Power Plays by Patriarchs Widen Rift Between Orthodox Churches

Such a spectacle had never been seen in the Deck 9 coffee bar aboard the Greek luxury ferry Eleftherios Venizelos.

Sipping coffee at separate tables were the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, the president of Moldova, and the vice president of Ukraine, each surrounded by a flock of bishops, retainers, and bodyguards in mixes appropriate to their positions.

Receiving them in turn in an adjoining conference room was their host, His All Holiness the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual leader of some 250 million Orthodox Christians.

It was the latest round in a series of genuinely Byzantine political struggles over the future of the Orthodox Christian world, the majority of which only recently emerged from years of Communist dictatorship.

At stake is both the unity of the Orthodox Church and the relations among its adherents in newly independent nation-states spread across the rubble of the old Soviet empire.

The struggle pits the financially weak Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew - the titular head of the Orthodox Church who lives under difficult circumstances in Istanbul - against the seemingly all-powerful Alexi II, patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, which also controls Ukraine, Moldova, and a sizable share of the Orthodox diaspora in the US and around the world.

As Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholmew is the leader of the Eastern (or Greek) Orthodox Church, which separated from the Western (or Roman Catholic) Church in 1054 after centuries of disputes over the papacy and other matters. The pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated one another during the schism, but the acts were mutually abolished in 1965.

"It is a blessing that these nations are free and sovereign again, but it also means that there are some growing pains in the pan-Orthodox world," a source within the Ecumenical Patriarchate says. "Russia is trying to reassert its authority. It was very strong before, but now it's even stronger. From time to time we have to point out to them in a motherly way that they are getting too big for their britches."

Alexi does have big ambitions. The Russian Orthodox Church is the largest by far of Orthodoxy's "autocephalous," or self-governing, churches. Since the Soviet Union's collapse, Russians and Ukrainians have been returning to the fold by the millions while church-state relations have done an about face; persecution stopped and politicians were so eager to establish ties with Alexi that he was able to engineer passage this fall of a law limiting missionary work by most other religions in Russia.

He's also been throwing his weight around the Orthodox world in an effort to maintain or increase the financial and political power of the Russian Church. Patriarch Alexi has tried to maintain control over areas annexed by the Soviet Union, such as Estonia and Moldova, as well as the more than 6,000 parishes of now-independent Ukraine. All three countries are suspicious of Russia but have large Russian minorities; worshippers on each side often fear being under the ecclesiastical control of the other.

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