c. 1997 Religion News Service

PITTSBURGH _ After four weeks crisscrossing the nation, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew ended his U.S. tour here Monday (Nov. 17), having largely succeeded in his effort of making Orthodox Christianity more publicly visible and portraying it as a”living church”in step with the times, even as it holds fast to its ancient traditions.

The 57-year-old Bartholomew’s 16-city tour took him from Washington, D.C., to California. He visited cities with large Orthodox communities _ Chicago and Boston _ and cities where Orthodox Christians are a rare breed, such as Des Moines, Iowa.

Bartholomew’s chartered jet left Pittsburgh Monday afternoon for Istanbul, Turkey, the site of the patriarchate for some 1,600 years.

His visit ended much as it began _ with prayer and worship. On Sunday, he celebrated a Divine Liturgy _ Holy Communion service _ for more than 4,000 people at the Pittsburgh Convention Center before going to Johnstown, Pa., where he presided at a service in that city’s Carpatho-Russian Orthodox cathedral.

With his long white beard and flowing black robes, the patriarch put forth an image of a gentleman of God, an image enhanced by his penchant for seeking to interact with children at nearly every public stop on his schedule.

In one of his last public statements, for example, the patriarch summed up his U.S. experience as”joy-filled”and called such children”Orthodox fruit”that”left him filled with hope for the future”of the church in America.

Bartholomew’s visit exposed Americans to an Orthodoxy most previously did not know. He portrayed a faith neither Catholic nor Protestant; a faith, he never tired of saying, tracing its origins to the Christian Apostles and whose mission is to transform the cultures of the world while retaining its diverse ethnic traditions.

Bartholomew’s greatest success was presenting Orthodoxy _ with its more than 250 million followers worldwide _ as a modern Christian faith retaining its historical asceticism, mysticism and liturgical lushness, yet relevant to contemporary concerns.”The Orthodox Church is not a museum church, as it is criticized from time to time by those who don’t know its spiritual treasures,”he said.”It is a living church which, although keeping the old traditions from the very beginning, nevertheless understands very well the message of every new era, and it knows how to adapt itself to the conditions of every period of human history.” His high-profile encounters with President Clinton, who welcomed him to the White House, members of Congress, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright reinforced Bartholomew’s importance as a religious leader who, from his perch in Istanbul, sits astride the critical fault line dividing Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam.

Bartholomew’s warm reception in Washington also underscored the economic, social and political clout of this nation’s 1.5-million Greek Orthodox Americans, second and third-generation immigrants who brought their faith with them to the United States, and who largely underwrote his visit, his first here as the ecumenical patriarch.

(BEGIN FIRST OPTIONAL TRIM)

Alex Spanos, owner of the San Diego Chargers professional football team, was one such success story. He provided the patriarch’s charter jet as well as a Lake Tahoe home where Bartholomew spent several days resting and hiking in the surrounding forest near the end of the trip.

Visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, Bartholomew spoke movingly about religious persecution and the importance of the state of Israel to Jewish survival.

While in Washington, he also participated in the first high-level dialogue between Orthodox Christians and Muslims ever held in the United States. In New York, Baltimore, Dallas and elsewhere, he engaged in equally high-level exchanges with Catholic and Protestant officials.

Linking ecological awareness with the Orthodox belief that God’s essence permeates all creation, Bartholomew declared willful pollution a sin when he spoke at an environmental symposium in Santa Barbara, Calif. And he urged world leaders attending the upcoming international summit on global warming set for December in Kyoto, Japan, to take meaningful action to combat the problem.”In time, (Bartholomew’s comments) will be seen as one of the most significant statements on the environment by a religious leader,”Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said in response to the patriarch’s remarks.”It will affect millions of Orthodox here in the United States and millions more worldwide.” (END FIRST OPTIONAL TRIM)

But successful as he was in presenting Orthodoxy to secular America and to people of other faiths, Bartholomew was less successful in quieting the concerns of American Orthodox Christians struggling with two smoldering internal issues: administrative unity among the dozen or so ethnically divided Orthodox churches in the United States and the authoritarian administrative style of Archbishop Spyridon, leader of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.

Although his schedule was filled with large-scale worship services, banquets, receptions and the receiving of honorary degrees from various educational institutions, the patriarch held no face-to-face encounters with members of laity clamoring for dialogue on those two issues.

Orthodox Christians in the United States, whose numbers are estimated from 2 million to 6 million, are largely the offspring of immigrants from Greece, the Middle East and the former Soviet Union and have long sought to establish administrative independence from mother churches of their various homelands, an idea the ecumenical patriarch has opposed.

Repeatedly during his visit he stressed the primacy of his patriarchate and of Greek language and culture, even when he visited Russian, Romanian and Middle Eastern Orthodox or congregations whose members are of mixed ethnicities.

Though Bartholomew met in frank discussion with leaders of other branches of Orthodoxy, there was no sense, when his plane winged its way to Istanbul, that any real progress had been made on the very real problems of administrative unity in the United States, where lines of authority are confused because multiple bishops aligned with different ethnic churches serve in the same community.”In terms of solving the problems of Orthodox unity, I don’t think his visit was very significant,”said Metropolitan Philip Saliba, head of the Antiochian Orthodox Church.”He did not bring any concrete plan for Orthodoxy in the United States. He talked in generalities about inter-Orthodox cooperation, but the burning question concerning Orthodox unity was not fundamentally addressed. And that concerns young American Orthodox very much: they yearn for a united church in America.” Bartholomew also raised concerns with his emphasis on the primacy of Greek language and culture, even when he visited non-Greek congregations or communities valuing their common Orthodox faith more than the ethnicity of their immigrant ancestors.

And his emphasis on the importance of the priesthood miffed many members of the laity, whose immigrant forebears established Orthodox churches here before there were priests and bishops to serve them.”I think he came here primarily to visit Greek communities and to project some kind of Greek ethnic reality,”Metropolitan Philip said.”Orthodoxy is above nationality. And that’s perhaps where the ecumenical patriarch missed the boat.”The church in this country is going to develop its own identity in the context of American culture. Many patriarchs and bishops who visit here from the Old Country do not understand this. We have been in this country for more than 200 years; we are Americans and our vision is to be united in one holy, catholic and apostolic church.” The Rev. Alex Karloutsos, spokesman for the archdiocese, said Bartholomew’s visit improved relations among the various ethnic branches of Orthodoxy as well as within the troubled Greek Orthodox archdiocese.”The patriarch had a chance to see America in all its diversity,”Karloutsos said.”He understands that there truly is an indigenous American church and he is more understanding of the processes that could lead to an autonomous church. He came here to deal with the family of man, with the Christian family, and the Greek Orthodox family. Archbishop Spyridon, whatever mistakes have been made, has benefitted by seeing how a spiritual father acts. And I think people are seeing Spyridon through the eyes of the person who sent him.

They are willing to give him another try.” (BEGIN SECOND OPTIONAL TRIM – STORY MAY END HERE.)

Some remain unconvinced.

Andrew Kartalis, a retired businessman from Cleveland, said mounting concern among the laity that they will lose administrative control of the churches their forebears built to the New York-based archdiocese, are already beginning to organize a new phase of opposition.

A lay organization called Voithia (“help”in Greek) has set up a web site (http://www.voithia.org) as an alternate source of news published on the official Greek Orthodox site (http://www.goarch.org).”The future of Orthodoxy in this country is for all Orthodox to be together,”Kartalis said.”Bartholomew was shown respect in his travels through this country and no one wants to shame him or the church. But the unaddressed problems muted the spirituality he was trying to emanate. It should have been a holy and moving experience, but here we are talking about secular matters.” MJP END RNS