Historian, Founder of the Community of Sant’Egidio
I am happy to speak at this Conference dedicated to His Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew and his long service as Archbishop of Constantinople, as Primus Inter pares among the Orthodox primates and as a spiritual leader. I am doing this not only out of friendship but for a historian like me it is a duty to go over the history of these years: I am very sorry not to be present today in Thessaloniki, as I would have been at the previously scheduled appointment that was later moved.
The Patriarch was enthroned on November 2, ’91, a turning point in the world: the wall had fallen two years before, the Soviet Union had crumbled, the Warsaw Pact had dissolved, apartheid in South Africa had ended, the First Gulf War had been fought. We were at the dawn of globalization, in that year the first cell phone call on the Finnish network actually was done.
Bartholomew was born as Patriarch along with globalization, he is the Patriarch of globalization. On that November 2, the young Patriarch had behind him a long and difficult transition in the great Church of Christ in the 1900s, so difficult that some had doubted the survival of the Patriarchate at least in Turkey. The twentieth century marks the end of fruitful and difficult centuries of coexistence with Ottoman Islam that Runciman called The Grey Church in captivity, a history that should be re-evaluated, or the times of Bisans après Bizans, the Byzantine civilization of which Iorg writes before being assassinated, let us keep in mind, by a Romanian Iron Guard nationalist.
The twentieth century is a time of challenges for the church in Constantinople: the birth of the Republic, the emergence of international states, the development of autocephalous churches. Considered the Church of the Greeks in Turkey, the Patriarchate was being flattened and its ecumenical dimension worn down. One must also recall the isolation of those years, while the Orthodox world is disrupted and the Russian Church almost annihilated, and any transition from one Patriarch to another was always a complicated operation, yet without ecumenicality the Patriarchate is not the same: there remains a secret in its openness to the world from the Shores of the Bosporus.
Sometimes Western authors speak of the Orthodox Church as immobile out of history, instead that of Constantinople shows a movement in the world even if, Bartholomew points out, it is not of this world. Metropolitan Melitone, Bartholomew’s teacher, recalled: the church is not just a historical fact, an institution established by God but static, it is not an animated rule of faith: it is more, it is the dynamism of history. The church is life.
From the end of the nineteenth century, the Patriarchate suffers from nationalisms and the local Council of Constantinople in 1872 has prophetic words, while conspicuous parts of Orthodoxy become nationalized: it is precisely in the clash of nationalisms that the Patriarchate develops an inter-Orthodox and inter-Christian ecumenical vocation, in the sense of openness to the world. We all know how in January 1920 the Patriarchate published an encyclical addressed to all Christian churches in which it spoke of a common spiritual front; it was the first of the appeals in this sense, and Patriarch Athenagoras made that document the heart of so many of his initiatives. In fact, in the 24 years of Athenagoras’ rule since ’48, there grows an ecumenical breath that we Catholics could see in the meeting between Patriarch Athenagoras and Paul the Sixth in Jerusalem in ’64; but also the figure of Athenagoras grew in his ecumenicity, precisely in the clash of nationalisms, in the cohabitation between different ethnic groups in the Balkans and the United States but also in the collision of nationalisms. Athenagoras at the end of his life understood that the world was unifying. I mean he had almost foreshadowed globalization, and in such a world one had to fill the spiritual voids and not raise walls around own parish. This is the challenge that Patriarch Bartholomew takes up in his ministry, the future was not assured for the Patriarchate in the early 1970s, and the young Bartholomew in ’72 had a conversation with Patriarch Athenagoras who said to him: we have come to a point and we have stopped. We must move forward: he still sensed that the steps forward would be taken by that 32-year-old archimandrite.
The ninth election to the ecumenical throne of Metropolitan Melitone could have been a negative sign. However, with the election of Patriarch Dimitrios the great Church of Christ was walking in the open furrow because here the young Bartholomew, with his proactive character, who had collaborated on the tomos agapis, leading the Patriarchal office since 1973, later becoming the Metropolitan of Chalcedon, was increasingly active. Of the 35-year-old Bartholomew, Olivier Clément writes in his diary, I found it in Clement’s diary: Bartholomew is a true young man totally dedicated, he is the one who accomplishes many things successfully. He is a pure heart and gives thanks for everything. It seemed to him that Bartholomew guaranteed the legacy of Athenagoras that Clément summarized thus: “From a tragic history springs primacy as selfless diakonia, as presiding in love”.
I would like, albeit quickly, to dwell on one theme: strength and weakness. The election of Patriarch Bartholomew was charged with a profound sense of resurrection. I was present at the enthronement in St. George’s Church with my friends Monsignor Paglia and Monsignor Marco Gnavi, and there was a joy of liberation from the fear of the future; after the liturgy the people, priests, and delegations swarmed through the Phanar district and beyond in an Easter spirit. The little more than 50-year-old Patriarch was a figure on whom so many hopes were pinned; he himself knew that he was called to a difficult task. After a very heavy century, that task required faith, patience, shrewdness to work in tight spaces and in the face of great challenges.
But back to that enthronement: the words of the newly elected at St. George’s were not formal. They struck me with the agonic sense – I use this word in the Greek sense. Bartholomew was saying that to perpetuate the light of the Resurrection, the great Church of Christ had to walk to the Golgotha and take up the cross. He himself two years later explained how his task was to make the flame burn: he said that in that flickering flame is the promise of redemption, as long as the candle burns, it is possible for the flame to transcend the boundaries of the Patriarchal Church of St. George and cast its light over the whole ecumene. This redemptive light is held in the hands of the Patriarch in thirty years: truly it has transcended the boundaries of St. George’s Church and spiritually brought so many worlds closer together.
I remember that 1991: the Patriarch seemed small in the face of threats; poor in strength, but he took on the fragility of faith, the fragility of the church, with faith and great dignity. The secret of the Patriarchate’s spiritual radiance is encapsulated in the words of the Apostle Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians, “When I am weak it is then that I am strong.” The Patriarch confirms this: “The fruits we have gathered are the product of our weakness and not of our strength, we need to recognize the evangelical secret that begins with the assumption of frailty, that stems from the ascent to Golgotha, but looks to the resurrection.” Thirty years, not seeking a statute of power. Says Bartholomew: the Ecumenical Patriarchate does not want to become a state, it wants to remain a church, a spiritual institution that teaches and edifies and shares philanthropic ideals by preaching love everywhere: the Vatican State is not in Orthodox ecclesiology. The Patriarch, a Turkish military man for two years, said he is a citizen among Turks. The Ecumenical Patriarchate, he says, will remain a spiritual institution, an unarmed force, strength and weakness. Strength born of weakness.
I was struck by the Patriarch in Strasbourg at the European Parliament when he said, “Please welcome our presence as just a reminder, we want to remind you that we exist and that we struggle to foster understanding and nurture hope throughout the world. His Holiness is convinced that the global world needs the light of the Christian East, a light that has remained on the margins of the contemporary cultural synthesis.
He says: Orthodoxy has much more to offer to the contemporary world, to offer to contemporaries, but not to impose on contemporaries but not to hide either. It offers from the sanctuary because from the sanctuary as with Easter, the light comes out. Here is the Patriarch’s tireless ministry, a geography of mission and dialogue: meetings with all kinds of people, visits to so many countries that had never seen an Orthodox leader. We owe it to Patriarch Bartholomew that the Orthodox Church exists in the global world, and the global world in the last in the last thirty years has been able in its synthesis, in its frailties as well as in its strengths to enjoy the great tradition of the Church of the East.
I would like to conclude by saying that the Patriarch points out an ideal to the Orthodox Churches, to Christians, to the whole world, an ideal of Civilization that is not just a religious or confessional ideal. Patriarch Bartholomew defends the expression Ecumenical Patriarchate and there is, for this, an interpretive key: the term ecumenical, Dimitrios explained, is not a name, it is a vision: we work to renew the harmony between heaven and earth. The ecumenical style is the asceticism of the encounter with all that is practiced by Bartholomew. The ecumenicality becomes more profound, embracing peoples and the earth itself, with a lively and prescient commitment to ecology that has earned him the name Green Patriarch, so far ahead of the Catholic Church that Pope Francis cites him in the encyclical Laudato si’.
Monsignor Gnavi writes, “Bartholomew’s language is anchored in the roots of Orthodoxy and is comprehensible to contemporary people,” he writes this in a valuable book on the Patriarch’s ecology. Bartholomew is the Patriarch of the earth and of the global world, a global world called to become ecumenical, the home where we all live, not a place where a few rule and too many are at war. Since 1993 he had been grappling with Huntington’s thesis on the clash of civilizations and religion. The rejection of this thesis stemmed from the very location of the Ecumenical Patriarchate living with others, especially Muslims, practicing the art of dialogue and not confrontation because so many times being a majority makes one arrogant. It is the great temptation of the regime of Christendom, the sense of being all-powerful makes one arrogant. The Patriarch says, “We live at the crossroads, we are living proof that different faiths and cultures can live peacefully.” This is why Bartholomew, a world traveler, likes to return to his Constantinople, never considering the Patriarchate outside the city. It is not just the number of faithful that matters, but living in the “Cosmos-Polis” that today’s globalization makes a carrefour between peoples again: Europe, Asia, the Middle East, between Slavic world Christianity and Islam. It seems that Athenagoras was saying that the faithful in Constantinople are few in number but countless: nice expression. I would like to say that countless are the disciples of Patriarch Bartholomew all over the world, in this ecumenical sense: he has a flock of faithful in the world, but around him a koinonia of friends and spiritual children without borders.
The Christianity of the great church is in the Crossroads, and like the Byzantine Virgin odigitria so prevalent in southern Italy, without imposing herself she shows the child in her arms and points the way.
The Patriarch in these 30 years has shown the path of conversion from idolatry of the self to God with respect for others and for the environment. I would like to say: he did it with zeal because the Patriarch lived with zeal but he was never a zealot.
Before concluding I would like to make two brief remarks: one about Italy, which the Patriarch loves and visited in a profound way. A fact happened here: this figure of an Orthodox Patriarch was received by Catholics as a spiritual leader, not an outsider and not external, with a direct contact and magisterium with the faithful, and this is a very special construction peculiar to the Patriarch, because the Italians love him and consider him one of them.
The other aspect I would like to emphasize is the relationship with the poor. I think of the visit to Lesbos with Pope Francis and Archbishop Ieronimo’s, where the Patriarch wrote a page of ecumenism starting with the poor, to the last visit to Poland to the Ukrainian refugees, where he showed that he is close to the discarded to use a word dear to Pope Francis.
Bartholomew, Patriarch of many Orthodox migrants, knows what it means to migrate and has defended migrants by saying that no one leaves home unless driven by tremendous need and that welcoming refugees is a necessity. He has been the Patriarch of Italians, but above all he has been the Patriarch of migrants, refugees and the poor to whom he has offered his smile, his closeness and has deeply understood the reasons of those who leave their homes.
I take this opportunity to express to His Holiness the gratitude of the Community of Sant’Egidio, which he has known for more than thirty years, for the solid friendship and contribution of guidance and support in the broader ecumenical effort. We remember the Patriarch in our Roman basilica where the body of St. Bartholomew is kept together with the memory of the New Martyrs. I have much insisted on the fragility, the strength that comes of fragility, but this is not fragility of faith or tradition. It is rather the fragility of the coffers in which the great riches of Christ’s Church are kept. The Patriarchate has demonstrated the need to accept the Eastern vision of the civilization of living together, of ecumenical civilization, against all nationalist reduction and against all nationalism. I want to say that His Holiness embodies true spiritual leadership worldwide: pastor, teacher, father even outside the Orthodox churches. The Patriarch once said, “There is a great need for spiritual leaders to take care of the world ,we must have a place in the world scene today that crimes are being perpetrated in the name of faith.” Yes, the global world needs spiritual leaders and Bartholomew teaches the younger generation that it is not enough to be locked in the sanctuary or in the sacristy, we need to be spiritual leaders of believers and non-believers alike. The Patriarch once said: our age needs prophets. And the Patriarch did not remain shrouded in the dignity of his office but went out into the streets like a prophet. Indeed as the prophet Isaiah says, he made the throne of Constantinople — the prophet says — a throne founded on meekness.
Today then I would like to personally thank the Patriarch for his great contribution and really objectively I would like to say that His Holiness Bartholomew is a witness to a world as a common home on an earth that belongs to all people.
Thank you Your Holiness and ad multos annos
