c. 1997 Religion News Service

DALLAS _ Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the spiritual head of Orthodox Christianity, touching on an issue currently pitting a variety of non-Orthodox faiths against the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, said Wednesday (Nov. 5) human rights and religious freedom cannot be separated.”The free will to choose to center our actions, our hearts, our minds upon God, is the image of God at work in our lives. … The image of God within us is freedom,”Bartholomew said in a speech at Southern Methodist University here.

Bartholomew _ in the third week of his first U.S. tour as ecumenical patriarch _ also said Orthodox spirituality”assures us that Orthodox Christians will always respect the human rights of others.”If they do not respect those rights, then they have desecrated the image of God that is inherent in all human beings.” Earlier in the day, the patriarch, speaking at an interfaith breakfast at Thanks-Giving Square in downtown Dallas, referred to the”most horrific”persecution of Christians under the former communist governments of Eastern Europe. At SMU, however, he did not mention specific situations.

The Rev. William J. Carl III, president of the Greater Dallas Community of Churches, said he found the absence of any reference to the current situation in Russia”kind of interesting.””The tensions in Russia are so apparent,”said Carl, senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Dallas.”One might expect a reference to a situation that’s on everyone’s mind.” The Russian Orthodox Church _ the largest of Orthodoxy’s 15 autonomous churches with more than 70 million followers _ recently engineered passage of legislation designed to protect it from a flood of mostly Western religious groups that have gained converts in Russia since the fall of communism.

The legislation places severe restrictions on the activities of all groups, both Christian and non-Christian, that are not recognized as traditional Russian faiths. In addition to Russian Orthodoxy, the law’s preamble mentions Islam, Judaism and Buddhism as traditional Russian faiths, along with an ill-defined reference to”Christianity.” The law has been sharply criticized by the Vatican and a slew of U.S. political and religious leaders as undemocratic and limiting religious freedom. Evangelical Protestant groups have been among the most vocal critics.

Bartholomew, however, has defended the law.

Speaking last month at the National Council of Churches in New York, he called American missionaries seeking converts in Russia”wolves in sheep’s clothing”who are taking advantage of a Russian Orthodox Church still recovering from decades of communist oppression.

Bartholomew’s defense of the law came despite his own differences with Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Alexii II over which of them should oversee the 60,000-member Estonian Orthodox Church.

Bartholomew is an ethnic Greek and based in Istanbul, which the Orthodox church still refers to by its former name, Constantinople, the historic home of Eastern Orthodoxy.

His primary direct authority is over the 13 million-member Greek Orthodox Church. But as the patriarch of Constantinople, he has special status and is considered the”first among equals”among the leaders of the ethnically divided, 250 million-member Orthodox Church, whose branches have their roots in the Balkans, Slavic Europe and the Middle East.

Bartholomew’s status gives added importance to his comments because they are generally viewed as representing pan-Orthodox positions.

As he has elsewhere during his U.S. tour, Bartholomew noted his primacy within the Orthodox world at the start of his SMU talk. Upon his arrival Tuesday in Dallas, he also stressed the authority of his office over a sometimes independence-minded American Greek Orthodox church _ another theme he has repeated throughout the trip.

But the connection between human rights and religious freedom dominated his SMU talk, which came after he received an honorary doctorate of divinity from the school.

Speaking to an audience of more than 2,000, Bartholomew decried”doctrinaire religious extremism,”calling it”a dangerous prelude to religious fanaticism and persecution.” He also criticized”secular American culture,”which he said tends to view human rights as an outgrowth of individual rights and not as an integral part of religious consciousness.”Our faith is the guarantee of spiritual freedom, and that freedom guarantees our physical freedom in the world,”he said.

Bartholomew leaves Dallas Thursday (Nov. 6) and heads for California, where he will make stops in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. He returns to Istanbul from Pittsburgh on Nov. 17.

MJP END RIFKIN