|
|
|
Published by Chiesa
Online, July 26, 2005
The
Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem Is Being
Replaced. How the Vatican Is Voting |
 |
 |
With Ireneos I
deposed, a successor is being elected. What this
event says about the Orthodox Churches as a
whole, and about relations between Rome and the
East. A commentary by Fr. David M. Jaeger
by Sandro Magister
ROMA, July 26, 2005
One of the items on Benedict XVI's list of
projects is a new equilibrium between papal
primacy and the college of bishops.
During the first millennium of Christianity,
when the Church of Rome and the Eastern Churches
were still united, the college of bishops played
a greater role than it has since. It still plays
such a role in the patriarchates of the East,
which are governed by a synodal system.
The opposite took place in the Roman Church.
There, papal primacy was greatly strengthened
during the second millennium. Benedict XVI
together with the cardinals who elected him is
convinced that the time has come to strike a
balance of powers and give greater recognition
to the role of the bishops.
A small first corrective measure has already
been introduced into the synod Rome is planning
for next October. The synod an institution
inaugurated by Paul VI after Vatican Council II,
periodically gathering around the pope
representatives of the Catholic bishops from all
over the world will remain a consultative
rather than a deliberative body, but the bishops
will be able to discuss their topic, the
Eucharist, using procedures much better adapted
to bringing out different points of view, which
the pope will have to consider.
Benedict XVI hopes that by reinforcing the
college of the bishops, he will heal the schism
that has divided the Church of Rome from the
Eastern Churches. He wants to bring the
respective systems of governance closer together
according to the best that each has produced
throughout its history.
There's likely to be a long and difficult road
ahead, because the breach that must be repaired
is very wide.
Glaring proof of how far away the two systems
are from each other can be seen in what is
happening in the Greek Orthodox patriarchate of
Jerusalem.
* * *
The Synod of the Greek Orthodox Church will meet
in Jerusalem on August 15 to elect a new
patriarch.
And up until this point there's nothing
different from what happens in the Roman Church,
where each new pope is elected by the college of
cardinals.
The difference is that, in Rome, the cardinals
cannot depose a pope, whereas in the East the
synod both can depose patriarchs and does so.
The Greek Orthodox synod which is preparing to
name its new patriarch in Jerusalem is the same
one that removed the former patriarch a few
months ago.
The deposed patriarch, Ireneos I (see photo),
has not accepted his removal. And he continues
to resist in his residence next to the Basilica
of the Holy Sepulchre, guarded by patrols of
armed Israeli soldiers.
The Israeli government, in fact, has not yet
recognized the dismissal of Ireneos from his
office, unlike Jordan and the Palestinian
Authority, which have approved it.
And this is another difference in comparison
with the Church of Rome. In the East, the
Orthodox patriarchs have ties with the
respective national governments that go back to
the "caesaro-papist" model typical of the
Byzantine Empire, which remained in force even
after the arrival of Muslim domination.
In the case of the Greek Orthodox patriarch of
Jerusalem, both his removal and his election
must be approved by Israel, the kingdom of
Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority.
Ireneos, for example, was elected patriarch on
August 13, 2001. But the Israeli government
which had previously vetoed his submission as a
candidate waited until March of 2004 to
recognize his nomination, after long and secret
negotiations.
And this fanned the flames of accusations that
Ireneos had gone over to serve Israeli
interests. Then, in March of 2005, when word got
out that he had sold to the Jews a complex of
buildings in the Old City belonging to the
patriarchate, revolt broke out against him and
led to his removal, which the synod approved on
May 7, 2005, with 13 out of 17 votes in favor.
* * *
The strife within the Greek Orthodox
patriarchate of Jerusalem is bound up with its
ethnic composition.
About 65,000 faithful belong to the
patriarchate. Of these, a little over 200 are
Greek, while the rest are Arab.
But the Greeks hold all the roles of power. The
18 bishops who are members of the synod, and who
are named by the patriarch, are all Greek. Of
the members of the Fraternity of the Holy
Sepulchre, responsible for electing the
patriarch, 90 are Greek and 4 are Arab.
Furthermore, the Greek Orthodox patriarchate of
Jerusalem is one of the major landowners in the
Holy Land. It owns much of the Old City. Beyond
the walls it owns, for example, the land on
which stands the building of the Knesset, the
Israeli parliament.
The sale which was attributed to Ireneos but
which he denied concerns the area that
contains two of the historic city center's
hotels, the Imperial and the Petra, which are
frequented by prominent Palestinians, and other
buildings close to the Jaffa Gate.
* * *
But it would be wrong to reduce what is
happening at the Greek Orthodox patriarchate of
Jerusalem to an internal affair. Its
significance extends to all of the Eastern
Churches.
The proof of this can be found in the decisively
unusual fact that in order to decide upon the
removal of Ireneos, which the patriarchate of
Jerusalem voted on May 7, a meeting was held in
Istanbul two weeks later, on May 23, to which
Bartholomew I, the ecumenical patriarch of
Constantinople, had invited 42 representatives
from 14 Orthodox Churches, including the
patriarchates of Antioch, Alexandria, Moscow,
Greece, Cyprus, Serbia, and Poland. Ireneos also
attended this inter-Orthodox synod, which ended
with the approval of the decision made by the
synod of Jerusalem. Since then, none of the
Orthodox Churches recognizes Ireneos as
patriarch anymore, and his name is no longer
mentioned in the liturgies. It is foreseen that
the Greek ιlite's domination over the
patriarchate of Jerusalem will be reduced in
favor of the Arab contingent.
And the Catholic Church? Here follows a
reconstruction of and commentary on these events
by an authoritative representative of the Church
of Rome.
The author of the essay is Fr. David Maria
Jaeger, an Israeli citizen who is Jewish by
birth but converted to Catholicism as an adult
and became a Franciscan. He is a specialist in
canon law, and for many years has been an
official negotiator for the Holy See with the
government of Israel.
His commentary appeared on June 2, 2005, on the
international online agency "Asia News," which
is directed by Fr. Bernardo Cervellera of the
Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions:
The Fall of Ireneos I: Israel Acts as the
Ottoman Empire
by David M. Jaeger
In a rather inconceivable move, the government
of Israel has sent armed police into the Greek
Orthodox monastery in the Old City of Jerusalem
to keep ex-patriarch Ireneos in possession of
the patriarch's apartments, against the will of
the patriarchate's synod, which, by a very large
majority, has deposed Ireneos, against the will
of practically all the priests and people of the
patriarchate, and indeed against the will of the
heads of all the Orthodox Churches throughout
the world.
It seems impossible that, in the twenty-first
century, a state, any democratic state can still
seriously claim to decide who will be, or will
not be, the bishop at the head of a Christian
community. It is certainly a complete
contradiction of Israel's own fundamental
charter, the Declaration of Independence, which
promises complete religious freedom to all.
BYZANTINES AND OTTOMANS
History and politics help to explain this
bizarre situation, although they most certainly
cannot excuse it.
As is well known, in the Eastern or "Byzantine"
Empire, the affairs of Church and state were
very closely entwined, and the emperor assumed
and exercised a kind of overlordship over the
Church as well, in a style that western critics
sometime call "caesaro-papism".
While there might have been some sense to it as
long as the emperor was himself a Christian,
sometimes a very devout Christian indeed, it
became grotesque after the conquest of
Constantinople in 1453 by the Ottoman Turks,
when the new Muslim rulers sought to exercise
over the Church, especially Church appointments,
control equal to or even greater than that
exercised earlier by the Christian emperor.
This unnatural situation reached Jerusalem and
the Holy Land when the Ottomans conquered it too
in the first half of the sixteenth century. At
that time the ancient Eastern-rite patriarchate
of Jerusalem was still arguably, in principle,
in communion with Rome, in virtue of the union
Council of Florence (1439).
Just as they had done in Constantinople, the
Ottomans' first order of business was to ensure
that the most implacable opponents of the union
with Rome were put in charge of the
patriarchate.
They therefore brought over anti-union monks
from Greece to fill all the positions of
governance at the patriarchate, and completely
supplant the indigenous Church. These Greek
monks organised themselves into a corporation,
the Hagiotaphitic (i.e. of the Holy Sepulchre)
Brotherhood, which took over, and still holds,
complete control over all the offices, and
more importantly the properties of the
patriarchate.
In keeping with the principles of
caesaro-papism, the appointment of the patriarch
remained always dependent on the will of the
government, and, as a legal body, the
patriarchate itself could conceivably be
described as a creature of Ottoman law.
JORDAN AND ISRAEL
Between 1948 and 1967, the seat of the
patriarchate, in the Old City of Jerusalem, was
controlled by Jordan, and Jordan enacted a new
statute for the patriarchate, claiming for
itself the powers earlier inherent in the
Ottoman government. Israel, which has controlled
the Old City since June 1967, has never formally
done that, and there is no law made in Israel to
control the Greek Orthodox patriarchate.
However, some influential elements in the
Israeli establishment claim that Israel too is
the inheritor of the Ottoman powers, and have
not balked at using even action by armed police
to make the point that the state alone has the
decisive word as to who is, or is not, the
patriarch.
I myself think that if recourse were made to
Israel's High Court of Justice, based on the
religious liberty components of the
international law of human rights, and based on
Israel's own declared values, the High Court
would find it very difficult to uphold the armed
incursion of the police into the Greek Orthodox
monastery in order to impose on the Greek
Orthodox Church a patriarch no one there wants,
and who has already been resoundingly deposed.
GREEKS AND INDIGENOUS
The deposition and "posthumous" struggle of
Ireneos are, however, only the latest chapter in
the long saga of the struggles within the Greek
Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem. The root
problem is, of course, the monopoly of power and
property still held by the ethnically Greek
Hagiotaphitic Brotherhood, dispossessing the
Arab faithful and the Arab lower clergy.
One serious manifestation of this has been that
the Greek Patriarchs, long before Ireneos, got
into the habit of selling off the Church's real
estate with no transparency about the uses and
destination of the money received. The Arab
faithful have repeatedly gone to the Israeli
courts, in an attempt to establish that the
Patriarchs and bishops control Church property
as trustees, that they cannot treat the Church's
property as if there were no difference between
it and their personal property.
However, the courts have so far rejected any
claim by the community to have a say, or a
stake, in the disposition of the Church's
property. When it was reported in the media that
Ireneos, who had promised to put an end to the
irresponsible alienation of Church property, had
in fact sold off some of the most prominent and
strategically important properties, at the very
entrance into the Walled City of Jerusalem, it
was no longer the Arab faithful and lower clergy
alone who were enraged.
Now the Greek prelates themselves concluded that
a red line had been crossed, and they have moved
quickly and decisively. They probably feared
that, if they failed to act even in the face of
such unprecedented conduct, their entire power
structure was endangered. After all, in Syria,
in the patriarchate of Antioch, already in 1899
the Arab faithful and clergy rose up and took
over power from the Greeks, restoring the
patriarchate to the indigenous Christian people.
THE CATHOLICS
Catholics are not directly involved in this
drama. However, Catholics are certainly not
sorry to see Ireneos deposed.
Since his election, he led a policy of
hostility, aggression and even violence against
the Catholic Church, culminating in the assault
on the Catholics at the Holy Sepulchre, which he
personally led on 27 September last year. On
that occasion too Ireneos led his monks in a
violent assault on the Jerusalem police who were
trying to restrain them, and several policemen
needed medical attention. It is therefore ironic
that the police have now let themselves become
instruments in an Ottoman-style attempt to
restore Ireneos to office by force of arms!
One can only guess that the police are not happy
with the orders they have received from the
politicians, and it is impossible even to guess
at the motives of the politicians for giving
these orders, or how they could think to
reconcile this armed intervention in the most
intimate decisions of a Christian community with
Israel's self-understanding as a "Jewish and
democratic state."
|
