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The Sweet Kiss icon
By John Couretas
Reading Andrew Estocin’s fine essay, “Constantinople’s Moral Oversight,” I was reminded once again of the long running institutional silence — a scandal really — from the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese on sanctity of life issues. But that attitude of indifference comes down from the top — the Phanar.
Here is a direct quotation from a July 20, 1990, article, “SF Shows Off Its Ecumenical Spirit,” in the San Francisco Chronicle. Metropolitan Bartholomais of Chalcedon is the current Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.
Asked the Orthodox church’s position on abortion, Bartholomais described a stand more liberal than that of the Roman Catholic Church, which condemns abortion in all cases and whose clergy have, in some cities, excommunicated leading pro-choice Catholics.
Although the Orthodox church believes the soul enters the body at conception and, ”generally speaking, respects human life and the continuation of pregnancy,” Bartholomais said, the church also ”respects the liberty and freedom of all human persons and all Christian couples.”
”We are not allowed to enter the bedrooms of the Christian couples,” he said. ”We cannot generalize. There are many reasons for a couple to go toward abortion.”
On the issues of sanctity of life and sexual morality it appears that this patriarch is something of a libertarian. Keep the government (and the priests) out of our bedrooms! On the environment, however, the patriarch is decidedly a believer in grand super-governmental, trans-national solutions, a la the United Nations. Why do greenhouse gas emissions elicit so much moral outrage, but the fate of the unborn meets with silence or evasions?
The quote from the 1990 San Francisco Chronicle story, reproduced below in its entirety with an associated Internet forum discussion, cannot be dismissed as an off-hand comment, a misquote, or a twisting of the patriarch’s true sentiments. He said much the same thing in “Conversations With Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I,” a book by Olivier Clement published in 1997 by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. This is from a section titled “Love and the Church” (p. 128-129):
Love is not justified by the bearing of children, but the child is the normal consequence of the superabundance of love. Do not expect from a patriarch orders or prohibitions about how to love each other! As both Bartholomew and his predecessor, Athenagoras, have stated: if a man and a woman truly love one another, I have no business in their bedroom! Regarding birth control methods, they have their own consciences, their physician, their spiritual father to guide them. It is not my business.
As for abortion, this is always profoundly dramatic for a woman and deeply injures her femininity. For this reason, abortion for the sake of convenience is, we cannot deny it, extremely serious and must be strongly discouraged. But there are situations of extreme distress when abortion can be a lesser evil, as, for example, when the life of the future mother is in danger. In a number of cases, the woman is less responsible that the man, who either commits rape or simply abandons her; or she is less responsible than a society in which the children of the poor are massacred or mutilated to harvest their organs, as happens in many places. The woman needs help, needs reconciliation, needs the healing of her body, of course, but also of her soul. And, when there is yet time, she, together with her child must be offered assistance — this is the duty of the Church, of the Churches.
Certainly, the patriarch is right in identifying the man who pressures a woman for an abortion as culpable. But note what is missing in both of these quotes: An absolute silence about the fate of the unborn. Yes, abortion is surely “dramatic” for the life terminated in the womb, isn’t it? But where is the “reconciliation” for the life destroyed? It is also an inexcusable dodge to shift the personal responsibility for this grave sin to “society.” What, or who, is that? Does “society” drive the pregnant woman and the father of an unborn child to an abortion clinic?
Even more equivocations and confusion-making in Bartholomew’s 2008 book, “Encountering the Mystery: Understanding Orthodox Christianity Today” (p. 150): Continue reading