Have they ever asked for forgiveness?
Because I know you like brevity, and several of my other readers enjoy my famed footnotes and digressions, in a bid to accomodate diverse needs of my friends, I have placed in bold text those parts of this post that directly answer your question or which constitute segues and digressions that I think you might find immediately interesting. Please let me know if this experimental format is useful for you.
Also, other readers who prefer the longer format of my posts, please let me know if this is acceptable or if the use of bold text for portions that might be of interest to some readers makes the overall post harder to read).
Pope St. John Paul II did make formal apologies for various actions of this sort (which some extreme traditionalists objected to) and there had been others made even before then, for example, prior to Vatican II, in the lead up to the council where Orthodox bishops and some Anglican and other mainstream Protestants were invited to be present as observers (
the attendance of Orthodox bishops proved to be controversial within Orthodoxy as many Orthodox Christians remain upset about historical actions committed against us, some of which, such as the theft of icons, relics and historical manuscripts of the Gospel and other texts and the causation of schisms in some of our churches, have not been rectified, for example, most of the relics of St. Mark the Evangelist are still in Venice most of the time; Venice expropriated these from the Greek and Coptic Christians in Alexandria, where St. Mark is known to have been the first leader of the Alexandrian Christian community*, because the Venetians wanted the evangelist associated with a winged lion as their patron, and they wanted his relics due to the commercialization of pilgrimage in the High Middle Ages.
For the same reason, the relics of St. Nicholas the bishop of Myra were removed from Greece and transported to the otherwise obscure Italian city of Bari. And several other relics were taken from the Middle East and put in Europe. Now, granted, some of them might have been destroyed by the Muslims had they remained in the East (although until recently with the expansion of Salafism, the Muslims in the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean seldom molested Christian relics and icons except when confiscating the most impressive churches in newly conquered cities like Constantinople like the Hagia Sophia for use as Mosques.
For the Oriental Orthodox such as the Coptic Orthodox of Egypt, life actually briefly improved after the Islamic conquest, at least until the reign of the insane Fatimid caliph Al Hakim, and then the Mamluks who suppressed the vernacular use of the Coptic language by removing with a dagger the tongue of any Egyptian heard speaking it instead of Arabic.
Now,
the Roman Catholics have lately returned more stolen relics, such as those of the Three Holy Hierarchs (although frustratingly these were given to the Patriarch of Constantinople, in Turkey,
which at the time was still dominated by the secular movement of Mustafa Kamal Ataturk but has
since become increasingly radical under Erdogan, who exploits the Islamic faith so that people will ignore the fortune in taxpayer dollars he spent building his presidential palace, which is one of the largest in the world. But all this puts the relics of the Holy Hierarchs and other relics in the Patriarchal Cathedral of St. George in the Phanar district of Istanbul, the last Greek area left in the entire country (there were some Greeks in Bursa but the current Archbishop of North America, who I greatly dislike, when he was Metropolitan of Bursa, spent his time writing papers in which he ascribed to the Ecumenical Patriarch various powers analogous to those of the Pope of Rome which the other Orthodox deny the EP has, which precipitated an embarrassing incident where Constantinople tried unsuccessfully to force the autocephalous Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia to replace its primate, while the Turkish government was putting into effect the closure of the last parish in his Metropolis.
I would think that someone who allowed their Metropolitan See to be turned into a titular see would be fired, but he was promoted when the Archbishop of North America reposed and given that job, which indicates he will probably be the next Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, which is not something I can contemplate with equanymity. However, this problem is offset by the recent exponential growth of the Orthodox Church in the US largely happening outside the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese (with churches and mission churches in Utah, for example, baptizing hundreds, primarily Mormons, into Christianity, so this growth is not at the expense of other churches but consists of non-Christians such as Mormons and J/Ws along with unchurched Christians who were left alienated and confused by the radical liberal takeover of some mainline Protestant churches. In the late 20th century most of our converts were disaffected high church Anglicans, but this hasn’t been the case for decades (I, for example, had been in the UCC, when I gave up fighting the left wing powers that be, in part because I realized that the congregational nature of our church meant that everyone who was leaving or who wanted to leave could leave - I did temporarily join the Episcopal Church so I could attend my friend Fr. Steve’s last 15 months of services, but this was always envisaged as a temporary thing and during his last year is when persecution heated up against the Christians in Syria, who I had always been interested in, so I associated myself with Orthodoxy.
The challenge for the Orthodox has been, even though we are no longer under anathema from the Roman Catholic Church, the memories of the Orthodox martyrs like St. Peter the Aleut, who was a 15 year old Native Alaskan fisherman who made the tragic mistake of sailing into the waters of California (which had hitherto been safe waters for Aleutian fisherman) and was arrested and taken to a mission, where his Orthodox profession of faith led to his execution.****
*I wouldn’t call him the founder, per se, because even if he arrived there very early, other Christians likely arrived first, since Alexandria was huge, one of the contenders for being the second most important city in the Roman Empire** in the centuries before the hitherto sleepy medium sized city of Byzantion was upgraded into the capital of New Rome - Constantinople in the fourth century*** and along with Antioch, another contender, Athens being the other, was one of the two large eastern cities in very close proximity to Judaea and Jerusalem. After the destruction of Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Rome became the three most important churches in the Roman Empire, and Seleucia-Cstesiphon, which replaced ancient Babylon when the Tigris moved, only to be replaced by Baghdad, which borders ancient Babylon during the Islamic period when the Tigris shifted again, but there exists a continuity between them, had the most important Christian church that was definitely outside the Roman Empire (since the Kingdom of Edessa, a city state, that officially adopted Christianity as its state religion about five years before the Kingdom of Armenia was converted in 306 AD, was if I recall until the rise of the barbarous Islamic caliphates a Roman protectorate or client state).
** indeed if Caesar’s older adopted son Marc Antony had prevailed (on behalf of Caesar and Cleopatra’s natural born son Caesarion, who was a young teenager, under 15 I reckon) against his younger adopted son, nephew and designated heir Octavian (who callously ordered the execution of his innocent child cousin Caesarion after the suicide of Antony and his mother), Alexandria would have become the capital of a Romano-Greco-Egyptian Empire.
*** This was due to Byzantion’s strategic location where the Golden Horn, a superb military harbor protected during the Byzantine Empire period with a golden chain (gold both as a display of power and so it wouldn’t rust and deteriorate), comes off of the Bosphorus Strait separating Asia Minor from Europe.
****
That a replacement statue of St. Peter the Aleut did not replace the statue of San Junipero Sera is the only thing I regret more than the removal of aforesaid statue from its position overlooking downtown Ventura and on the seal and flag of Ventura County, but of course, this was done by the left in order to strip away Christian identity, just as the cross was ludicrously removed from the mission of San Fernando in the County Seal of Los Angeles County due to the ACLU, since apparently its more important to not offend those who hate the national religion of the United States that all of her founding fathers subscribed to, in at least a heterodox way (in the case of the Unitarians such as John Adams, and other outliers like Thomas Jefferson, who being a rationalist deist did not believe in the deity or miracles performed by Christ our True God but did regard him as the greatest philosopher, and who used the Napoleonic-era equivalent of an X-Acto knife to cut and paste a Gospel Harmony which was even worse than the boring Diatessaron of Tatian, a second century Gnostic heretic who before he became openly heretical, decided that Syriac speaking Christians would be better served by a single book that was edited from the four Gospel books as opposed to the four accounts of the Evangelists themselves, which would not be translated into the Syriac dialect of Aramaic until the early third century; the Vetus Syra by the way is an interesting ancient translation because it is one of only two known examples of the Western Text Type of the New Testament, the other being the Vetus Latina, the original Latin translation of the Bible made by Patriarch Victor of Rome*****
***** St. Victor was not yet styled Pope; I realize this must seem to my Roman Catholic friends to be exceedingly pedantic on my part, although I feel, like the famously pedantic traditionalist Catholic, the Right Honorable Jacob Rees-Mogg, until recently a member of the UK Parliament and of the Privy Council (of which he was for a time I think Lord President), pedantry has become an underrated virtue, I just cannot get past the anachronism of using the title Pope to refer to bishops of Rome from before this title was first actually used by them, especaily during the 320 year period when the title was exclusively used by their colleagues the Popes of Alexandria including St. Peter the Martyr, St. Alexander the Confessor, St. Athanasius the Pillar of Orthodoxy, and St. Cyril the Great, who were clearly the most important bishops of their era, who provided guidance on issues like Arianism and Nestorianism to their Roman colleagues such as St. Damasus and St. Celestine, who were great bishops but from the most conservative church which prior to the reign of Leo I, except during the reign of St. Victor, preferred more than any other church to avoid rocking the boat or admitting even trivial changes to the liturgy.
