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Dr. Cyril Hovorun is a Senior Lecturer and Associate Dean at Sankt Ignatios Academy, Stockholm School of Theology
Clik Here;
“Pan-Orthodox Council and Its Ecumenical Implications.” Materialdienst des konfessionskundlichen Instituts Bensheim 67, no. 4 (2016): 69–70.
The Holy and
Great Council of the Orthodox Church, which sometimes is abbreviated as
Pan-Orthodox Council, concluded its work in Crete. It lasted one week
following the eastern feast of Pentecost, from 19 to 26 June 2016. It has
been in preparation since 1961, when it was decided at the first
Pan-Orthodox meeting at the Greek island of Rhodes to have a venue, which
would be attended by all local Orthodox churches. It is the first Pan-Orthodox
council in history whose purpose was not to solve a particular issue, but
to demonstrate unity of the Orthodox Church.
The council
adopted six documents: “The Importance of Fasting and Its Observance Today”,
“Relations of the Orthodox Church with the Rest of the Christian World”,
“Autonomy and the Means by Which it is Proclaimed”, “The Orthodox Diaspora”,
“The Sacrament of Marriage and its Impediments”, and “The Mission of the
Orthodox Church in Today’s World”. It also promulgated two messages: one
brief and one more extended, called “encyclical”. These documents constitute a
rather modest outcome of the conciliar event. However, its implications
are much wider and will affect the entire Orthodox fellowship for decades.
These implications will also affect the relationship of the Orthodox fellowship
with other Christian churches. Among the factors that will affect the
inter-Orthodox cooperation is that not all local churches showed up in Crete.
From the fourteen unanimously recognised churches, four abstained not
only from the discussions, but also from praying together. This is despite
the initial common decision to come to the council, when all the
churches (except Antioch) signed the preliminary drafts of the conciliar
documents and accepted its regulations. Because not all the churches
eventually upheld their initial decisions (namely Russia, Georgia, and
Bulgaria), the council turned to a painful experience for both those who
came and those who did not.
This was a
pain familiar to me from the bilateral dialogues. I had opportunities to
represent the Russian Orthodox Church in a number of them: with the Catholic,
Lutheran, Anglican, and Oriental churches. In these dialogues, we the
Orthodox often behave in a way, for which I should apologize. We do not
always respect agreements that we have commonly reached; we refuse to
recognise our own faults and to acknowledge the merits of the other side of the
dialogue; we solve particular issues of our jurisdictions under the guise
of protecting our common tradition. Our partners in the dialogues need to have
steel nerves to bear with us. We do not have the same nerves when we have
to bear with our own Orthodox brethren. In the process of preparation and
during the Pan-Orthodox council, the churches walked in the shoes of our
partners in the ecumenical dialogues, and none of them liked it. I hope
this painful experience will help us the Orthodox to be more consistent in
what we say and what we do in our relationship with the ecumenical
partners.
Another
factor that has already affected the Pan-Orthodox fellowship is that the
churches which did not come to Crete were moved more by their particular
interests than by caring about the common good of the Orthodox fellowship.
This means that the very Orthodox identity was been caught into a trap.
Indeed, we the Orthodox identify our church as the church of councils. As
a result, in the Catholic-Orthodox dialogues, we always advocate
conciliarity against the papal system, where the councils have submerged to the
authority of the bishop of Rome. In the dialogues with the Protestant churches,
we emphasise that to have a valid council, the church should have
apostolic succession and other structures that go back to the apostolic age.
Now it will be harder for us to ride on our conciliar identity in the
dialogues.
Conciliarity
has been challenged in two senses: as an identity and as a mechanism of
managing church affairs. The crisis of conciliarity after Crete in the
latter sense led some theologians to suggest that probably conciliarity
cannot be exercised without some sort of enhanced primacy, which could be
even similar to the Roman papacy. I personally think this would be a too
cheap answer to the complicated question of equality of the Orthodox
churches. We need to recognise that we are unable to exercise conciliarity in
the way we believed in it. This has to lead us to finding new ways of
conciliarity. Another issue, which was raised at the council, is the one
of consensus. The Orthodox churches, through the Special Commission for the
Orthodox Participation in the World Council of Churches (WCC), forced other
partners in the WCC to accept the practice of taking decisions not by the
majority of votes, but by consensus. However, when they tried to apply the
same principle to the Pan-Orthodox Council, it became a stumbling block that
endangered the conciliar process. I need to give some background
information, in order to explain why this happened.
The issue of
consensus is connected with another issue - that of representation. The church
councils were in some sense institutes of representative democracies in the era
when there was no representative democracy. In the period of late antiquity',
when all governmental positions were filled by the above institutions, and the
highest institution of emperor was filled in most cases by military or
aristocracy, the church was the only' democratic institution in the Roman
society. Its bishops were elected by their
communities, with every member of the community regardless of his or her social
position being eligible to participate in the elections. This practice was
kept longer in the West than in the East, and continued until
approximately the end of the era of common ecumenical councils. When the
bishops, thus, came to the councils, they in most cases represented their
folks, and were accountable to them when they voted. Each bishop meant one
vote. The decisions voted for by the majority of bishops were adopted by
the council and became obligatory for the entire church. Since the early
Middle Ages, both the Orthodox and Catholic churches have abandoned this
democratic system, which was adopted relatively recently by the secular
political systems. Nowadays, the local Orthodox churches, with a few exceptions,
do not allow their bishops to be elected by people - they are picked by the
Holy Synods, who represent a collegium of bishops. In other words,
nowadays the Orthodox Church functions not as a representative democracy -
something they held in the Late Antiquity, but as an English club, where
the existing members of the club of bishops invite other members to join
it. There are a few exceptions. One of them is the Church of Cyprus, where
the bishops are elected by all inhabitants of the diocese, where he is to be
installed, and the Archbishop is elected at the nationwide elections,
which are similar to the ones that elect the president of the country.
Even in the
situation when bishops are not elected by their people, they are believed to
vote on their behalf. For this reason, the Hear bishops usually do not
have the right to vote in the local councils of the church. This norm has
no sense when the bishops are not elected, and yet it is kept as a part of
the tradition. According to the same tradition, the bishops still vote for
themselves. The Pan-Orthodox Council did not follow this tradition. At the
stage of preparation for it, it was decided that not individual bishops, but
the delegations of the autocephalous churches have one vote. In this sense, the
meeting in Crete was not a traditional council. It was closer to an
international congress or a General assembly of the United Nations, where
not individual members of national delegations, but countries have each
one vote.
This problem
has its reason. If the council followed the usual principle “one bishop - one
vote”, it would be dysfunctional. The majority of the voting delegates would be
the bishops from the Russian Orthodox Church. No one doubts that they
would vote as one voice, being commanded by the Patriarch of Moscow. This would
make all the decisions of the council predictable and favouring only one
Church. Constantinople and other churches could not allow this. As a
result, they imposed a norm that every church would have only one vote.
This norm made the PanOrthodox Council a Pan-Orthodox congress. Now Moscow
would be a minority among the Greek-speaking churches. In response to this
initiative of Constantinople, Moscow demanded that each church would
have the right of veto.
As I have
said earlier, this norm mirrors the Orthodox participation in the WCC. As a
result of the work of the Special Commission for the Orthodox
Participation, initiated after the General Assembly in Harare, with
Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad playing a leading role,
the principle of consensus was introduced to the work of the WCC. This
principle was good for the Orthodox Churches, but difficult for the WCC.
Now, with this principle applied to the Pan-Orthodox Council, the council
was close to be paralysed - the Orthodox churches experienced
its bitterness, which they had imposed on the WCC.
The
Pan-Orthodox Council faced an issue, which is too familiar to the WCC, the one
of reception. The problem of the reception of the outcomes of the dialogues,
both bilateral and in the framework of the WCC, is that the documents
produced by these dialogues are not properly scrutinised by most churches. The
same issue occurred to the Pan-Orthodox Council. The drafts of the
conciliar decisions, prepared in advance, were declared as the main
obstacle for some churches to not participate in it. All these documents
have been drafted over decades by groups of the representatives assigned by the
churches. They did their job in the same way as they contributed to the
ecumenical dialogues. The paradigm of drafting such texts is as follows: The
synods or primates appoint official representatives, usually priests and rarely
bishops or laypersons. They come to the meetings, draft the texts, and
then report these texts to the synods. The synods are supposed to study
them and then either accept or reject the drafts. In reality, however, a
few read those texts, which in most cases pile up in the archives without being
studied.
This
paradigm worked during the decades of preparation for the Pan-Orthodox Council.
The representatives of the local Orthodox churches met regularly and
drafted the texts that were supposed to be discussed and accepted (or rejected)
by the synods and councils of the churches. However, the proper reception
work was not done - the texts were passed formally. Only on the eve of the
council, when the synods began reading these texts actually for the first time,
they decided to not accept them. This is because they had to read them earlier,
but they did not. Some in the last minute decided to trash the work of the
commissions, which they themselves had appointed, because they did not
care to check up their work.
This exactly
has been a problem for the ecumenical movement, which suffers from the
irresponsiveness of the churches. Indeed, the Orthodox churches often do not
read the texts drafted by their own representatives. In other words, they do
not do the work they are supposed to do. At the same time,
ultra-conservative circles do this work instead of the official synods.
Their attitude to the ecumenical texts is critical, and their rebuking
voices dictate the churches an anti-ecumenical agenda. This agenda
eventually wins, filling up the vacuum left by the official church, which
does not care about properly evaluating the ecumenical work of its own
delegations.
The
Pan-Orthodox Council was called to demonstrate Pan-Orthodox solidarity. This
demonstration turned out to be ambivalent. On the one hand, the conciliar
statements addressed the crisis in the Middle East, which has affected
some of the Orthodox churches. On the other hand, it failed to respond to
the wars in Georgia and Ukraine.
The only two
wars in Europe in the twenty first century were between Orthodox countries:
Russia and Georgia in 2008, and Russia and Ukraine from 2014. Moscow propaganda
tried to present the latter as a conflict between the Orthodox and
(Greek-)Catholics, but this was a lie that could not stand the fact that
the majority of those fighting on the Ukrainian side were not “Uniates”
from the West of Ukraine, but soldiers from the centre and even East of
the country. Most of them speak Russian and if they go to any churches,
these are the churches of the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine. As a matter of
fact, a lot of Orthodox blood was shed in both wars. Particularly the war
in Ukraine was endorsed with the strong religious rhetoric of protecting
the “Orthodox values” against the “godless West”. In spite of this, there
was not a single statement from any Orthodox church, which would rebuke
both wars and condemn the perpetrator. On the contrary, many Orthodox came to
believe the propa-gandistic thesis that both wars just reflected geopolitical
wrestling between the Orthodox East with the Catholic/Protestant West. With
this comfortable explanation in mind, they favoured the aggressor rather
than their Orthodox brethren who fell on the other side.
The wars in
Georgia and Ukraine are the issues that demand a strong Pan-Orthodox
solidarity. The council in Crete, however, failed to express such a
solidarity. It chose to not touch on the Ukrainian issue, the most burning
one for the inter-Orthodox agenda. As a matter of fact, this was a
precondition for the council to happen. That is the paradox of
the Council: it had to avoid any meaningful agenda, which would be
relevant to the churches. Any solution to the burning issues was frozen
until the council would finish. The discussions of really important things
will be resumed only now, when the Council is over.
This stand
of the Council, unfortunately, coheres with the stand of some other Christians.
The Vatican seems to pursue its own agenda trading “neutrality” and handshaking
with Mr Putin for various concessions from the Russian Church. The WCC
prefers to keep silent on the war in Ukraine. When the delegation of the
WCC, headed by its General Secretary, visited Ukraine in March 2015, it issued
a statement which fits more the patterns of the Russian propaganda. The
standpoint of the Pan-Orthodox Council regarding the wars in Georgia and
Ukraine, as well as similar standpoints of the Roman Catholic Church and
the WCC, have compromised these churches and ecumenical organisations, and
should be regarded as a shameful episode in the history of the ecumenical
movement.
Despite all
these difficulties, the Pan-Orthodox Council in Crete has produced some
positive outcomes for the ecumenical dialogue. It confirmed the participation
of the Orthodox churches in the bilateral dialogues, as well as their
commitment to the international organisations such as the WCC. This was a
positive decision, even though it faced a resistance from the
ultra-conservative circles. It is also important that the council, for the
first time in the history of the Orthodox Church, condemned fundamentalism,
whose main feature is resistance to ecumenism. The council became a kairos for
serious inter-Orthodox discussions about the Christian unity.
Rev. Dr. Cyril
Hovorun is a Senior Lecturer and Associate Dean at Sankt Ignatios Academy,
Stockholm School ofTheology
Source: MATERIALDIENSTdesKonfessionskundlichenInstitutsBensheim.
Protestantismus-Katholizismus-Orthodoxie-Ökumene,
Juli /August 67.Jahrgang,pp. 69-70
Die Heilige und Große Synode 2016
- Geschichte, Verlauf, Beschlüsse 071
Gisa Bauer
