Every January, Christians across Canada gather with a hope older than our divisions and brighter than our differences: the hope that the Body of Christ may one day breathe again with fully united lungs. The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is an annual observance. It is also an invitation to rediscover what we already share and what God still calls us to become together.
The 2026 materials for the Week of Prayer were prepared by the Churches of Armenia: the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Armenian Catholic, and Armenian Evangelical Churches. Together they form one of the oldest Christian cultures in the world, shaped by Scripture, martyrdom, and a liturgical and theological tradition in which the wisdom of the early Fathers still flows like living water. To receive these materials from the Armenian Churches is to listen to a voice that has carried the Gospel across empires, mountains, and diasporas.
A Brief Orientation: Armenia in the Christian Family
For many Christians, especially in the West, the landscape of the Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches can feel unfamiliar. Armenia stands within this ancient tapestry as the first nation to adopt Christianity as a state religion (A.D. 301). The Armenian Apostolic Church is part of the Oriental Orthodox family, which also includes the Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopian, and Eritrean Churches. (You can learn more about this ecclesial family in last month’s One Body article.)
Running alongside the Armenian Apostolic Church are the Armenian Catholic Church in full communion with Rome, and an Armenian Evangelical tradition, each carrying the same cultural and spiritual inheritance in distinct ecclesial expressions. Their shared Christian identity has been forged through resilience, scholarship, monastic life, and an extraordinary artistic and liturgical heritage.
The Armenian Contribution, A Light Tested in Fire
This year’s theme, Light from Light for Light, rises from the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea. It is the Creed that St. Athanasius defended with tireless courage, the Creed that St. Gregory of Nazianzus polished like a craftsman working gold, the Creed that St. Basil the Great saw as the lighthouse safeguarding Christian faith against the storms of confusion. Their labours were not abstractions: they were acts of pastoral love protecting the faithful from fragmentation and preserving the Church’s radiant confession of Christ.
Alongside these Greek Fathers, the Armenian tradition contributes its own towering saints. Foremost among them is St. Gregory of Narek, a 10th-century monk, mystic, and doctor of the spiritual life, whose Book of Lamentations remains one of the most beloved works in Armenian Christianity. For Catholic readers, it is noteworthy that Pope Francis proclaimed St. Gregory of Narek a Doctor of the Church in 2015. In 2021, the Holy See inscribed an optional memorial for him on February 27 in the Roman Calendar, meaning that his feast can be celebrated in the Latin Church, not only in the Armenian or other Eastern Catholic Churches. These actions represent an extraordinary recognition of St. Gregory of Narek’s universal witness.
These combined voices—Greek, Armenian, Syriac, and Latin—drawn from those who defended and reflected on the Creed, together express the Church’s ancient intuition: that to confess Christ as Light from Light is to be drawn into unity. Armenian Christians in diaspora communities have also practiced a quiet form of ecumenism shaped by necessity and neighbourliness. Living among diverse Christian traditions around the world, they have learned that shared faith in Christ often runs deeper than the boundaries that divide us. Their experience echoes St. Augustine’s observation that the Church is “always ancient and always new,” rediscovered again and again in unfamiliar places.
Unity as Illumination
The phrase “Light from Light” speaks of Christ’s divinity and also of the Church’s vocation. The Fathers of Nicaea understood that confessing the Son as true Light was a safeguard for communion itself. If Christ is one, Light from Light, then those who belong to Him cannot remain satisfied with division. Early Christian writers returned to this conviction again and again. St. Irenaeus pictured the Church as scattered across the world yet animated by one soul. St. Cyprian, with pastoral urgency, insisted that the Church’s unity was as seamless as Christ’s own tunic. Much later, St. Maximus the Confessor contemplated the reconciliation of Christians as a foretaste of a transfigured world, the restored harmony of creation itself. Their voices, echoing across centuries, remind us that ecumenism is not a modern invention but an ancient instinct, an impulse born of contemplating Christ as the radiant centre who draws all things to Himself.
In our own context, Canada’s Christian communities often feel the crisp winds of secularism sweeping through parish life and public culture. In such a landscape, the Fathers’ insistence on unity as a source of life becomes particularly vivid. They knew that the Church flourishes through communion. Their teaching whispers into our present: unity strengthens witness, shared prayer softens and opens the heart, and mutual charity becomes a living catechesis more eloquent than any program.
The presence of Middle Eastern Christians in Canada, many of whom arrive bearing both deep wounds and extraordinary resilience, intensifies this lesson. Their lives give fresh resonance to St. John Chrysostom’s conviction that when the members of Christ’s Body care for one another, the Church becomes brighter than the sun. Celebrations of the WPCU in this country, such as the ecumenical prayer in Montreal, one of the largest and longest-standing gatherings of its kind, are therefore signs of what the Church in Canada can become: a fellowship of diverse traditions walking steadily toward the same luminous centre.
Light Shared, Light Increased
As the Church marks 1700 years since the Council of Nicaea, the Creed reveals itself once more as a doctrinal anchor and becomes a bridge across centuries and between communities. “Light from Light for Light” invites us to inhabit again the vision of the Fathers, a vision in which Christ’s radiance heals divisions, draws neighbours into deeper fellowship, and gradually unveils the true face of the Church.
May the prayers formed by the Armenian Churches, the common celebration in Montreal, and the quiet fidelity of Christians across Canada help us receive that light anew. And may that same light pass through us, gently but unmistakably empowering us to work, for the unity of the whole Body of Christ.