Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg
Pope
Francis' enormous popularity -- his Twitter accounts in different
languages have a total of about 30 million followers, about as many as
Bill Gates and more than Adele -- is a consequence of his openness to
diversity and a softer approach to dogma
. He represents a modernized
Catholic Church. By contrast, the world's second biggest Christian
denomination is proving so resistant to modernization that its plans to
adopt some timid changes for the first time since the year 787 have
fallen through.
The Pan-Orthodox Council that is scheduled to
begin on Crete this weekend was more than 50 years in the making. It was
intended to establish a common modern agenda for the 14 Eastern
Orthodox churches, with a total of 225 million to 300 million faithful.
In recent years, thanks to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I,
traditionally considered first among equals by Orthodox church leaders,
the preparations were moving along nicely: Draft documents
were approved, meetings among the heads of the 14 churches were held,
and plans were made for a bigger gathering of dignitaries. Yet the
Russian Orthodox church, the biggest of all potential participants, has
pulled out at the last moment, following the defection of three smaller
churches, and the Council has been rendered meaningless or even damaging
to future attempts to bring Orthodox Christianity into the 21st
century.
Pope Francis has made surprisingly liberal statements on matters such as remarriage, abortion and homosexuality; the Orthodox leaders never meant to go as far as that. Their draft document on
the church's mission in the modern world skirts contentious issues. Its
section on discrimination, for example, fails to mention sexual
orientation. The document affirms love and peace as the church's ideals,
criticizes racism, inequality, moral degradation and "liberal
globalism" -- it's an agenda as conservative as it is anodyne.
Yet
the Council could have changed the Orthodox churches' ossified attitude
toward the rest of Cristendom, which has not changed since the Dark
Ages. To Orthodox Christians, all other denominations are heresies, not
churches. Some steps toward more ecumenism and more openness would
already constitute serious progress for what is now the most
conservative of Christian denominations. Patriarch Bartholomew, a friend
of Pope Francis's, was determined to push it through.
Russian Orthodox
Church Patriarch Kirill appeared to be among the modernizers. In
February, he held an extraordinary meeting with Pope Francis. They
signed a joint declaration that showed the pope's willingness to concede political
points important to Moscow just to keep the dialogue going. The move
got Kirill in hot water with the more conservative believers at home:
Some priests in Russia even stopped mentioning the Patriarch in their
prayers and were promptly removed from their parishes; it was harder to
stop priests in Ukraine, formerly loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate, from
rebelling in the same way.
Rumors spread among Russian
conservative believers that the scheduled Pan-Orthodox Council was
planning to allow bishops to marry, priests to remarry, abolish monkhood
or move all the churches to the same calendar -- the one the rest of
the world uses (in Russia, Christmas is celebrated 13 days later than in
the rest of the world because the Church hews to the Julian calendar). The Patriarchate had to issue a special statement to allay those fears.
Conservative forces in other Orthodox churches protested a draft document on
relations with the rest of the Christian world: They argued that its
call for "restoring Christian unity" went against the dogma. The
Georgian Church -- like conservative elements elsewhere -- had a
separate problem with a proposal that would allow marriages between Orthodox believers and other Christians if the children are brought up Orthodox.
The
conservative pushback alone may not not have torpedoed the Council.
Kirill, however, appeared to be concerned with Bartholomew's role as the
chief organizer. In Istanbul, where the Ecumenical Patriarch is based,
his flock is limited to about 3,000 people, yet if he managed to bring
the Orthodox confessions closer together and open them to the rest of
the world, he would end up with an oversized role. The Russian Patriarch
couldn't really express these fears publicly, so the Bulgarian church,
closely allied to the Russian one, was the first to call for a
postponement of the Council, objecting, among other things, to the
proposed seating arrangements that would give Bartholomew too much
prominence. When their call was ignored, the Bulgarians withdrew from the Congress.
The
Georgians quickly followed suit. The Antiochian Church, with parishes
in Syria and Lebanon, withdrew for its own reasons -- a dispute with the
Patriarchate of Jerusalem over which of them should cater to Orthodox
believers in Qatar, along with a perceived lack of attention to its
plight as a result of the Syrian war. The defections allowed Moscow to
withdraw, too, claiming the Council wouldn't be truly pan-Orthodox without all the churches participating.
Even
if all the churches took part in the Council, the Orthodox faith would
still have a long way to go. Now, the disagreements and the internal
strife are making the goal of contemporary relevance all but
unattainable.