If it is really true that one out of every 20 householders in London, according to a new survey from the Centre for Economics and Business Research, is a millionaire, I must know one heck of a lot of millionaires. The idea that the land is promised to Rome, the Russians would riposte, is the heart of the problem.. Hang on, let’s work this out. This is a real blow to John Paul II who has seen, throughout his 25-year pontificate, relations with the Orthodox as a great ecumenical priority – not just because of his Slavic background, but because the 250-million-strong block of Eastern Orthodox peoples is a far bigger prize in terms of unity than the far smaller Protestant churches of the West.In the end, one commentator said, John Paul II may be fated to play the role of Moses: he can see the promised land, but it may be up to someone else to enter it.

for us it is a fundamental human right.”Which is why the Pope has set aside his cherished dream of a papal trip and decided to return the Kazan icon as “a gift to the people of Russia” along with fervent prayers for better relations between the two churches. And Cardinal Walter Kasper, Rome’s man charged with promoting Christian unity, has previously provocatively said: “This is a question of religious freedom. But more than 80 per cent of Russia’s Catholic parishes are served by foreign priests. Most of them are better educated, financed and equipped with greater pastoral experience than their Orthodox counterparts. He also spoke of how he had scuppered an arrangement to meet the Pope outside Russia. “There was a plan to have such a meeting in 1997 in Austria,” he revealed.

But the meeting was cancelled by the Russians who wanted “more than just to meet in front of TV cameras and demonstrate to the public that there are no problems among us. We do have problems.”The Catholics insist they are not trying to convert the Orthodox. At the heart of the clash is the Patriarch’s insistence that, following the collapse of Communism, Rome should leave the job of re-evangelisation to the Orthodox church which before the Red Revolution had presided over what the Patriarch called “1,000 years of holy Russia”.What emerged from our interview was the confession by the Patriarch that it is he, as head of the Russian Orthodox church, who has been for decades blocking plans for the Pope to travel to Russia. The long-running row between the churches is over what the Patriarch claimed is “proselytism” – aggressive Catholic missionary activity – across the former Soviet Union. And in Ukraine, he said, churches in communion with Rome have turned hundreds of thousands of Orthodox believers into a “humiliated minority”.