The Council due to open on Monday in Crete has been beset by controversy
18 June 2016 | by Tom Heneghan|The Tablet
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.