
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.