Pope Francis received a top-ranking member of the Russian Orthodox Church for private discussions at the Vatican this week.

The Holy See Press Office confirmed on July 12 that the pope received Metropolitan Anthony of Volokolamsk, the head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations, on Thursday afternoon.

Metropolitan Anthony is essentially the “foreign minister” of the Moscow Patriarchate and considered to be second only to Patriarch Kirill of Moscow.

The Vatican has yet to release any photos or details regarding the discussions between the pope and Russian metropolitan. 

The meeting took place two days after Pope Francis expressed his “great sorrow” over Russia’s attacks on two hospitals in Kiev, including Ukraine’s largest children’s medical center.

As the Russian Orthodox Church’s chief ecumenical officer, Anthony has met Pope Francis twice since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The pope kissed the Orthodox metropolitan’s pectoral cross during a brief encounter after a Wednesday general audience in May 2023 and had a “lengthy conversation” with Anthony shortly after he was appointed in 2022.

Pope Francis has wanted to meet with the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine.

The two have not met since their historic first meeting in the Havana airport in February 2016 — the first meeting between a pope and a patriarch of Moscow.

A planned second meeting between the two leaders in Jerusalem in June 2022 was canceled following a video call between the pope and the Russian patriarch in March of that year.

The Russian Orthodox Church is an autocephalous Eastern Orthodox Church with an estimated 150 million members, accounting for more than half of the world’s Orthodox Christians.

This article was originally published on Catholic News Agency.