Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew stressed the 2,000-year unity of the Orthodox churches at a divine liturgy in Crete on Sunday ahead of the week-long Holy and Great Council where their present-day disunity over the challenges of the modern world will be on full display.
Addressing the concelebrated service at the Cathedral of St Minas in Heraklion, the spiritual head of Eastern Orthodoxy said this day — Pentecost according to the Orthodox calendar — was a “day of unity, as we are all united in the faith and the sacraments through our liturgical gathering in one place”.
He began his sermon with greetings to the “holy brother primates” of the 13 other Orthodox church leaders. But only nine of them gathered around him for the hours-long ceremonies attended by many other Orthodox prelates and Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos.
The churches of Russia, Bulgaria, Georgia and Antioch (Damascus) are boycotting the Council, the first in over 1,200 years, the first three because of disagreements on its organisation and — at least in Moscow’s case — broader tensions over the Ecumenical Patriarch’s role and the future of Orthodoxy in Ukraine.
Antioch broke communion with another ancient patriarchate, that of Jerusalem, in 2014 because of a dispute over who has authority over the small Orthodox presence in Qatar. The Orthodox churches, which broke with Rome in 1054, are “autocephalous” national churches whose territories have expanded and overlapped because of modern-day migration and globalisation.
Bartholomew said the Orthodox were “obliged to give the contemporary world a testimony of love and unity” but admitted that, “on the practical level … unfortunately, we are greatly lacking”.
The Russian Church, which claims up to two-thirds of the world’s 250-300 million Orthodox, has said it could not attend the Council because the other churches had pulled out, thus robbing it of its pan-Orthodox character.
After it withdrew, Metropolitan Hilarion, head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s external affairs department, told the Greek Orthodox agency Romfea he hoped Bartholomew would “show prudence, humility and calm” at the Council and avoid “separatist consequences”.
The Ukrainian parliament called for such a development on Thursday when it appealed to the Ecumenical Patriarch to help unite the country’s three rival Orthodox churches — one under Moscow’s authority, one under the Kiev Patriarchate founded in 1992 and one independent — into one national church.
That would mean splitting off Ukraine from the Moscow Patriarchate’s realm, depriving the Russians of a large minority of their church’s followers and clergy — a fate Moscow is determined to avoid.
Conservative groups in the Russian and other churches are also opposed to or wary about the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s increasing cooperation with the Catholic Church, which looks to them as if Bartholomew wants to turn his small Phanar headquarters in Istanbul into a kind of Orthodox Vatican.
These and other differences among the 14 churches have meant that the list of topics to discuss, which started with about 100 suggestions when Council preparations first began 55 years ago, was slimmed down to only six documents the meeting is due to approve.
They concern the following topics:
- Autonomy — this document confirms that only an autocephalous church, one with its own primate, can grant the canonical status of autonomy to a local church within its boundaries. Autonomous churches cannot be established in the diaspora. This is important because the migration of Orthodox to diaspora countries has led to disputes about jurisdiction there.
- Diaspora — In the diaspora, when several churches have established a presence to serve emigrant members of their flocks, cities or countries have several resident Orthodox bishops instead of only one as canon law dictates. Their assemblies of bishops should prepare a plan to propose ways to “proceed to a canonical solution of the problem”.
- Ecumenical Relations — The Orthodox Church, as “the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church”, believes it has a central place in “promoting unity among Christians in the modern world” and will never sacrifice its principles. This document does not refer to other Christian denominations as churches because of opposition by conservatives to using that term.
- Fasting — the Orthodox have stricter rules and more frequent occasions for fasting than Catholics, but modern work schedules sometimes make these difficult to respect. This document allows the local Orthodox church “to determine how to exercise philanthropic dispensation and clemency, relieving in these special cases any ‘burden’ of the holy fasts.”
- Marriage — this document states the Orthodox Church “does not recognise same-sex unions or any other form of cohabitation for its members other than marriage”. Also, “those members of the Church who contract a civil marriage must be approached with pastoral responsibility”. It also deals with impediments to marriage according to Orthodox canon law.
- Mission — The Orthodox Church shares the concerns of today’s world, which include “the dignity of the human person, the limits and implications of human freedom and responsibility, the nature of true peace, the cessation of war and violence, and social, political and economic justice”.
Photo caption: His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew concelebrates the Divine Liturgy of Pentecost with the Primates of the Autocephalous Orthodox Churches at St. Menas Cathedral in Heraklion, Crete. © 2016 JAROSLAW CHARKIEWICZ.
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