HOLY AND GREAT COUNCIL DOCUMENT

Draft Synodical Document

Τετάρτη 21 Δεκεμβρίου 2016

CYRIL HOVORUN, “PAN-ORTHODOX COUNCIL AND ITS ECUMENICAL IMPLICATIONS.” MATERIALDIENST DES KONFESSIONSKUNDLICHEN INSTITUTS BENSHEIM



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

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