
The Council due to open on Monday in Crete has been beset by controversy
	 
	By Tom Heneghan
 
	Russian
 Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, whose Church is boycotting the Holy and 
Great Council of the Eastern Orthodox that opens in Crete on Monday, has
 said he hoped the meeting would help lead to a summit of all 14 
autocephalous churches sometime in the future.
	In
 a message to the Orthodox leaders “who have assembled on the island of 
Crete”, the head of the Moscow Patriarchate said his Church believed the
 meeting could not be a Pan-Orthodox Council because the Antioch 
Patriarchate had refused to attend and the Churches of Georgia, Serbia 
and Bulgaria had called for a delay in convening it.
	He
 stressed that all member churches, large or small, had an equal voice 
in pan-Orthodox issues and said he hoped the current differences would 
not “weaken the God-commanded unity [and] grow into an inter-church 
conflict”.
	“I
 trust that if there is good will, the meeting in Crete can become an 
important step towards overcoming the present differences,” Kirill said.
 “It can make its own contribution to the preparation of that Holy and 
Great Council which will unite all the local autocephalous churches 
without exception.”
	Ecumenical
 Patriarch Bartholomew, the spiritual head of the world’s 250-300 
million Orthodox believers, called Orthodoxy’s first supreme council in 
over 1,200 years as an initial step toward a revival of its conciliar 
system of leadership.
	Council
 spokesman Fr John Chryssavgis has said the Council will go ahead 
without the absentees and its decisions would apply to all Orthodox 
churches. The Serbian Church initially called for the Council to be 
postponed, but its Patriarch Irinej attended a pre-Council meeting in 
Crete on Friday.
	Kirill,
 whose Church represents about two-thirds of the world’s Orthodox, 
stressed its weight in inter-church affairs by sending his message “on 
behalf of the Russian Orthodox Church and on behalf of the Orthodox 
faithful in Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, Moldova and other countries, 
who comprise the vast flock of the Moscow Patriarchate”.
	He
 did not spell out the difficulties that he said the Council 
preparations had “fully revealed”, but remarks by a professor from his 
Church’s academy pointed to the larger tensions between the large 
Russian Church and the small Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople 
(Istanbul).
	“The
 Pan-Orthodox Council has failed, it is a conference of bishops,” said 
Alexey Svetozarsky, professor of the Moscow Theological Academy, told 
the Russian news agency Interfax. “The agenda is miserable.”
	“We
 see the life of the Orthodox Church as a fraternal unity of separate 
local Orthodox Churches, which should settle problematic questions 
jointly, not dictated by a certain "Eastern pope," very small pope, 
caricatured in a certain sense, even though in a high rank,” he said.
	Svetozarsky
 criticised the Ecumenical Patriarch, who attended Pope Francis’s 
installation and met him in the Holy Land and Lesbos, as seeking to move
 Orthodoxy too close to the Vatican.
	"Anyone
 can search in [an] internet browser for 'Patriarch Bartholomew' — he 
jumps out of his frock as he wants to serve with the Pope of Rome,” he 
said. “It is an absolutely inexplicable moment. The Constantinople 
patriarch was the first person who congratulated the pope during 
enthronement at St. Peter's Square.”
	Another
 major concern of the Moscow Patriarchate is the confused situation in 
Ukraine, where there are three different Ukrainian Orthodox churches — 
one under the Moscow Patriarchate, one under the Kiev Patriarchate 
founded in 1992 and a third independent group.
	Orthodoxy
 is especially strong in Ukraine and the Moscow Patriarchate is 
concerned about losing members to competing churches. Ukraine’s 
parliament in Kiev hit that raw nerve on Thursday by approving an appeal
 to Bartholomew to help unite the three bodies into one autocephalous 
church.
	"The
 Ukrainian parliament calls on the Ecumenical Patriarch to take an 
active part in overcoming the consequences of the church schism through 
convening under the aegis of the Ecumenical Patriarch a pan-Ukrainian 
unification council that would solve all disputes and unify Ukrainian 
Orthodox churches," the appeal said.
	The
 Ecumenical Patriarchate recognises the Moscow-linked Ukrainian church 
as the region’s valid Orthodox church. The Council in Crete will not 
change that but the issue of whether Ukraine should have its own 
autocephalous church when much smaller independent Orthodox churches 
exist elsewhere will not go away.