Today is not only the Sunday of St. John of the Ladder (which I recognized by anticipation yesterday) but the feast day of St. Gregory of Constantinople (1745-1821), Patriarch of Constantinople (1797-1798, 1806-1808, 1818-1821), whose murder on Easter Sunday 1821 was the first Ottoman atrocity in reaction to the Orthodox uprisings in Moldavia and Greece. Two metropolitans, twelve bishops and scores of prominent laymen followed him into martyrdom. “By the summer of 1821 the great houses in the Phanar [the Greek district of Constantinople] were
Ironically, the martyred Patriarch, Gregory V Angelopoulos, was not a nationalist. In the Byzantine tradition of political quietism, he opposed rebellion and adhered to the concordat between Patriarch Gennadios and Sultan Mehmet II, made after the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453. By its terms, the Patriarchs swore political fealty to the Sublime Porte in return for freedom of worship (accompanied, it is true, by prohibition of proselytization, restrictions on church building, and disruptive intrusions into Church affairs).
In 1798, during the first of his three terms as Patriarch, Gregory was involved in a semi-scandal, when he saw to the publication of (and perhaps personally wrote) a book entitled The Paternal Exhortation, which urged Orthodox Christians to remain loyal to Ottoman rule. It denounced Greek and other nationalisms in terms similar to those that contemporary conservatives elsewhere were using against revolutionary movements. The ostensible author was Anthimos, Patriarch of Jerusalem, a prelate of saintly reputation who then lay gravely ill. He recovered, however, living for another ten years and staunchly denying any connection with the Exhortation. [Runciman, op. cit., pp. 394-6] The incident, a great embarrassment to the Church hierarchy, was a milestone in the Greek community’s internal debate between those who were content to await the Sultanate’s collapse when God willed and those who, often under the influence of secular Western ideas, demanded that the process be hastened along.
A decade later, while in retirement on Mount Athos after being deposed from his second Patriarchal tenure (the Ottomans liked to rotate Patriarchs in office, because they could extort “gifts” at each accession), Gregory was approached by, but declined to swear allegiance to, the Hetaireia ton Philikon (“Society of Friends”), an underground organization established to promote the independence of the Sultanate’s Christian peoples. Aside from scruples about his oath to the Sultan and the lack of information about the composition of the group’s leadership, he probably suspected, with much justification, that the Hetaireia was fundamentally non-Christian in its principles.
In 1818 he was recalled to Constantinople and enthroned as Patriarch for a third time. By now revolutionary trends were running strong in the increasingly decrepit regime. In early 1821 Alexander Ypsilanti, scion of a leading Phanariot dynasty, raised a revolt in Moldavia. Then, on March 25th, the Feast of the Annunciation, a clergy-led popular uprising broke out in the Peloponnesus. The Patriarch summoned a synod to condemn rebellion, but the Sultan’s ministers were certain that he was the secret force behind the threats to their power. He was arrested and ordered to convert to Islam. When he refused, he was hanged from the middle gate of the Patriarchal Palace on Easter morning. The gate has never since been reopened.
Saint Gregory was a martyr not just for the Faith but for a particular understanding of the duty of Christians who must live under a hostile government. His belief in submission to the political authorities, so long as the price was not the destruction of the Church, and his distaste for revolutionary movements founded on nationalist aspirations are easy to dismiss today. They were almost certainly doomed to obsolescence, but is it so obvious that they were wrong?
Because the nationalist impulse prevailed, all of the Christians of Asia Minor, save for a few dwelling in Constantinople and on two nearby islands, were deported in the “exchange of populations” agreed to in the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). Their number included tens of thousands of Turkish-speaking Orthodox, since nationality and religion had come to be regarded as synonymous. Thus all of the leaven was removed from one of the ancient Christian heartlands, and it should be no surprise that the permitted vestiges have faded to almost nothing.
At present, Orthodox Christianity in Turkey is being smothered, because the Church may neither train new priests within the country (the famous theological academy at Halki has been forcibly shuttered since 1971) nor import priests from abroad. The degree of persecution is mild compared to much of the rest of the world, but it is steady and effective. (Vide Otmar Oehring, “On Religious Freedom in Turkey” and United States Commission On Security And Cooperation In Europe, “The Greek Orthodox Church in Turkey: A Victim of Systematic Exploitation”.) We cannot be sure that the situation would be better if Christians had heeded the Paternal Exhortation. We can strongly doubt that it would be worse.
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