The Unorthodox Patriarch?

A very critical review of Bartholomew I's new book on Orthodoxy.

By CHARLOTTE ALLEN
January 25, 2008; Page W11

Bartholomew I, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, can be regarded as the "pope," or at least the symbol of unity, of Orthodox Christianity. The denomination's 300 million or so adherents make it the second-largest body of Christians in the world, after Roman Catholicism. The 67-year-old Bartholomew also represents one of Christianity's most ancient branches as the latest in a line of 270 archbishops of his city -- modern Istanbul -- that traces itself back to the apostle St. Andrew, brother of St. Peter, in a part of the world where the Christian faith has existed since New Testament times.

In December 2006, Bartholomew, patriarch since 1991, was thrust under the world-wide media spotlight when he celebrated the Orthodox Divine Liturgy with Pope Benedict XVI. The two met in the tiny Church of St. George in the equally tiny patriarchal compound in Istanbul, all that remains of an Eastern Christian civilization on the Bosporus so glistening and powerful that for more than 1,500 years Constantinople called itself the "new Rome."

Now Bartholomew has a forthcoming book, in English, "Encountering the Mystery: Perennial Values of the Orthodox Church" (Random House). It purports to be a primer to Orthodoxy, with short chapters on ritual, theology, icons and so forth. What it really is, perhaps inadvertently, is a telling glimpse into the mindset of a church that, venerable and spiritually appealing though it may be, is in a state of crisis. And the book reveals the jarringly secular-sounding ideological positions its leader seemingly feels compelled to take in order to cultivate the sympathy of a Western European political order that is at best indifferent to Christianity.

The Orthodox community, rooted mostly in Russia and Eastern Europe, is in "apparently irreversible demographic decline," as religious historian Philip Jenkins wrote in 2006, thanks to falling birthrates, cultural secularization, turf battles between the various ethnically focused Orthodox churches, and past communist ravages. The historic Christian communities in the Islamic-dominated world -- some Orthodox -- have fared even worse, their numbers reduced as members frantically immigrate to the West under pressure from terrorism, persecution and religious discrimination. The historic fate of Christianity in Islamic-majority lands has been cultural annihilation, whether gradual over the centuries or, as in recent decades, swift.

Nowhere does the plight of Christians look so pitiful as in Turkey, nominally secular but 99% Muslim. At the turn of the 20th century, some 500,000 Orthodox Christians, mostly ethnic Greeks, lived in Constantinople, where they constituted half the city's residents, and millions more resided elsewhere in what is now Turkey. Today, Bartholomew has only about 4,000 mostly elderly fellow believers (2,000 in Istanbul) left in Turkey's 71 million-plus population. The quasi-militaristic regime of Kemal Ataturk that supplanted the Ottoman Empire during the 1920s forcibly Westernized the country's institutions but also made Islam an essential component of the Turkish national identity that it relentlessly promoted.

"Kemalist ideology regarded Christianity as Greek and thus foreign," says Greek Orthodox writer Joshua Treviño. The result was a series of official and unofficial ethnic cleansings, population transfers, massacres and pogroms in Turkey, such as the wholesale destruction of Orthodox churches in 1955. The murders of a Catholic priest in 2006 and of an Armenian Christian journalist and three evangelicals, two of whom were Turkish converts, in 2007, together with threats and assaults against other Christian clergy by ultra-nationalists and Islamic militants, indicate that such anti-Christian animus is far from dead. Furthermore, the current government refuses to allow the reopening of Turkey's sole Greek Orthodox seminary, closed in 1971, which means that there have been no replacements for Turkey's aging Orthodox priests and -- since Turkish law requires the patriarch to be a Turkish citizen -- no likely replacement for Bartholomew himself, whose death may well mean the extinction of his 2,000-year-old see.

Nonetheless, Bartholomew devotes the bulk of his book to anything but the mortal threat to his own religion in his own country. High on his list of favorite topics, most with only a tangential relationship to Orthodoxy, is the environment. He has won the nickname "the Green Patriarch" for the decade or so he has preached the ecological gospel, largely to liberal secular audiences in the West. "Encountering the Mystery" is in large part a collection of eco-friendly platitudes about global warming ("At stake is not just our ability to live in a sustainable way but our very survival") and globalization, adorned with a bit of theological window-dressing, that today's secular progressives love to read.

Regarding globalization, Bartholomew cannot decide whether global capitalism is bad ("there are losers as well as winners") or good ("We must learn, therefore, both to think and to act in a global manner"). Plus, we must "transcend all racial competition and national rivalry," "promote a peaceful resolution of disagreements about how to live in this world," and yadda, yadda, yadda. Islam comes into play in the book only in terms of another bromide: a call for "interfaith dialogue."

On first reading, this exercise in fiddling while the new Rome burns seems pathetic, presenting a picture of a church leader so intimidated by his country's Islamic majority that he cannot speak up for his dwindling flock even as its members are murdered at his doorstep. Bartholomew's book presents an eerie mirror image of the concerns of aging, culturally exhausted, post-Christian Western Europe, happy to blather on at conferences about carbon emissions and diversity but unwilling to confront its own demographic crisis in the face of youthful, rapidly growing and culturally antagonistic Muslim populations. The suicide of the West meets the homicide of the East.

On the other hand, Bartholomew's "green" crusade across Western Europe may actually represent a shrewd last-ditch effort to secure a visible profile and powerful protectors for his beleaguered church. The patriarch has been an incessant lobbyist for Turkey's admission to the European Union, and his hope has been that the EU will condition Turkey's entry on greater religious freedoms for all faiths.

"The EU are secularists," says the Rev. Alexander Karloutsos, an administrator for the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, based in New York. "They won't do anything out of religious reasons, but they will do it out of secular reasons if they can be persuaded that what's best for Europe is to have a Muslim state that's pro-Western in values, such as freedom of religion." The bureaucrats of Brussels may care little about Christianity, but they care deeply about global warming and multiculturalism, and on those issues Bartholomew has carved out common ground.

Orthodox Christianity is not dead yet. Its famous monastery on Mount Athos in Greece has enjoyed new growth recently, and in America some Orthodox churches are drawing converts attracted by the glorious liturgy and ancient traditions. It is unfortunate that Orthodoxy's spiritual leader feels compelled to position the Orthodox with a Western Europe that is, in fact, spiritually dead.

Ms. Allen is the author of "The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus."

The 'Crunchy-Con' Orthodox convert from Catholicism seems to agree with Allen.

Whistling past the Orthodox graveyard

Gotta say I agree with Charlotte Allen's dismissal of the new book about Orthodoxy by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, which she reviews in today's Wall Street Journal. I read much of the book in galleys a couple of months ago, but didn't finish it. If you really want to learn about Orthodoxy, there are much better books for the lay reader (I'm currently reading an excellent one, "Light From the Christian East," by James Payton, a committed Reformed Christian college professor who writes a clear explanation, from a Western perspective, of how Orthodoxy differs subtly but profoundly from Western Christianity. I'm learning a great deal from this book, and can't recommend it highly enough.)

Anyway, I found the partriarch's book to be mostly dull pious bromides. That's no sin, I guess; lots of religious figures write boring, well-meaning books. But I kept wondering when he was going to talk about the challenge presented to Christians by Islam, which he can see as well as anybody, living as he does in a leading Islamic country. The patriarchate in Istanbul is on its last legs. The Turkish government has long persecuted, and continues to persecute, Orthodox Christians there. By Turkish law, the Patriarch has to be a Turkish citizen, which is to say, born in Turkey. But the Greek community there, owing to persecution, is vanishingly small, and Orthodox Christians in Turkey aren't allowed to train their own priests there. It's a horrible situation, one that I understood much more clearly from having been to Istanbul in the past year. I think it would be utterly disastrous to Europe to allow Turkey into the EU, because Turkish migration into Europe would be unstoppable -- and it would permanently Islamify the culture of Europe.

Yet the Patriarch has nothing to say about the Islamic challenge -- not the reality of the present moment, not with insight about how Orthodox Christianity, which has suffered for centuries under the yoke of Islam, managed to endure. Nothing. In my view, Charlotte gets this exactly right:

Nonetheless, Bartholomew devotes the bulk of his book to anything but the mortal threat to his own religion in his own country. High on his list of favorite topics, most with only a tangential relationship to Orthodoxy, is the environment. He has won the nickname "the Green Patriarch" for the decade or so he has preached the ecological gospel, largely to liberal secular audiences in the West. "Encountering the Mystery" is in large part a collection of eco-friendly platitudes about global warming ("At stake is not just our ability to live in a sustainable way but our very survival") and globalization, adorned with a bit of theological window-dressing, that today's secular progressives love to read.

Regarding globalization, Bartholomew cannot decide whether global capitalism is bad ("there are losers as well as winners") or good ("We must learn, therefore, both to think and to act in a global manner"). Plus, we must "transcend all racial competition and national rivalry," "promote a peaceful resolution of disagreements about how to live in this world," and yadda, yadda, yadda. Islam comes into play in the book only in terms of another bromide: a call for "interfaith dialogue."

On first reading, this exercise in fiddling while the new Rome burns seems pathetic, presenting a picture of a church leader so intimidated by his country's Islamic majority that he cannot speak up for his dwindling flock even as its members are murdered at his doorstep. Bartholomew's book presents an eerie mirror image of the concerns of aging, culturally exhausted, post-Christian Western Europe, happy to blather on at conferences about carbon emissions and diversity but unwilling to confront its own demographic crisis in the face of youthful, rapidly growing and culturally antagonistic Muslim populations. The suicide of the West meets the homicide of the East.

On the other hand, Bartholomew's "green" crusade across Western Europe may actually represent a shrewd last-ditch effort to secure a visible profile and powerful protectors for his beleaguered church. The patriarch has been an incessant lobbyist for Turkey's admission to the European Union, and his hope has been that the EU will condition Turkey's entry on greater religious freedoms for all faiths.

I told a Greek priest friend weeks ago that the Patriarch's book struck me as mostly a plea to make Europe wake up and come to his rescue by bringing Turkey into the EU -- which would be culturally suicidal for Europe. Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks so. If you want to encounter the mystery of Orthodoxy, by James Payton's book, or even better, try Kyriacos Markides' un-put-downable "The Mountain of Silence."

One last remark: I pity Patriarch Bartholomew, well and truly. He, and the community he pastors, are in desperate times. He could be the last in an unbroken line of patriarch of Constantinople, going back to the early days of Christianity. He is in a terrible position, and suffers things Christians, Orthodox and otherwise, living safely in the West can hardly imagine. Yet this is not the book one would have expected from a man in his tragic historical position. Or rather, this is not the spiritually heroic book one would have wanted from a man who could very well be the last patriarch left to turn off the lights in Christian Byzantium.