The Russian Orthodox Church, whose boycott of a major
summit of Orthodox Christian leaders in Crete last month threatened to
slow down efforts to promote greater unity, has declared the meeting “an
important event in the history of the conciliar process.”
The church’s synod, in its official reaction to the
June 20-26 Holy and Great Council, also said the meeting could not be
called “pan-Orthodox” because four of the 14 independent Orthodox member
churches did not attend.
The Moscow Patriarchate, which represents between
half and two-thirds of the world’s 300 million Orthodox, has been
disputing the summit’s pan-Orthodox character since announcing its
boycott in early June. Officials at the council said Russia’s Patriarch
Kirill could not come to Crete because archconservatives in his ranks
opposed it.
But the synod took a more positive approach by
calling the session “an important event” and asking its theological
commission to study the six documents the council approved and report
back on its findings.
In the diplomatic way the Orthodox churches
communicate with one another in public, these comments meant Moscow has
not closed the door on further efforts to bring the churches closer
together.
Unlike the Roman Catholic Church led by a single
pope, Orthodoxy is a loose network of sovereign — the official word is
“autocephalous” — member churches organized along national lines, each
with its own leader.
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the spiritual
leader of the Orthodox based in Istanbul (the former Constantinople),
has no administrative authority over the members. He championed the idea
of the council to bring church leaders together at the highest level
for the first time in over 1,200 years.
The four absent churches — Antioch, Bulgaria, Georgia
and Russia — stayed away because of disagreements with the documents
drawn up for approval and a jurisdictional dispute between Antioch and
Jerusalem.
Bartholomew insisted on going ahead with the council
anyway because he felt the Orthodox churches, which had grown apart and
somewhat isolated from one another during the turbulent 20th century,
needed to revive their conciliar tradition and seek a more unified
response to the challenges of the modern world.
“This sort of uneven evolution required a council to
establish some fundamental guidelines for the Orthodox churches,” the
Rev. John Chryssavgis, council spokesman, told RNS after the summit.
No follow-up meeting was decided, but Romania offered to hold the next summit in seven years.
“There will no doubt be more opportunities for such
councils,” Chryssavgis said. “Hopefully these will not take as long to
prepare and organize.”
(Tom Heneghan is based in Paris)Religion News Service