GREEK officials and church leaders have pledged “full support” for the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew of Constantinople, after he was accused by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service of allying himself with British spies and “tearing apart the Church”.
“As a state and as individuals, we are all self-evidently standing alongside Patriarch Bartholomew,” the Deputy Minister to the Prime Minister of Greece, Pavlos Marinakis, told a press conference.
“He is a person who, beyond the credentials demonstrated as the leader of our Church, has taught faith and humanitarian values. It is a sacred duty of all Orthodox Christians to stand by him.”
The minister was reacting to last week’s statement by Moscow’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, which branded the Ecumenical Patriarch as a “devil incarnate” and accused him of widening “schismatic activities” across the Orthodox world.
The diatribe was ridiculed by a senior Ecumenical Patriarchate representative, who said that it highlighted the Russian Orthodox Church’s “complete identification” with the State and its “transformation into a political propaganda weapon”.
“When theological discourse degenerates and the gospel itself becomes an instrument of state enforcement and political expediency, then, alas, only insult remains,” Metropolitan Emmanuel (Adamakis) told the Greek daily Kathimerini on Monday.
“We find ourselves facing a new environment and entering uncharted waters — less because anything has substantively changed and more because barbarity is tending to become the norm in inter-Church relations.”
The Russian government and Church have long contested Patriarch Bartholomew’s traditional primacy among the world’s 200 million Orthodox Christians, and have urged Churches to sever ties since his recognition, in January 2019, of an independent Orthodox Church for Ukraine.
Welcoming a Ukrainian Church delegation on 5 January, the Patriarch said that his decision to grant autocephaly, or independence, to the OCU remained “firm and unchangeable” when “a future peace for Ukraine” was being decided.
In its statement, however, the Russian SVR said that the Patriarch was “mired in the mortal sin of schism” and had now “set his dark eye on the Baltic states” at the instigation of British Intelligence, “relying on ideological allies in the form of local nationalists and neo-Nazis”.
“Church circles note that Bartholomew is literally tearing apart the living Body of the Church — he resembles the false prophets mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount,” the Russian agency said.
“The Constantinople Antichrist’s aggressive ambitions are not limited to Ukraine and the Baltics. His treachery is gradually spreading to the lands of Eastern Europe.”
In a brief response, the Ecumenical Patriarchate expressed “deepest sorrow” that the latest attack had come from Russia’s “state services”, and said: “The Mother Church has avoided commenting on countless similar attacks from ecclesiastical or political centres and figures in Russia. Imaginative scenarios, fake news, insults, and fabricated information from all kinds of propagandists do not discourage the Ecumenical Patriarchate from continuing its ministry and ecumenical mission.”