The Greek and Roman churches
Two cheers, two saints

Argument about a gesture from west to east

EuropeDec 2nd 2004 edition


Bones of contention

WHEN Pope John Paul II visited Greece three years ago, letters to Greek newspapers were full of smouldering indignation about his indecent haste. Did this self-invited guest not realise that less than 800 years had passed since the sack of Constantinople in 1204? In that year an army of western Christians desecrated the Christian east's holiest cathedral and imposed their rule over the Byzantine Greeks.

In the Orthodox world, such sentiments are not confined to history buffs. They reflect a deeper sense of being abandoned by a western Christendom that treated its eastern brethren as a useful buffer against Islam but secretly despised them. Such grievances are still a factor in modern European politics, from Ukraine to Bosnia.

If any pair of prelates could heal the psychological chasm between eastern and western Christians, it ought to be their present leaders: a Slavic, mystically inclined pope and an Orthodox patriarch who studied in Italy and speaks fluent Italian (as well as six other languages). On the face of things, a huge step forward came last weekend when the bones of two of the three most important theologians of the early Greek Church—kept in Rome for at least 800 years—were handed over by the pope to Bartholomew I, the Orthodox patriarch, who promptly took them back to his home city of Istanbul. Their arrival was greeted with great rejoicing by Istanbul's small (and dwindling) band of Orthodox faithful. They have had more than their fair share of problems recently, including protest marches and minor bomb attacks by Turkish nationalists, and the usual bureaucratic hassles from the Turkish authorities.

But the healing of historic wounds is never a simple business, and the handover was overshadowed by a messy misunderstanding over what exactly was happening. To the Orthodox, the pope was making a welcome act of atonement for the misdeeds of 1204 by handing over the bones of two eastern saints that were removed by marauding western Christians. But a Vatican spokesman denied that there was any act of atonement, and insisted that the bones of one saint had been transferred to Rome before 1204. It may not take another thousand years to bring eastern and western Christians together, but it will take more than a weekend.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "Two cheers, two saints"

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