Religion: Wise Men from the East

Ponderous and stiff with the incrustation of centuries of bickering and privilege is the Eastern Orthodox Communion—an assortment of 15 national churches headed by patriarchs and loosely bound by a common tradition of liturgy, sacerdotalism, and suspicion of Rome. Last week, on the sun-drenched Greek island of Rhodes, representatives of 12 of the 15 main churches gathered for a Pan-Orthodox Conference.

They had been called together by Athenagoras, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, who (by a tradition that dates back to the schism of Christendom between Rome and Constantinople in 1054) is the “first among equals” in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Modernminded Athenagoras, aware that Orthodoxy must begin to shuck its ancient animosities if it is to carry any weight in the world, had been working for a decade to organize the conference, and perhaps its most important achievement is that it was finally held.

Absent Eminences. Its immediate purpose was to prepare an agenda for another meeting, which would in turn prepare an agenda for a full-dress synod—the first in more than ten centuries. At this synod, the patriarchs themselves will make canon law on such matters as litur gical revisions, calendar reform, theological minutiae, and relations between the churches. Thus the patriarchs themselves stayed away from Rhodes; the conference was presided over by venerable Chrysostom, 81, Metropolitan of Neapolis, Thasos and Philippi, and was actually run by an Athenagoras protégé—slim, black-bearded and also named Chrysostom, the Metropolitan of Myron—who served as the meeting’s executive secretary. With true Orthodox grandiloquence, he said in his sermon at the opening Mass: “If I could characterize the Pan-Orthodox Conference in one word, I should not hesitate to say that it is a conference for the projection of Orthodoxy on a scale which is Pan-Orthodox, Pan-Christian and worldwide.”

Besides Athenagoras, two other absent eminences dominated the deliberations. One was Pope John XXIII, whose nine years’ residence in Istanbul as apostolic delegate has made him exceptionally knowledgeable about Eastern Orthodoxy and sympathetic to it. The other was Moscow’s Patriarch Alexei, represented by Archbishop Nikodemus, 32, the youngest bishop in the Russian Church.

Present Strictures. Alexei’s church claims about 95 million of Pan-Orthodoxy’s 130 million, and it is entering world Christian affairs for the first time since the Russian Revolution. The application of Russian Orthodoxy for membership in the World Council of Churches will almost certainly be accepted at the council’s third General Assembly in New Delhi in November. In a speech that attacked the Vatican, called for disarmament and denounced colonialism, suety, brown-bearded Nikodemus spouted Khrushchev’s line.

Roman Catholic and Protestant observers regretted Nikodemus’ anti-Vatican strictures, but they were inclined to forgive him on the ground that his church is hard pressed by the Communist government at home. Said a representative of the World Council: “We mustn’t make things too difficult for Christians inside Russia. It’s better having the Russians at New Delhi, no matter what they say, than bottled up inside the Soviet Union.”