Happy Birthday, Guys.

Delegation from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, with the relic of St. Peter.



On June 29, the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, the Vatican held a large ceremony. Among those present was a delegation from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.

The pope presented them with precious relics of St. Peter, which had originally been venerated in the papal apartments. The relics were bone fragments found during excavations begun in the 1940s of the necropolis under St. Peter’s Basilica.

The pope claimed this was a token of “brotherhood and closeness”...whatever kind of closeness he imagines there can be with schismatics who deny the primacy of Peter.