Athens, April 21, 2025
His Eminence
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re
Dean of the College of the Cardinals
Rome
Your Eminence,
Ιt is with great sorrow that we would like to express our most
heartfelt condolences on the passing of His Holiness the late Pope
Francis to You and to all the faithful members of the Roman
Catholic Church. May we assure you of our partaking of the grief
and mourning of the Christians around the Earth.
He was a powerful personality, who spent himself for the
prevalence of all that is good and of the values of the human being
as God’s creature. Throughout his ministry as Bishop of Rome,
every lowliest brother, the poor, the migrant, the refugees, in
particular, occupied a central place in it.
With great emotion we retain in our heart the experience of
our interaction and of all that we lived side by side during the two
visits of the late Pope to our country, which alone demonstrate the
love and the respect he had both for the Church of Greece and for
the Greeks and Greece more broadly. Indeed, everyone in Greece
will always remember him, not least for his exemplary generosity
of returning three fragments from the Parthenon marbles in view
of their re-unification with this monument of paramount
significance to the entire mankind.
His contribution to the sincere dialogue between the
Churches and his anxiety for the desideratum of the unity of all
were the main axes of his pastoral activity throughout his papacy.
May his memory be eternal.
With our deepest sympathy,
ARCHBISHOP OF ATHENS AND ALL GREECE
