His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew preached a homily in the historic cathedral of Stockholm on Saturday, August 23, 2025, in the presence of His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf and Her Majesty Queen Silvia of Sweden, along with Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. His All-Holiness delivered his homily during an Ecumenical Prayer Service of the Lutheran Church’s Ecumenical Celebration – Time for God’s Peace. The prayer service was part of Ecumenical Week, which featured a series of ecumenical anniversary celebrations commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the historic Stockholm Conference of 1925, a milestone in the improvement of relations between the Churches, when more than 600 church leaders from 37 countries gathered for an unprecedented meeting.
The Ecumenical Patriarch noted that one of the first petitions in the Divine Liturgies of St. Basil the Great and St. John Chrysostom, celebrated in Orthodox Churches worldwide for over seventeen centuries, was “Let us pray for the peace of the whole world, the stability of the holy churches of God, and the unity of all.” He pointed out that “unity and peace have been the fundamental and distinctive characteristics of the disciples of Jesus Christ from the earliest apostolic times,” and offered a prediction: “If our age will be remembered, it may well be for those who dedicated their lives to the cause of the unifying peace.”
His All-Holiness emphasized, however, that such peace would not be easily attained, and related the inner transformation of the individual to the transformation of societies as a whole. “Reconciliation and peace call for a radical reversal of what is increasingly becoming the normative way of survival in our world. Inner peace and global peace are the distinctive way of breaking the cycle of violence and injustice. Indeed, peace and unity are a matter of individual and institutional choices, as well as of individual and institutional change. They are, in the final analysis, the seeds for conversion of the heart and mind, what we call metanoia, which implies an essential transformation of personal practices and political decisions.”
Accordingly, His All-Holiness stated, “peace ultimately requires sacrifice and courage so that we can become communities of transfiguration, whereby ‘Christ is formed in us’ (Galatians 4:19) and we are ‘conformed to the image of Christ’ (Romans 8:29).” Stressing the urgency of this sacrifice and courage, he added a prophetic call: “Never has the voice of a united Christianity been needed more than today. Peacemaking is integrally and inseparably associated to the coexistence of all people and the survival of our planet. It is reflected in the way we treat one another and the way we treat the natural environment. The way we behave toward and respect each other mirrors and influences the way we treat and respond to the rest of creation. We have it in our power to contribute either to the healing of our world or to its suffering. Dear friends, what will we choose?”
The Ecumenical Patriarch also called for “dialogue and fellowship,” saying that “ecumenical encounter and dialogue are in the DNA of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, an integral element of our desire to fulfil the Lord’s will that His ‘disciples may be one’ (John 17:21).” Such encounters are urgently necessary, he said, because the world “hungers and thirsts for unity, solidarity, and integrity like never before.”
Once again, Christian religious leaders and dignitaries from various nations, as well as the Archon leadership and other Archons from the United States, were present at this profound and moving homily.
