Death of a Patriarch

patriarch: the head of a family

First and foremost, he was head of the family. It was a large family -- Russians, Greeks, Bulgars, Syrians -- and it could be a quarrelsome one. His fellow patriarchs in the ancient sees of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria, and newer ones like Moscow, recognized him only as the "first among equals." The power of his office had originally derived from its association with the Byzantine Empire, and later from its role as a kind of Christian viceroy for the Islamic Ottoman Empire. But modern Turkey had scant use for a Christian leader in Constantinople.

Thus, while as many as 250 million Eastern Orthodox Christians round the world owed him spiritual respect, His Holiness Athenagoras I, Archbishop of Constantinople-New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch, held actual jurisdiction over as few as 3,000,000 of them, mostly Greek Orthodox outside of Greece. Yet when he died at 86 last week in Istanbul -- of kidney failure following a hip fracture -- Athenagoras was widely mourned as one of the world's great holy men.

His gift had been one of reconciliation. It was Athenagoras who first sent out feelers to the Vatican to end the 900-year-old battle between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy.*The gesture culminated in the historic meeting between Pope Paul VI and Athenagoras in 1964 on Jerusalem's sacred Mount of Olives, where the two men exchanged a kiss of peace and prayed together. The next year, the Patriarch and the Pope officially revoked the mutual anathemas that had been hurled at the start of the schism between East and West in 1054. In 1967 they capped the new era of good feeling by exchanging visits at Istanbul and Rome.

A doctor's son, Athenagoras was born Aristocles Spyrou in 1886 in what is now northwestern Greece. He trained for the priesthood at the Patriarchate's seminary on the island of Halki near Istanbul. By 1922 he was a bishop--bearing the ecclesiastical name Athenagoras --and soon became one of the leading clerics in Greece. Perhaps partly to remove him from contention for the powerful post of Archbishop of Athens, he was sent to the U.S. in 1931 as Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church of North and South America.

U.S. Greek Orthodoxy was in a shambles when Athenagoras arrived. Like other immigrant churches, it was torn by the politics of the old country, and Greece had been riven for decades by the struggle between royalists and republicans. In 1922 the new Ecumenical Patriarch, Meletios Metaxakis, had canonically severed the American church from Athenian authority and made it subject to the Patriarch of Constantinople. Despite the disjuncture, political passions continued to divide parishes.

The tall (6 ft. 4 in.), lordly Athenagoras, with his then-black beard bristling over his black cassock, visited each of the congregations under his jurisdiction, patiently healing the wounds. "Leave your arguments outside the church door," Athenagoras told them. "You will find them there when you come out." At the same time he was such a staunch U.S. patriot that he tried to enlist in the Army on the day after Pearl Harbor. Athenagoras (and Archbishop Michael, who succeeded him after he was elected Ecumenical Patriarch in 1948) joined other Orthodox churchmen in a campaign for public recognition. Most states now recognize Orthodoxy as a "major faith," and Athenagoras' successors as Archbishop of the Americas (see following story) have offered prayers at the inaugurations of four presidents.

Athenagoras did not live to see one dream fulfilled--the calling of a great synod embracing all of Orthodoxy, which would have been the first in nearly 1,200 years. The great synod he envisioned would have worked to bring Orthodoxy under one harmonious canopy round the world. It was a fitting vision for a Christian who saw the world as one, and whose life was nothing less than an embrace.

"-Orthodoxy today comprises 15 independent churches, ranging from the mighty Patriarchate of Moscow (an estimated 60 million members) to the tiny Church of Sinai, with 100 adherents. As does Rome, Orthodoxy believes in both church tradition and Scripture as the source of divine revelation, in the seven Christ-instituted sacraments, in the basic trinitarian doctrine formulated by the first seven ecumenical councils, and in the duty of reverence toward the Virgin Mary. But Orthodoxy rejects papal infallibility and permits married men to become priests, though only celibates can become bishops. Orthodoxy also makes a distinction between its churches and "Oriental" churches like the Armenian Church, which differ from them doctrinally on the nature of Christ but are sometimes confused with them by Westerners.

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