By turning a position of relative political weakness into a position of influence by staking out a clear moral and spiritual vision, Patriarch Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, has become one of the world’s 100 most influential people, says the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Rowan Williams writes on Time.com the following:
The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople enjoys a resonant historical title but, unlike the Pope in the Roman Catholic context, has little direct executive power in the world of Eastern Orthodoxy. Patriarchs have had to earn their authority on the world stage, and, in fact, not many Patriarchs in recent centuries have done much more than maintain the form of their historic dignities.
Patriarch Bartholomew, however, has turned the relative political weakness of the office into a strength, grasping the fact that it allows him to stake out a clear moral and spiritual vision that is not tangled up in negotiation and balances of power. And this vision is dominated by his concern for the environment.
In a way that is profoundly loyal to the traditions of worship and reflection in the Eastern Orthodox Church, he has insisted that ecological questions are essentially spiritual ones.
Read the rest here.
Hat tip to Santos Woodcarving Popsicles who writes,
I lament the fact that our own Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury has had to spend so much time contending with schismatics and angry Anglicans that his voice and attention to issues of war, poverty, and the environment has been less than it might have been.
I wonder if Archbishop Rowan Williams has perhaps revealed a bit of his own lament for where he has placed his attention (even if he was forced to) over these last 5 years.