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Also see video “extras” on CBS site. Transcript from CBS via National Herald:

Text of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew’s interview on CBS’s ’60 Minutes’

(CBS) Would it surprise you to learn that one of the world’s most important Christian leaders, second only to the pope, lives in a country where 99 percent of the population is Muslim? His name is Bartholomew, and he is the patriarch of 300 million Orthodox Christians. He lives in Istanbul, Turkey, the latest in a line of patriarchs who have resided there since before there was a Turkey, since the centuries following the death of Jesus Christ.

That’s when Istanbul was called Constantinople and was the most important city in the Christian world.

But times change, and in modern Muslim Turkey the patriarch doesn’t feel very welcome. Turkish authorities have seized Christian properties and closed Christian churches, monasteries and schools. His parishioners are afraid that the authorities want to force Bartholomew and his church – the oldest of all Christian churches – out of Turkey.

His official title is impressive: “His All Holiness, Bartholomew, Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome, Ecumenical Patriarch.”

“Ecumenical” means “universal,” and worldwide, 300 million Orthodox Christians look to him for spiritual guidance.

60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon first met him in Istanbul. It was Easter, and worshipers from throughout the Orthodox Christian world had come to celebrate Christ’s resurrection on the holiest day of their calendar with the man who they see as their pope.

“My first question is this. How should I refer to you? As your all holiness? As patriarch? As ecumenical patriarch? What is the proper way to address you?” Simon asked the patriarch.

“The official title is ‘your all holiness,'” he replied, laughing. “But for me, Bartholomew is enough.” Continue reading →

(CBS) — Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the leader of the 300 million-member Orthodox Christian Church, feels “crucified” living in Turkey under a government he says would like to see his nearly 2,000-year-old Patriarchate die out.

His All Holiness speaks to 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon for a story to be broadcast this Sunday, Dec. 20, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Orthodox Christians trace their roots to the earliest days of Christianity but do not answer to papal authority in Rome. Bartholomew is, in effect, their pope. The Patriarchate in Istanbul, Turkey, dates back to Roman times, when the city, then Constantinople, was the center of Christianity.

Since then, history has seen the Patriarch and the part of his church in Turkey – who are Turkish citizens of Greek ancestry – discriminated against in their traditional homeland inside what has become modern Turkey, where 99 percent of the people are Muslim. One and a half million were expelled in 1923 and another 150,000 left after violent anti-Christian riots in Istanbul in 1955. A population once numbering near two million is now around 4,000.

“It is not [a]crime…to be a minority living in Turkey but we are treated as…second class,” Bartholomew tells Simon. “We don’t feel that we enjoy our full rights as Turkish citizens.” Continue reading →