The night of Saturday, October 21st, the Protestant Cathedral of Berlin will host an ecumenical intercessory prayer for the ancient Christian Churches of the Near and Far East. The occasion is the conference that is taking place in Germany’s capital about the future of Christianity in the Middle East. Invited by the German Evangelical Church, over these days the Catholicos of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Karekin II, the Coptic Orthodox Patriarch, Pope Tawadros II, the Patriarch of the Syrian Orthodox Church, Ignatius Afrem II, and the Patriarch of the Indian Syrian Orthodox Church, Catholicos Baselios Marthoma Paulose II, are meeting the political leaders of the newly-elected German Bundestag, and a meeting has been planned with the president of the German Catholic Conference, cardinal Reinhard Marx. In the morning, German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier welcomed the four Oriental Church leaders in his official residence, the Bellevue. The meeting focussed on the different situations of each Church and on the current situation of Christians in Syria, Egypt and Turkey. The ancient Eastern Churches belong to a group of confessions that, after the Council of Chalcedon, remained loyal to pre-Chalcedon Orthodoxy. The main difference between such Churches are the rites, while theologically they are basically united: Coptic-Alexandrine rite, Western and Eastern Syrian rite, and Armenian Apostolic rite. In Germany now over 250 thousand Christians hail back to those ancient Churches.