The Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dora Bakoyannis, has decided to inform the European Union of the situation of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and has presented a report on the question to the Council of General Affairs and External Relations that met in Brussels on 23 July, under the chairmanship of Louis Amado, Portuguese Foreign Minister. At the end of the Council, the ministers declared, in their final communiqué, their dismay about the “recent sentence of the Turkish Court of Appeal and its implications for freedom of religion” in Turkey. Tensions between the Turkish authorities and the Patriarchate are long-standing. On 26 June, a Turkish court denied the ecumenical character of the Patriarchate of Constantinople and ruled that Patriarch Bartholomew is solely head of the small Greek-Orthodox community of the city and not the spiritual leader of some 300 million Orthodox believers scattered all over the world. Over the last two years the Christian minorities in Turkey have suffered various forms of aggression, some of them fatal, mounted against both the clergy and the laity, such as the killing of the Catholic priest Andrea Santoro at Trabzon, the journalist of Armenian origin Hrant Dink and three Protestants at Malatya. And there are the constant threats being made against the Patriarchate of the Armenians. “This country of ours – recently said Patriarch Bartholomew, in one of the very few public statements he has made on the matter – must become reconciled with its own history. It must understand that the minorities here are not something separate, but form part of the history of this country, of this land. We have no political claims to make. We are not a threat to the State, but we are a source of civilization and stability”. The Russian Orthodox Patriarchate, however, has intervened on the question. In a statement released by the Interfax agency on 26 July it denied that the Patriarchate of Constantinople could historically claim the title of “ecumenical” and the leadership of 300 million Orthodox Christians worldwide. When “these titles appeared – says the statement -, what was meant by the world was the Byzantine Empire”. Therefore “the concept of ‘world jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople’, as of the affiliation of 300 million Orthodox Christians, cannot be true, because the Patriarchate of Constantinople is just one of the 15 autonomous (autocephalous) local Orthodox churches and far from being the most numerous”.
