During a recent trip to Bulgaria, I discovered a people in need of pastoral care, not theological squabbling
I have recently been in Bulgaria, a delightful country that I
would recommend to all readers who like good food, friendly people,
spectacular mountain scenery, and interesting and beautiful historic
cities. While in Bulgaria, I met up with several clerics, both Orthodox
and Catholic, and got something of a feel for the religious temperature
of the country. What follows will necessarily be a personal impression
rather than the result of deep research, but will, perhaps, still be of
interest.
Bulgaria is a country that has been gravely damaged by 500 years of
Ottoman rule, as well as 50 years of communist rule, the latter
generally considered to be far the worse experience. The country is
still marked with Soviet-style monuments, though many have been
relegated to a very interesting museum in a suburb of Sofia. Quite a lot
of the roads have now got royalist names, and there is a Gladstone
Street in both Sofia and Plovdv. This represents an attempt to
reappropriate a historical era that was blotted out by communist
propaganda.
Likewise, if one studies old photos of Plovdiv, one can count at
least twenty minarets, of which only two survive; similarly, Sofia has
but one functioning mosque; the nineteenth century saw a boom in the
building of Orthodox churches, which was, among other things, an
exercise in the reclamation of religious territory, and the
re-Christianisation of what had been a Muslim landscape. Yet modern
Bulgaria is emphatically not a Christian land: religious practice is
low, though much folk religion persists. Many people call themselves
Orthodox, though some who do so have not even been baptised. The
indigenous Catholic Church is tiny, but making converts, particularly
amongst intellectuals. These converts come, generally, from the ‘no
religion’ category. The Muslims number about one in ten of the
population, but most of these are cultural Muslims, if that designation
makes sense.
There is certainly lots for the Catholic Church to do in
Bulgaria. There are several religious communities active in the country,
and three bishops: one is an Exarch for the Greek Catholics, and the
other two are Latins. There is a community of Missionaries of Charity in
Plovdiv, the sisters founded by the Blessed Mother Teresa.
The Bulgarian Orthodox Church has no official dialogue with the
Catholic Church, and is opposed to ecumenism, having recently produced
some very strongly worded official publications to that effect.
In the spectrum of opinion that is to be found in Orthodoxy, the
Bulgarians are the least ecumenical, along with the Georgians. However,
the hierarchs of the Bulgarian Church make an annual trip to Rome to
visit the tomb of St Cyril which is to be found in the basilica of San
Clemente, and are regularly received by the Pope when they do so. On a
personal level, internationally and locally, relations are friendly.
While it is true that the Synod of the Bulgarian Church may take a hard
anti-ecumenical line, this is not true of all the faithful, some of
whom, at least, view the official line with dismay.
The same goes for the Bulgarian Church’s refusal to participate in
the recent Council of Orthodox Churches in Crete. They were the first to
refuse to go, at the very last minute, and their non-attendance was one
of the reasons the Russians gave for following suit. The Bulgarian action has been seen as a convenient cover for the Russians,
siding with them against the Patriarch of Constantinople, but this
pro-Russian line is by no means what all Bulgarian Orthodox want. As one
cleric put it to me: the real challenge facing the Bulgarian Church is
pastoral, and the people do not really care about this sort of
theological infighting. The people want something different from their
Church, but they are not getting it, he added. One concludes from this,
as in the West, there is a crisis of leadership in Orthodoxy. Perhaps,
with an emergence of a new generation, things will change; though no one
I spoke to thought this likely, sadly.
The Council of Crete represents a huge lost opportunity for the
various Orthodox Churches, some of which are facing challenges to their
very existence; it makes one reflect on the old saying that “Unity is
strength”. The Catholic Church needs to take heed of this: internal
quarrels do not help the Church’s mission. Meanwhile, let us all pray
for the Catholics of Bulgaria!