In the Shoes of The Fisherman
Until the last minute the Orthodox world did not believe that this could happen: the Vicar of Christ visiting Athens, the Areopagus, received by the episcopate of the Greek Orthodox Church. Even now, with all those generations of Orthodox and Catholic believers being inveterately at odds long gone, there is a surfeit of those determined to keep what they consider the sacred fire of enmity burning forever.
Orthodox and Catholic hierarchs sitting in the beautiful ancient audience of the Archbishop of Athens and All Greece, with the highest priests, Archbishop Christodoulos and Pope John Paul II in the center. It is as though we were back in the first millennium when Latin Rome and Greek Constantinople were building the Ecumenical Church together. Television made it possible for us to witness the lofty and touching ceremony with the guest from Rome apologizing for the historical guilt of his Church. One could visualize behind the Pope humbly asking forgiveness from over a billion adherents (the Greek Orthodox community at large is many times smaller). Afterward, the Pope and the Archbishop visited the Hill of Ares [another name of the Areopagus] and the sacred land in which the fundamentals of democracy had been formed and where St. Paul had preached.
Catholic historical wrongs were used in certain Greek quarters as an excuse to stage actions of protest against the Pope’s visit. The list of these sins includes the seizure of Constantinople in 1204 by the Fourth Crusade. The story is horrible indeed. The city was the largest and richest in Christendom at the time (the population numbered over a million, compared to slightly more than 10,000 in Paris). It was forced and ruthlessly plundered by the Crusaders. Masterpieces of art, part of the loot, still embellish Western cities and museums (e.g., four large bronze horses standing guard over the central portal of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice).
It should also be remembered, however, that the Christian countries, confession notwithstanding, had been constantly at war with each other for almost 2,000 years. In 1043, after the baptism of Kyiv Rus’ by Byzantine missionaries, Prince Yaroslav the Wise’s troops launched a campaign against Constantinople (although they never seized the city). During World War II, Christians — among them Orthodox adherents — fought on both sides, including the Third Reich (the village I lived in during the war was occupied and looted by Orthodox Romanian soldiers). How, then, should we treat our former enemies? The Germans or even the French (after the 1812 invasion of Russia)? Do we have to regard them as our enemies until the Last Judgment?
Holding events dating from 1204 as a serious factor in today’s church policy defies common sense. Yet certain fundamentalist (or extremist) Orthodox circles obviously abide by the principle that if you have hatred, you can always find an historical excuse to vent it. And they brainwash their flock accordingly, banking on such adverse instincts as xenophobia, nationalism, and confessional narrow-mindedness. This is true of Greece and unfortunately also of Ukraine. In both cases there is matching rejection of things not Orthodox, a matching desire to lock oneself in one’s confessional ghetto and throw away the key (without doubt, this attitude serves to constantly reduce the Orthodox share in the Christian world). These people respond to John Paul II’s praiseworthy attempt to lay a bridge, however fragile, across the glaring confessional abyss with stubborn resistance, even contempt. These Orthodox zealots have a faultless (sic) history, so they are unable to appreciate the Roman Pontiff’s effort to reconsider the history of his Church, let alone his asking forgiveness for its misdeeds. What other way is there to bring about reconciliation except sincere repentance and forgiveness, in religious as well as secular life?
And the religious fanatics prove incredibly resourceful. Imagine the taboo they imposed on the Roman Pope, forbidding him to kiss the Greek land. An anecdote that will go down in church history. How different today’s Greeks are from their Hellenic forefathers that erected an altar to a Christian deity no one knew on a city square and then listened benignly to St. Paul, even if disagreeing with his tenets!
Hard as all of the Orthodox fundamentalists try, they are unable to change reality. The Roman Pope did visit the heart of Orthodoxy and was welcomed by the Greek hierarchs. Slowly, with difficulty, the relationships between the two churches will evolve. Setbacks may well occur, but nothing will efface or take the bark off the precedent.
