Pope Francis has recovered the title of ‘patriarch of the West’a definition that had disappeared from the list of papal titles since 2006, by order of Benedict XVI and that reappeared in the new Pontifical Yearbook 2024.
The explanation for this development, according to the Vatican news agency Fides, of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity, “can be linked to his insistence on the importance of synodality, and to the ecumenical concern that pushes us to always look at the first centuries of Christianity, when there were no dogmatic lacerations between the Churches”
Fides explains that the title of ‘patriarch of the West’ had been used in the year 642 by Pope Theodore I and later its use was consolidated in the 16th and 17th centuries and in the Pontifical Yearbook, which appeared for the first time in 1863.