By Kerin Hope
As a Christian leader based in a Muslim country, Ecumenical Patriarch Brtholomew sees the world from an unusual point of view. History has placed the spiritual head of the world’s Eastern Orthodox community in Instabul – the centre of Christianity before the schism with Rome in 1054 when the city was known as Constantinople.
But Patriarch Bartholomew has little political clout in Turkey, where his official status is that of leader of a small Christian minority rather than the head of a world faith. He also faces a constant struggle to assert his authority with leaders of the Russian Orthodox church, which embraces the majority of the world’s 300m Orthodox Christians.
Yet he has carved out an international role as the Green Patriarch through a campaingn of promoting cross-border co-operation on environmental issues.
This week he hosts a group of 200 clerics and environmental experts at a symposium aboard a cruise ship in the Baltic Sea.
The purpose is twofold: to highlight pollution problems in the Baltic and to involve Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant organisations from the eight Baltic countries in joint conservation and environmental programmes.
He also has a diplomatic agenda to promote the patriarchate with government and religious leaders in the region, especially Poland and the three Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which are due to join the European Union next year.
Patriarch Bartholomew, 63, belongs to a tradition of Orthodox churchmen skilled in the politics of survival. Until Turkey became a candidate for EU membership, the patriarch faced the possibility of expulsion from Istanbul whenever a crisis erupted in Greek-Turkish relations.
He was trained at a seminary in Istanbul, spent several years at Orthodox centres in Italy and Switzerland and became an expert in canon law. His appointment as patriarch came at a challenging time – amid the collapse of communism and a revival of Orthodoxy in east Europe.
Patriarch Bartholomew has tried to build a new role for Orthodoxy as an outward-looking faith committed to building bridges with the Catholic, Muslim and Jewish religions. His main political backing comes from Greece where Orthodoxy is the established religion. The patriachate, stripped of most of its property over the centuries, is also financed from Greece – partly through donations from wealthy shipowners.
Patriarch Bartholomew wields influence in Washington, thanks to ties with the powerful Greek-American political lobby. He has a diplomatic office in Brussels, with a brief to keep watch on human rights and religious freedoms in the accession countries. Like his Greek political backers, Patriarch Bartholomew is a strong advocate of EU membership for Turkey.
The Patriarch is campaigning for the re-opening of the theological school on Halki island, shut down by the Turkish government in a period when tensions with Greece ran high.
Without a steady flow of new entrants to the priesthood in Turkey over the next decade, the ecumenical Patriarchate faces the possibility of terminal decline.
(From the Financial Times, 02/06/03)