NEWS ANALSYIS: Christian Orthodox leader Bartholomew spurs dialogue with Muslims, Jews

c. 1997 Religion News Service WASHINGTON _ Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew’s current visit to the United States has brought him from the Old to the New World. But the distance he’s covered is more than geography. In the first week of his month-long U.S. tour, Bartholomew has spurred advances in relations between his Greek Orthodox Church […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew’s current visit to the United States has brought him from the Old to the New World. But the distance he’s covered is more than geography.

In the first week of his month-long U.S. tour, Bartholomew has spurred advances in relations between his Greek Orthodox Church and Jews and Muslims that are far more difficult to come by in the Old World _ where Orthodox Christians have long lived side-by-side with the other two faiths, but often amid great tension and bloody conflict.”These things are easier to do here, in the United States, where religion and state are distinct,”said the Rev. George Dion Dragas, ecumenical officer of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.”Elsewhere, particularly where one of us is a minority with a deep grudge against the majority, these opportunities do not exist to the same degree.” The steps taken here _ the full significance of which is as yet difficult to gauge _ stand in stark contrast to Bartholomew’s approach this week to Orthodox-Roman Catholic relations.


In a speech at the Jesuit Georgetown University, Bartholomew stressed the differences between Christendom’s two largest bodies more than he did areas of possible reconciliation.

His outreach to Jews and Muslims was far more direct.

Monday (Oct. 20), Bartholomew visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, spending 90-minutes viewing exhibits portraying the mixed record of Orthodox Christian nations during the Nazi campaign to eradicate European Jewry.

Afterward, he became the first ecumenical patriarch _ a position of great symbolic importance for all Orthodox Christians _ to publicly denounce the Holocaust, calling it”the singular icon of our century’s evils.” Rabbi Leon Klenicki, interfaith director of the Anti-Defamation League termed the comment”a beautiful expression, given the importance of icons to Orthodoxy. It’s a term very clear to his people. This is very, very important.” Bartholomew also called Israel the”guarantor of the Jewish people’s existence,”a statement carrying political risks for him, given the generally harsh view of Israeli policies held by the 120,000 Greek Orthodox Arabs living in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

Last year, when Bartholomew visited Israel and even made a stop at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, he said nothing publicly about the Holocaust or Israel’s importance to Jewish survival. Removed from the Middle East, Bartholomew was free to give impetus to a nascent effort by the American Greek church and the ADL to write a joint interfaith statement.

Bartholomew’s overture to the Jewish community could go a long way toward healing the ever-festering wound of the Holocaust among American Jews, even if the patriarch has limited political influence over the Ukrainian, Russian and other Orthodox churches whose members, Jews say, often willinging cooperated with the Nazis in killing Jews.

Globally, however, the 57-year-old patriarch’s outreach to Muslims could have far greater significance.

Tuesday (Oct. 21), Bartholomew delivered brief remarks at the conclusion of the first official Muslim-Orthodox dialogue ever held in the United States, an event organized to take advantage of the goodwill generated by his visit.”May the seeds you plant today bear fruit and continue to nourish all the children of Abraham,”Bartholomew said.

Some 40 scholars and clergy from both faiths assembled at Georgetown for the more than two-hour dialogue held in advance of the patriarch’s talk on Orthodox-Catholic relations. The closed-door session was intended to break the ice and, said several participants, was most noteworthy simply in that it took place.


Most of the world’s more than 250-million Orthodox Christians _ members of more than a dozen autonomous ethnic or national churches among whose leaders Bartholomew is considered the”first among equals”_ live in close proximity to the Muslim world, and serious problems between members of the two faiths exist in Bosnia, Cyprus and areas of the former Soviet Union.

Bartholomew’s own situation is at the core of the struggle for territory and influence that Orthodoxy and Islam have waged for some 1,400 years. His patriarchate is headquartered in Istanbul _ the former Constantinople, and once the center of Eastern Christianity _ in Muslim Turkey, and interreligious and political tensions are a constant.

Despite the ongoing conflicts, Orthodoxy is situated to be”the natural bridge between the Muslim east and the Christian west, and a prime player in heading off conflict between the two,”said John Voll of Georgetown’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, which hosted the dialogue.

Moreover, said Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University, Orthodoxy’s innate conservativeness _ its desire to remain firmly rooted in its traditions and beliefs _ make it the branch of Christianity”most like Islam.” Still, dialogue between Orthodox Christians and Muslims has been relatively slim, Nasr added, and he welcomed Bartholomew’s call for reconciliation.

In the United States, past attempts have been largely restricted to academic conferences and limited to an exchange of papers and small, informal gatherings. Internationally, intermittent meetings have been held in Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Switzerland and elsewhere.

The meetings, Nasr said,”all struggle with dealing with the past. Getting past the past is always the problem.” But Mahmoud Ayoub, a Temple University Islamic scholar, said that just as”an absence of direct links to past conflict”facilitates Orthodox-Jewish relations in the United States, so can it help Muslims and Orthodox Christians move beyond”nodding about the past to earnest dialogue.””We may be able to do something here,”he said.”That’s why the patriarch’s personal appearance here is important. Perhaps we’ll have a breakthrough _ Allah willing.”


END RIFKIN

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