Crete: A four-hour service on June 19 opened an attempt to bring together all leaders of the world’s Eastern Orthodox Churches for the first time in more than 1,000 years.
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I led heads of the autocephalous Orthodox Churches to celebrate the Divine Liturgy on the feast of Pentecost in the Metropolitan Church of St Minas in Heraklion, Crete, the largest island of Greece.
An autocephalous Church appoints its own head and is not subject to the authority of an external authority.
However, the powerful Russian Church and three others pulled out of the historic meet at the last minute over disputes ranging from the seating plan to efforts to reconcile with the Vatican, report agencies.
Speaking in Rome on June 19, Pope Francis prayed for all the Orthodox leaders gathered in Crete for the week-long meeting and urged Catholics to unite themselves in prayer to all their Orthodox brothers and sisters.
The Holy and Great Council is the first meeting of all Orthodox leaders since the year 787, when the last of the seven councils recognized by both Orthodox and Catholics was held.
Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, considered “the first among equals” since the time when Constantinople was the seat of the Byzantine Empire, has been the main driving force behind efforts to bring together the leaders of all 14 independent Orthodox churches.
The gathering, for which preparations began 55 years ago, was meant to promote unity among the world’s more than 300 million Orthodox Christians. But in recent weeks, differences that at first seemed minor escalated as the date for the meeting approached.
Patriarch Bartholomew, the most senior hierarch in the Orthodox Church, was joined by Patriarchs Theodore of Alexandria, Theophilos of Jerusalem, Irinej of Serbia, Daniel of Romania, and Archbishops Chrysostomos of Cyprus and Ieronymos of Athens and all Greece, Metropolitan Sawa of Warsaw and all Poland, Archbishops Anastasios of Albania and Rastislav of Czech Lands and Slovakia.
At the opening liturgy, Bartholomew told the leaders from countries around the world that every local Orthodox Church has its own treasure to offer and is a vital part of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. At the same time, he said, the Church is “crying out” to the Holy Spirit “to come and abide in us and keep us in Its Truth and Its sanctification”
This appeal, he added, remains “the primary request of all humanity in a divided world that is full of strife, and which thirsts for unity, on behalf of which the Son of God gave up Himself so that all of us may have life, and that we may have it more abundantly.”
Bartholomew’s words touched numerous points of contention and angst of contemporary Orthodoxy— a church that is “united” in faith and dogma, whose independent heads have complete and full jurisdiction over their church and territories, which are usually carved along national divides.
But as is often the case, the Churches have rivalry and conflict among themselves, the largest being that between Constantinople and Moscow, whose Patriarch Kirill, has overtly and covertly challenged the primacy of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, which has traditionally and historically been the “first amongst equals” of the Orthodox world.
Other local rivalries and distrust exist among Churches and hierarchs, as do beliefs as to how the overall Church is responding to contemporary times and how it’s adapting as such.
Antioch and Jerusalem are in a turf war over a tiny flock in Qatar and who has jurisdiction. That conflict led to Antioch’s refusal to participate in the Council taking place on Crete.
The Ecumenical Patriarchate, which has a small flock in Turkey of native Greeks also has large numbers of faithful in the “New Lands” or the Orthodox Diaspora, including Asia, Europe, North America and Australia. As a result of the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s diversity it has been perceived by other, more conservative churches, to be liberal in both how it approaches its faithful, as well as its relations with other Christian Churches, namely the Catholics.
Furthermore, with regards to inter-Church relations with other Christian traditions, the more conservative bloc— the Bulgarians and the Georgians in particular, don’t even refer to Catholicism and other Christian traditions as “churches” and some officially refer to all non-Orthodox Christian churches as “heresies.”
Speaking specifically of the Holy and Great Council as a visible expression of unity, despite four Churches’ absence, the Patriarch noted that the road to unity “demands a living sacrifice, much work, and is achieved after great struggle.”
He added that “this Council of ours will contribute towards this direction by creating a climate of mutual trust and understanding.”
The Patriarch closed his homily with a prayer to the Holy Spirit: “Setting aside the problems that arise from our different ethnic backgrounds, we beseech the descent of the [Comforter] upon us all of us so that, illumined by Him, we may issue a message of truth, genuineness, and hope all across today’s world.”