Rome (ENI). Pope Benedict XVI and Patriarch Alexei II of the Russian Orthodox Church may meet in early 2007, according to unconfirmed reports circulating in Rome and Moscow. There has been no official church confirmation of the rumours, but if such an encounter did take place, it would be the first meeting between a Pope and a Russian Orthodox Patriarch. The Vatican is mulling the possibility of a meeting in Hungary in 2007 between Pope Benedict and Patriarch Alexei, the Italian weekly Panorama has reported.
After all, we can’t have the media thinking that the Ecumenical Patriarch is the “spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians”! 🙂
Fr. Andrew, it would be nice if the media were able to report the reality of the Orthodox hierarchical structure rather than just doing an overlay of the western model. Of course, if we really knew it ourselves, that would probably help. What I fail to see is what your observation has to do with the announcement. The Russian Patriarchate has far more people and parishes in Europe than the Ecumencial Patriarchate and therefore from just a political standpoint is more important to building a working realtionship between Rome and the Orthodox.
@ Fr. Andrew
Well, Bartholomew is NOT the Orthodox Pope, or is he? But it’s good they’re talking again (Russia and the Vatican), it’s about time…
No, Bartholomew is not the Orthodox pope but he does get a lot of press coverage. And the meeting between Benedict and Bartholomew gave media exposure to Orthodoxy it would not have had otherwise.
More to the point, Alexy is ambitious to preserve the title of leader of the “Third Rome,” which explains why Alexy and Bartholomew are continually fighting with each other. Any meeting with Benedict gives him further status as the leader of Orthodoxy throughout the world. But it gets rather tiresome to hear Alexy drone on and on about “sheep stealing.” A little competition in Russia would do much to reinvigorate the Church. Now that the Patriarchate and ROCOR are unifying, Alexy will get a good taste of Protestant style American church competition. He will enjoy no monopoly here.
The truth is the Catholic Church does not need Orthodoxy, though it is desirous to reach attain full communion. Benedict, like it or not, is the only Christian leader with a worldwide pulpit. There is no visible Orthodox patriarch who can possibly match Benedict in terms of media attention, intellect, and understanding of the perils the West is now facing. Alexy is xenophobic, Jerusalem is a puppet, and
Antioch is a prisoner of the Syrian gangster regime. And in America, look at the crazy quilt of Orthodox jurisdictions. And on and on we can go.
It is high time we take a sober assessment of the sad state Orthodoxy is in today. I am not sanguine about the future of Orthodoxy given what we see across the board.
To be perfectly truthful, I would welcome Bartholomew or his successor to move the Ecumenical Patriarchate to America, where it can benefit from freedom of movement. It may also be the only real opportunity to achieve long needed Orthodoxy unity in America. No doubt some will choke on my words. But I see no other scenario that works.
George Strickland
The whole Patriarchal system is a mistake. It was Roman organization grafted onto the Church and it never fit. It has always created problems. It only worked a little bit when there were monarchies and empires. It has no function in the modern world except to exacerbate disunity. We already have the model staring us in the face, national Churches with national Synods headed by the folks who live and worship in that country. Combine this with an international Synod that is required to meet at least annually with binding doctrinal authority. The chairman of Synod would rotate amongst all of the member bishops. Moving the Ecumenical Patriarchate anywhere, especially the United States will just prolong the inevitable death of the system.
We are in visible disarray because we just don’t care. I am afraid we have become Orthovox (right talkers) rather than Orthodox. Despite the fact that almost no Orthodox in the United States looks upon any Patriarch for genuine spiritual authority, we continue to persist in the delusion that they do have such authority. If I go to another Orthodox Church and wish to receive communion and am asked who my bishop is, I won’t say Patriarch Ignatius IV, I’ll say His Grace Bishop Basil of the Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America—he is my bishop. He has the authority, but it is not political authority. Do we really believe that Jesus Christ is the Head of the Orthodox Church or not? It seems we actually put our hope on archaic artificial structures that require a ruling monarch to function at all.
That being said, IMO we actually have greater unity than the Roman Catholics and the unity we do have is more spiritually viable even if it is politically far weaker. Last time I checked the Bible it was pretty clear that we are not to rely on politics for our salvation, but the Incarnate Word of God, Jesus Christ. It is to Him we look when the priest offers up the Body and the Blood “for the life of the world”. In Orthodox ecclesiology the office of bishop is sacramental. When we pray that they “rightly divide the word of truth” we are looking to that sacramental authority to distribute the Truth amongst us.
Evangelization, not worldly unity is the key. To evangelize someone, or a whole bunch of some ones called a country, takes love, real personal love for the people, for the land. As long as even our titular loyalty lies across the sea, that won’t happen. The Russian saints who came to Alaska to evangelize responded to our Lord’s command to “go forth”. Their bishops recognized the truth of that command specifically for them in this land and sent them. Now all the Patriarchs want to do is gather because they are lonely and afraid. So far only Patriarch Ignatius and the Antiochian Synod have shown any sign of understanding the reality with which we are faced. What Fr. Josiah Trenham said in his address to we Antiochians in El Paso this past summer https://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles6/TrenhamUnity.php applies to Orthodox unity in general, not just in the United States, but Fr. Stanley Harakas is equally correct. The task of unity does not belong to the bishops alone, but to all of us.
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” John 12:24
“Benedict, like it or not, is the only Christian leader with a worldwide pulpit. There is no visible Orthodox patriarch who can possibly match Benedict in terms of media attention, intellect, and understanding of the perils the West is now facing. Alexy is xenophobic, Jerusalem is a puppet, and
Antioch is a prisoner of the Syrian gangster regime. And in America, look at the crazy quilt of Orthodox jurisdictions. And on and on we can go.
It is high time we take a sober assessment of the sad state Orthodoxy is in today. I am not sanguine about the future of Orthodoxy given what we see across the board.”
Neither am I. Having been in the OCA for about a year now, when I first heard about the financial scandal I knew it would be ugly knowing the overall intellectual and moral “state” of Orthodoxy in America. It has turned out to be even uglier than I thought. Only one bishop out of nine reacted (and continues to react) with anything resembling a Christian mindset, let alone a 6th grade education (harsh words I know, but sadly true). It took my own Bishop (Dimitri – South) about a year to move from outright denial (and strangely, cheap grace thrown in at the same time) to “yes, we have a problem but let’s focus on ourselves some more”. He does not seem to realize that focusing on our selves is a source of the problem. All my parish council could muster is a letter to our bishop that said “we prayerfully support you”, which while being a truism, does nothing to begin the process of recognizing that the sad state of intellect and moral reasoning at the parish level is directly related to the sad state of intellect and moral reasoning at the Diocesan and Syosset levels.
George, the only thing I might disagree with here is your assessment that ;
“would welcome Bartholomew or his successor to move the Ecumenical Patriarchate to America, where it can benefit from freedom of movement. It may also be the only real opportunity to achieve long needed Orthodoxy unity in America”
That would lead to a place where the Greeks have too much influence here in America. They have too much already IMO, and I don’t think they have the basic mindset needed to overcome the various problems facing American Orthodoxy. Again, I come back to the parish level. Having converted at a Greek parish and subsequently fled it due to it’s ethnic focus, and understanding that the Greeks are in last place as it were in realizing and addressing the bane of ethnic “Christianity”, I do not think anything that increases their influence would be a move in the right direction…
Wrong. Dead wrong. The Roman Church desperately needs the Orthodox, which is why the successive Popes have been reaching out every more lately. The Orthodox has preserved authentic Christian worship and liturgy, at a time when the RC has spun itself into mass confusion over the very essentials of the faith.
Remember the ‘one lung’ comment from Pope John Paul II? Here is Jaroslav Pelikan discussing that:
This is not a situation where the RC has everything and us poor, downtrodden Orthodox are in need of Rome’s rescue. The Roman Church has issues. Massive issues. It just so happens that the RC is strong in areas in which the Orthodox is not only weak today, but has been traditionally weak. The flipside, however, is also the case. The things which are strongest in the Orthodox tradition (such as liturgy, worship, Theology) are also the ones which are most endangered in the RC.
To believe that the RC doesn’t need the Orthodox is to be blind and willfully obtuse. The question is – will the RC pay the price necessary to rejoin the Orthodox?
Now Christopher – will you lighten up? Dmitri is 80 and he’s tired. Everyone in the Diocese is in a holding patter waiting for him to step down or die. There are tons of decisions to be made that are being put off, because the current Archbishop of the South simply isn’t up to the task of making them. The Diocese is too big, and he is too old and frail.
Should he step down? Yes, I think he should. But he is probably determined to die in office. God will be the final judge of the rightness of that decision.
The OCA financial mess is a problem. All organizations involving humans have these kinds of issues. You do recall that more than a few Saints have been persecuted by their brethren within the church?
St. John Chrysostom comes to mind. Both East and West has seen its share of saints persecuted within the church, along with a whole lot of other bad decisions.
In fact, in case you may have forgotten, entire Councils were invalidated by later ones. Remember, the 7th council we celebrate today is actually one that nullified an earlier one that approved iconoclasm.
In the end, God puts things to right. All of this doom and gloom and defeatism among the Orthodox is more than revolting. Of course we should investigate what happened financially. And that investigation will happen, and we are right to insist on it. But the level of benightedness that this and other issues (such as ethnicity) cause among Orthodox Christians is absurd.
The Patriarch of Moscow is more interested in his nation’s future than in ours. Who would expect otherwise? The Patriarchate in Jerusalem has to co-exist with Muslims, many of who want to kill us. That sets a certain tone. Who would expect otherwise? The Patriach in Damascus is in better shape than the one in Constantinople, but this is only a matter of degree. It isn’t like he’s operating in Switzerland.
So, yes, we need a new focus in the United States. We need to be really self-governing and look to our own devices. We need to build our own church informed by Orthodox tradition and guided by the Holy Spirit.
But above all, we need to quit whining. It isn’t helping.
The first thing we have to do as Glen advises is relax. The second thing we need to do is stop complaining about the (fill in the blank) jurisdiction becasue they are too(fill in the blank). It is after all the (fill in the blank) jurisdictions fault that we are in this mess. In other words, trust Jesus Christ and trust the Church and trust each other. Today is the feast day of St. Basil the Great, who faced the Arian crisis in the Church when it looked as if the whole Church would become Arian. What we face today is nothing compared to that. I’m Orthodox because I love God and found Him in the Church. I really don’t care if its Greek, Arabic, Slavic, American as long as its Orthodox. That won’t change if there is no hierarchy left in the United States because they’ve all be arrested as frauds and felons. We have to love this land and her people, engage this land and her people from a solidly Orthodox perspective. Us. True Orthodox ecclesiology teaches that the lay people are just as important as the hierarchy and the ascetics. It is not just the bishops, not just the priests, us. Pray for the Bishops, encourage the Bishops in word as well, but don’t let them off the hook either.
Everytime someone abandons an “ethnic” parish just because it is too “ethnic” it is a blow to Orthdox unity. It proves the point of those who feel that we foreigners are not really Orthodox.
Faith friends. Blessed St. Basil pray for us, Blessed Raphael, Shepard of the lost sheep of American, pray for us.