CHRISTIAN UNITY IN ACTION: THE RETURN OF ST. GREGORY’S AND ST. JOHN’S RELICS TO CONSTANTINOPLE

Dr. George Demacopoulos, Fr. John Meyendorff & Patterson Family Chair, Co-Director of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center, Fordham University

There is little doubt that Pope John Paul II was a heroic figure. A fierce critic of communism, totalitarianism, and exploitation, he reshaped the global stage in light of Catholic social teaching. For those who care about the cause of Christian unity, the pontiff’s ecumenical initiatives were equally significant.

It was twenty years ago this week that Pope John Paul performed his final heroic act: the return of precious relics of the Orthodox Church that had been stolen during the Fourth Crusade. This act of public repentance transpired in the form of an ecumenical prayer service, in Rome, with the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Pope jointly presiding. The highlight of the service was the official transfer of the relics of St. Gregory the Theologian and St. John Chrysostom from Pope to Patriarch (the relics of both saints had been in Rome for 800 years). This was, in fact, the Pope’s last major public appearance before his death.

The Backstory

Like all major diplomatic initiatives, ecclesiastical or otherwise, there is a backstory. Fordham University played a small part in that backstory, and it is the reason that the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham exists today.

As early as the 1960s, the Roman Catholic Church began to return looted religious treasures as a way of demonstrating its ecumenical good will. It returned the relics of St. Andrew to the Church of Greece and relics of St. Mark to the Coptic Church. But it wasn’t until May of 2001 that a sitting pontiff publicly acknowledged the error of the Crusades, especially the Fourth Crusade (which seized Constantinople in 1204 and would eventually lead to the end of the Byzantine Empire).

When Pope John Paul II visited Greece in 2001—he was the first Pope to do so in more than a thousand years—he well understood the local opposition that he would face. He characteristically confronted the challenge courageously. From the moment he exited the plane in Athens, he offered a forty-minute public apology on behalf of the Catholic Church for the crimes of the Fourth Crusade.

In the Spring of 2004, the Ecumenical Patriarch, who had warm relationship with John Paul, decided that it was time to request that the bodies of his two most famous predecessors might also be returned (both St. Gregory and St. John had served as archbishops of Constantinople). His All-Holiness turned to his trusted assistant, Fr. Alexander Karloutsos of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in America, to prepare a formal request. Fr. Alexander, in turn, reached out to Aristotle Papanikolaou and me to provide the documentary evidence for a formal request.

Using Fordham’s extensive library collections, we were able to follow the trail of the looted relics from Constantinople to Rome, as well as their distinctive movements within Rome between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, when they were separately deposited into side chapels of St. Peter’s Basilica. When His All-Holiness visited Rome for the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul in June of 2004, he formally asked the Pope to return the relics and provided a dossier based on the research that Aristotle and I provided. Within a few weeks, Pope John Paul agreed to the request, and they identified the November 30th Feast of Andrew, the patron saint of the See of Constantinople, as the appropriate date for the relics to be re-installed in Constantinople.

The Significance

There is little doubt that Patriarch Bartholomew’s initiative and Pope John Paul’s heroic good will jumpstarted a stalled ecumenical process between the Orthodox and Catholic communions. Institutionally, this has manifested itself in the form of unprecedented collaborative statements of common faith and in expanded episcopal attendance of prominent events. For example, when Patriarch Bartholomew attended Pope Francis’ elevation in 2013, he was the first Patriarch of Constantinople in history to do so. And when Francis and Bartholomew traveled to Cairo in 2017, it was the first time in history that the bishop of Rome, the bishop of Constantinople, and the Coptic bishop of Alexandria were all in the same place at the same time (this had never occurred during an ecumenical council).

I would like to suggest that Pope John Paul’s heroic gesture to the Orthodox in 2004 has had a profound impact in other ways as well, most notably in terms of Catholic higher education. While Vatican II had already encouraged Catholic theology departments to employ Orthodox Christian scholars, it was only in the wake of the 2004 exchange that Roman Catholic institutions began to invest seriously in Orthodox Christian Studies and to deploy those investments for ecumenical purposes. The Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham was the first and is, for now, the largest, of these initiatives. But there are several additional programs at various stages of development at Loyola Marymount, Catholic University of America, Notre Dame, and Georgetown. The Huffington Ecumenical Institute at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology serves as an important mirror initiative at an Orthodox institution. These institutional centers will be the incubators of research and goodwill that will fuel the cause of Christian unity in the future.

To be sure, the creation of these academic initiatives has been made possible by the extraordinary generosity of hundreds of ecumenically-minded donors. But these centers and programs simply would not exist if not for the vision, courage, and faith of Pope John Paul II. Nor would they be possible without the genuine, brotherly relationship that he had with Patriarch Bartholomew.

Public Orthodoxy