful and beneficial are found in the depths: in the depths of the heart, in the depths of contemplation, in the depths of the mind, in the depths of silence, in the depths of hesychia, in the depths of prayer, in the depths of divine study and in the search for modesty and salvation.”
“It is there,” His All-Holiness continued, “that Christ calls us today—to enter our inner treasury, to turn the eye toward the innermost parts of our hearts and thoughts, into the existential gaps of our souls. This secret and sacred work of salvation in silence is not the exclusive privilege of monks and hermits, but also belongs to pious Christians living in the wilderness of modern cities, thirsting for true life.”
True life and freedom are found only in Christ, as His All-Holiness explained at the beginning of Holy and Great Lent in 2025. This life and freedom, however, are not the province of the believer as an atomized individual, cut off from the life of the Church. “Our experience of faith,” the Ecumenical Patriarch stated, “is ‘unique’ and ‘profoundly personal’ as a freedom given to us by Christ, as something that is at the same time ‘essentially ecclesiastical,’ an experience ‘of common freedom.’”
Elaborating on the nature of this freedom, His All-Holiness said that “this most genuine freedom in Christ is expressed as love and applied support to our concrete neighbor, as this is described in the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10.30–37) and in the passage about the Last Judgment (Mt. 25.31–46), but also as respect and concern for the world and the eucharistic approach to creation.” He also stressed the fact that “Christian freedom, as existential authenticity and fullness, does not involve a gloomy asceticism, a life without grace and joy, ‘as if Christ never came.’”
It is the glorious freedom of the children of God that makes the life of the Church, as His All-Holiness said, a continuous celebration, and lends a particular joy to commemorations such as the Romanian Church anniversaries to which His All-Holiness just lent his sacred presence. These commemorations take place in light of the Holy Resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the source and summit of our life as Orthodox Christians.
