The Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch appointed two women to his host delegation at a major Pan-Orthodox Church Council in June.
A church statement said 65-year-old Mother Theoxeni, from the Chrysopigi convent at Chania, and Elisabeth Prodromou, an ethnic Greek academic from the United States, would "advise the synod fathers" in the team of Bartholomew I. An appeal, signed by over 840 theologians and others from 13 countries, including Greece and Russia, praised the initiative of the Istanbul-based patriarch, who is recognised as first among equals by leaders of the world's 300 million Orthodox Christians.
Plans for the council, which meets on 19-26 June in an Orthodox academy at Kolymbari in Crete, were first laid in 1901 by Ecumenical Patriarch Joachim III, and revived in the 1960s as a means of settling disputes over church governance, the dating of Orthodox festivals, relations with Catholics and other issues.
However, preparations for the assembly, the first incorporating all Orthodox churches for 1,200 years, have been dogged with disputes over authority and jurisdiction between the Moscow and Ecumenical Patriarchates, as well as by planning complaints by Orthodox churches in Greece and Georgia, and bilateral disputes between the patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch.
In their appeal, the Orthodox theologians said all the council's voting members would be male hierarchs, and added that a "special delegation of women" should be set up, with three members from each of the 14 participating churches forming a "constructive, consultative body".
"The Council is structured in such a way that women, who comprise at least 50 per cent of Orthodox congregations, will have virtually no opportunity to make a substantive contribution", said the appeal, drafted by Patricia Bouteneff, a lecturer at New York's St Vladimir Seminary. "Formal ecclesiastical councils, organised around bishops, have never represented the Church's actual male-female demographics. But the secretariat can now take steps to redress the near-complete absence of women's voices at this important gathering of our church".
The Istanbul-based Greek-language daily, Icho tis Polis, said it hoped Patriarch Bartholomew I's "good example" would be followed by other Orthodox churches, who are each allowed six advisers in their delegations.
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