The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople has declared that Orthodox churches have an important role to play in solving the world’s problems. But the patriarch, who is recognized as the primus inter pares—first among equals—of the world’s Orthodox leaders, added that Orthodox churches did not wish to ally themselves with any particular government or political group.”
The Orthodox church is powerfully concerned about the correct responses to tensions and challenges in the contemporary world,” Patriarch Bartholomeos I, who is based at Phanar, in Istanbul, told the Polish parliament January 25 during a visit to Poland. “But it does not utilize worldly methods and powers which actually escalate these tensions. The church has never sought, nor does she seek, to impose changes on the world by means of power.”
The patriarch said Orthodoxy was content to leave “legal and administrative measures” to the state, and did not support political parties even when they offered to “pursue the imposition of the church’s views on various communities.”
“The Orthodox church has never desired, and does not desire, to acquire political power in order to compete with other political forces to impose God’s dominion on society,” Bartholomeos I continued. “Its support of a particular political party would entail the division of citizens into allies and rivals. This would militate against the church’s catholicity.”
The 59-year-old Orthodox leader was speaking at the close of his four-day visit (January 22 to 25) to predominantly Roman Catholic Poland, his second visit here in 15 months.
(A number of the world’s principal Orthodox churches, such as the Russian Orthodox Church and the Church of Greece, are primarily national churches. Often they play a significant role in the social and cultural life of their nation. The assumption of such roles by Orthodox churches at times gives rise to criticism from minority churches in their countries, such as in Russia, where the Orthodox Church openly supported the new religion law which gives special status to the nation’s “traditional” faiths, Orthodoxy, Islam and Buddhism.)
Maciej Plazynski, speaker of the Sejm, the lower house of the Polish parliament, said he had invited the patriarch to become the second religious leader to address parliament—after Pope John Paul II last June—to show that Poland was “an open country” which guaranteed equal rights to citizens “irrespective of faith and nationality.”
He added that Bartholomeos I was a “moral authority for all Europe.” Similar invitations would be extended to heads of other monotheistic religions, beginning in May with the head of the Tibetan Buddhist faith, the Dalai Lama, who lives in exile in northern India.
As well as addressing parliament, Patriarch Bartholomeos met the head of state, President Aleksander Kwasniewski. The patriarch attended an ecumenical service with Roman Catholic and Protestant leaders in Wroclaw, where he stressed the need for the inclusion of Orthodoxy in a united Europe.
Speaking after talks in Warsaw with the patriarch, Poland’s premier, Jerzy Buzek, who is a Lutheran, said that Patriarch Bartholomeos had also acknowledged the “excellent conditions” enjoyed by religious minorities in the country.
The visit coincided with the January 23 signing by Poland’s seven biggest churches of a document mutually recognizing baptism.
In an interview published January 26 by the mass-circulation newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, Patriarch Bartholomeos again spoke of the social role of Christians and churches, explaining that a balance was necessary between extremism and loyalty to one’s nation. He believed, he told the newspaper, that a lack of patriotism which implied “indifference towards one’s homeland” was as wrong as a nationalism which went beyond “healthy patriotism.”
Referring to the war over Kosovo last year, the patriarch said that Orthodox churches had aided all Balkan war victims, irrespective of nationality, and the Serbian Orthodox Church had condemned the persecution of Kosovo Albanians and all “bloody acts of revenge.”
“The fact that a church shows solidarity with another church whose nation has suffered victims doesn’t mean it approves the unacceptable activities of particular people and groups,” said the Orthodox leader. Apparently referring to expressions of support by Orthodox Christians for the Serbian people—who are mainly Orthodox—during the Kosovo conflict, the patriarch continued: “Co-operation and solidarity with the healthy forces of a nation do not justify co-operation and solidarity with its extremist or nationalist efforts. Nor can one fail to solidarize with a nation’s victims because its other members may be criminals.”
The patriarch also touched on “proselytism,” one of the most sensitive questions in relations between Orthodox and other churches, particularly in Eastern Europe and Russia where the arrival of foreign missionaries, Protestant and Roman Catholic, has provoked hostility from the Orthodox. Asked about Russian Orthodox complaints of trespassing by foreigners on what the Orthodox regard as their own “canonical territory,” the patriarch said that “church jurisdictions” had not been an “invention” by the Russian Orthodox Church.
He added that “hurtful proselytizing activities” by other churches had been one reason why Orthodox leaders had questioned the point of belonging to the Geneva-based World Council of Churches (most of whose member churches are Protestant).
The Orthodox church would not oppose the arrival Roman Catholics and Protestants “if they merely proclaimed the Gospel, without drawing the Orthodox away from the church they belong to,” Patriarch Bartholomeos said. “But the Russian Orthodox church sees these issues quite differently.”
Speaking to journalists shortly before his departure from Poland, the patriarch said disputes over Byzantine Catholic (Uniate) communities, who are loyal to Rome while preserving eastern rites, would dominate the next meeting of the Catholic-Orthodox International Commission, scheduled for June in Baltimore, in the United States.
He added that a solution was needed to the issue of Uniatism, which he described as a “fake phenomenon called into being in the name of proselytism,” before the central questions of papal primacy could be tackled. But he said he would be happy to Rome again, where he has been received by the Pope, “whenever the opportunity arises.”
During the patriarch’s visit, officials of some other minority churches in Poland were skeptical of the plan to have the world’s religious leaders address the parliament. The leader of Poland’s Reformed church, Bishop Zdzislaw Tranda, asked whether speeches to parliament would change Polish society’s lack of “basic knowledge” about traditions other than Catholicism.
The Lutheran director of the country’s ecumenical Bible Society, Barbara Enholc-Narzynska, said she also believed that before hearing from leaders of other faiths, Poles should first become better informed about Christian churches, “especially those which have lived on the same territory for centuries.”
In a January 18 interview with Radio Vatican, the Russian Orthodox Church’s representative in Germany, Archbishop Longin, said that the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches were considering monasteries in Hungary, Switzerland, Austria, France and Italy for a possible meeting in 2001 between Patriarch Alexei II, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Pope John Paul II.Copyright © 2000 Ecumenical News International. Used with permission.
Related Elsewhere
Our past articles about the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople includes ” American Growing Pains Strain Relations with Patriarch,”(Dec. 8, 1997) and ” Patriarchs and Presidents to Gather in Bethlehem for Orthodox Christmas” (Dec. 16, 1999). In its issue about Eastern Orthodoxy, Christian History, a Christianity Today sister publication, interviewed Patriarch Bartholomeos I
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