East Meets West in Rome
Patrick Henry Reardon on an Ecumenical Experiment
Around noon, the cab dropped Denise and me at our hotel just off the northeast corner ofthe massive piazza fronting the monument of Victor Emmanuel. I shall never forget the bitter wind in the Eternal City that winter day in 1996. Even for the feast of Stephen, this was fearsome weather, worse than I had ever known in Rome during the winters I lived there in years gone by.
Denise was very tired, and understandably so, after a sleepless night during the transatlantic flight, preceded by a weary Christmas afternoon spent in the airports of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Indeed, we had missed that previous night’s sleep as well, because of the midnight Divine Liturgy, followed by the festive family activities of Christmas morning. Anyway, cold and exhausted, Denise did the sensible thing and headed right for bed.
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Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).
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