Berkley Center

This week in Rome, Pope Francis I received his papal palladium made of lamb’s wool and the fisherman’s ring bearing the image of St. Peter, thereby marking his elevation to the position of Bishop of Rome and Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. These events were the culmination of an ancient set of ecclesiastical procedures catalyzed into motion a mere five weeks ago, when Pope Benedict XVI suddenly announced that he would become the first Pontif in six centuries to resign. Once Benedict became emeritus on February 28, 115 Elector Cardinals arrived in Rome from all the world’s continents, to begin their congregational deliberations on Benedict’s successor and, soon after, to move into the official conclave that concluded on March 13, when white smoke heralded the election of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as the 266th Pope. As spiritual leader of the planet’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholic Christians, Pope Francis is now recognized by governments the world over as the leader of his flock.

What’s been most remarkable about the flood of global reportage—from Vaticanistas deconstructing the ecclesiastical alliances and personalized politics of the papabile, to talking-heads Cardinals on Euro-American television, to international journalists analyzing the geopolitical implications of the Roman Catholic Church’s transnational activities—is what has been taken for granted: the simple, unimpeachable reality of freedom that guarantees that the See of St. Peter in Rome can sustain its governance and operations without danger of external interference, pressures, and threats against either the Pope or his flock of believers. In a word, when Benedict declared that he took his decision “in full freedom for the good of the church,” he used the phrase expansively and unreservedly.

There’s no one more painfully aware that freedom is the lifeblood of Christianity than Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the holder of the See of St. Andrew in Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) and the spiritual leader of the world’s 250 million Orthodox Christians. In a 2010 segment on CBS News’ acclaimed television program 60 Minutes, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I memorably told his interviewer that he feels crucified living in Turkey—the country where he was born and whose government has worked relentlessly to extinguish both its Greek Orthodox citizenry and the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Not surprisingly, Bartholomew's comments caused a firestorm in Turkey, given that Ankara has expended much treasure in branding Turkey as a “modern, secular, democratic, European” country. Bartholomew’s compelling, humble statement revealed to the world the reality of Turkey’s deplorable human rights violations, which continue to put the country squarely at odds with international law and to impede Turkey's convergence with EU membership requirements.

Rome and Constantinople are the historical anchors of Christendom. But today, while the Papacy stands in freedom in Rome, the Ecumenical Patriarchate lives in captivity in Constantinople, hostage to the whims of a Turkish state whose only predictability has been its 90-year policy of pogroms, persecutions, expropriations, and expulsions against the country’s Greek Orthodox minority. When Kemal’s Republic was founded in 1923, after the population exchange mandated by the Treaty of Lausanne, more than 130,000 Greek Orthodox Christians lived in Turkey. Today, thanks to a playbook on religious cleansing that would make any dictatorship proud, the Turkish state has shrunk its Greek Orthodox minority community to under 2,000 people.

Ankara’s strategy to eradicate Greek Orthodox Christians and the Ecumenical Patriarchate has been simple: impose arbitrary laws that reject the Ecumenical (global) status of the Patriarchate and limit the institution’s purview to Greek Orthodox Christians who are citizens of Turkey, while simultaneously eliminating the country’s Greek Orthodox Christians. And so, presto-chango, the Ecumenical Patriarch becomes redundant because he has no followers. It’s within this vise of legal assault and chicanery by the Turkish state that Bartholomew, who is, in fact, the first among equals in the Orthodox Church worldwide and recognized as such by governments around the world, must calculate the effects of his decisions on his global flock and his communicants living under threat inside Turkey.

There is a brutal efficiency by which Turkey has implemented the above strategy of annihilation against its Greek orthodox citizens. Ankara has imposed Turkish citizenship requirements on candidates for the hierarchical Synod and successor to the Ecumenical throne. The four-plus decades closing of the centuries-old Theological School of Halki means that there is no option for educating future Greek Orthodox clergy in Turkey. And for a Stalinesque reminder of gratuitous control, Ankara maintains veto rights over Synodical votes for Ecumenical Patriarch. Daily indignities for Greek Orthodox clergy (and all non-Muslim clerics, for that matter) include a prohibition on wearing religious dress in public, while deliberately-designed visa restrictions force priests and lay people working at the Ecumenical Patriarchate to leave Turkey every few months to request visa renewals.

Bartholomew and his fellow hierarchs endure conditions of ecclesiastical governance marred by Turkish-state acts of persecution that threaten the institutional survival of the See of St. Andrew at Constantinople. But it’s the climate of low-level hostility and intolerance, interspersed with episodes of violence worthy of a Quentin Tarantino film, which illustrates why Bartholomew fears for the survival of Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey—predatory taxes and an impenetrable property rights regime leading to the minority’s economic disenfranchisement; police and fire officials who look the other way when Molotov cocktails are lobbed into the compound of the Ecumenical Patriarchate; and an official cleansing policy (the eritme programi, or melting program) applied on the islands of Imvros and Tenedos, where the government located an open-air prison to terrorize Greek Orthodox Christians to flee from freely roving felons from the Turkish penal system.

All told, Bartholomew’s decisions and actions for the good of the Church in Constantinople are defined by conditions of unfreedom and life as hostages—to Kemalist Deep Staters who plotted only a few years ago to assassinate the Ecumenical Patriarch in the Sledgehammer Plan under the Ergenekon network, as well as to governing Justice and Development Party Islamists who treat Bartholomew and the Greek Orthodox community as 21st-century rayah, the non-Muslim subjects who were legal property of the Ottoman Sultan. Turkey’s Minister for EU Affairs, Egemen Bagis, is fond of snarky boasts about the holiday sweets that he exchanges with the religious leaders of Turkey’s Christian and Jewish communities. It’s a safe bet that Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I (not to mention the Grand Rabbi of Turkey, the Armenian and Syriac Patriarchs, and Roman Catholic and Protestant leaders) would forego Bagis’ boxes of Turkish delight in exchange for religious freedom, as protected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and safeguarded in the Treaty of Lausanne.

Until the international community--perhaps led by President Obama in one of his many phone chats with Prime Minister Erdogan on how Turkey can be a model for democracy in the Middle East—holds Ankara accountable, the 72-year-old Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople will continue to take decisions under conditions of persecution which are alien to the reality of freedom that comforted Pope Benedict XVI of Rome in his decision to become Emeritus and that guaranteed the free process which allowed Pope Francis I to celebrate his inaugural mass in Rome.