Vatican City: Pope Francis will meet Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill in Cuba next week in a historic first meeting between the heads of the two largest Christian churches, the Vatican has announced.
The gathering will be the first of its kind since a schism in the 11th century split Christianity into Western and Eastern branches.
Relations have warmed of late between Rome and other branches of the Orthodox tradition, but the Russian one has maintained its distance, until now.
With Pope Francis having adopted an "any time, any place" approach since his 2013 election, the once-in-a-millennium sitdown has been set for Havana's Jose Marti International Airport on February 12.
Francis will stop over on his way to a scheduled visit to Mexico while Kirill is due on the communist island for the first leg of a February 11-22 trip to Latin America which will also take in Paraguay, Chile and Brazil.
A spokesman for the Russian church said the meeting would be principally focused on the persecution of Christians around the world and that a joint declaration would be issued after a private conversation between the two leaders.
"The current situation in the Middle East, North and Central Africa and in several other regions where extremists are conducting a veritable genocide against Christian populations, requires urgent measures and real cooperation between Christian churches," the Moscow-based Church said..
"That is why, despite the obstacles, the decision to organise a meeting between Patriarch Kirill and Pope Francis was taken."
The meeting has been on the cards for some time with Francis having said in 2014 that he had told Kirill to just "call me and I'll come."
The various Orthodox churches count some 260-300 million followers, with the Russian branch accounting for 165m of them. In comparison, the Catholic church claims 1.2 billion members around the globe.
Francis has also made a priority of improving relations between Roman Catholicism and other religions.
He has defended Islam as a peaceful faith and the last month has seen him visit the main synagogue in Rome and announce plans to visit Sweden in October for a ecumenical service to mark next year's 500th anniversary of the Protestant reformation in Europe.
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