The fall of Ireneos I: Israel acts as the Ottoman Empire
Jerusalem (AsiaNews) - In the recent weeks many news reports have been published on the "excommunication" of Ireneos I, the deposed Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem . Still, the Israeli government has not yet ratified the decision taken by the Pan-orthodox Synod in Constantinople (Istanbul) last week. To shed some more light on the topic, AsiaNews has spoken to Franciscan Father David-Maria A. Jaeger, who is widely considered to be the leading Catholic expert on Church-State relations in Israel. He has provided us with a brief note.
In a rather inconceivable move, the Government of Israel has sent armed police into the Greek Orthodox monastery in the Old City of Jerusalem to keep ex-Patriarch Ireneos in possession of the Patriarch's apartments, against the will of the Patriarchate's Synod, which, by a very large majority, has deposed Ireneos, against the will of practically all the priests and people of the Patriarchate, and indeed against the will of the heads of all the Orthodox Churches throughout the world. It seems impossible that, in the twenty first century, a State, any democratic State, can still seriously claim to decide who will be, or will not be, the bishop at the head of a Christian community. It is certainly a complete contradiction of Israel's own fundamental charter, the Declaration of Independence, which promises complete religious freedom to all.
Byzantines and Ottomans
History and politics help to explain this bizarre situation, although they most certainly cannot excuse it. As is well know, in the Eastern or "Byzantine" Empire, the affairs of Church and State were very closely entwined, and the Emperor assumed and exercised a kind of overlordship over the Church as well, in a style that western critics sometime call "caesaro-papism". While there might have been some sense to it as long as the Emperor was himself a Christian, sometimes a very devout Christian indeed, it became grotesque after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by the Ottoman Turks, when the new Muslim rulers sought to exercise over the Church, especially Church appointments, the same -or even greater - control earlier exercised by the Christian Caesar. This unnatural situation reached Jerusalem and the Holy Land when the Ottomans conquered it too in the first half of the sixteenth century. At that time the ancient Eastern-rite Patriarchate of Jerusalem was still arguably, in principle, in communion with Rome, in virtue of the union Council of Florence (1439). Just as they had done in Constantinople, the Ottomans' first order of business was to ensure that the most implacable opponents of the union with Rome were put in charge of the Patriarchate. They therefore brought over anti-union monks from Greece to fill all the positions of governance at the Patriarchate, and completely supplant the indigenous Church. These Greek monks organised themselves into a corporation, the Hagiotaphitic Brotherhood, which took over, and still holds, complete control over all the offices, and - more importantly - the properties of the Patriarchate. In keeping with the principles of caesaro-papism, the appointment of the Patriarch remained always dependent on the will of the Government, and, as a legal body, the Patriarchate itself could conceivably be described as a creature of Ottoman law.
Jordan and Israel
Between 1948 and 1967, the seat of the Patriarchate, in the Old City of Jerusalem, was controlled by Jordan, and Jordan enacted a new Statute for the Patriarchate, claiming for itself the powers earlier inherent in the Ottoman government. Israel, which has controlled the Old City since June 1967, has never formally done that, and there is no law made in Israel to control the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. However, some influential elements in the Israeli establishment claim that Israel too is the inheritor of the Ottoman powers, and have not balked at using even action by armed police to make the point that the State alone has the decisive word as to who is, or is not, the Patriarch. I myself think that if recourse were made to Israel's High Court of Justice, based on the religious liberty components of the international law of human rights, and based on Israel's own declared values, the High Court would find it very difficult to uphold the armed incursion of the police into the Greek Orthodox Monastery in order to impose on the Greek Orthodox Church a Patriarch no one there wants, and who has already been resoundingly deposed.
Greeks and Indigenous
The deposition and "posthumous" struggle of Ireneos are, however, only the latest chapter in the long saga of the struggles within the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. The root problem is, of course, the monopoly of power and property still held by the ethnically Greek Hagiotaphitic Brotherhood, dispossessing the Arab faithful and the Arab lower clergy. One serious manifestation of this has been that the Greek Patriarchs, long before Ireneos, got into the habit of selling off the Church's real estate with no transparency about the uses and destination of the money received. The Arab faithful have repeatedly gone to the Israeli courts, in an attempt to establish that the Patriarchs and bishops control Church property as trustees, that they cannot treat the Church's property as if there were no difference between it and their personal property. However, the courts have so far rejected any claim by the community to have a say, or a stake, in the disposition of the Church's property. When it was reported in the media that Ireneos, who had promised to put an end to the irresponsible alienation of Church property, had in fact sold off some of the most prominent, and "strategically" important properties, at the very entrance into the Walled City of Jerusalem, it was no longer the Arab faithful and lower clergy alone who were enraged. Now the Greek prelates themselves concluded that a red line had been crossed, and they have moved quickly and decisively. They probably feared that, if they failed to act even in the face of such unprecedented conduct, their entire power structure was endangered. After all, to the north, in Syria, in the Patriarchate of Antioch, already in 1899, the Arab faithful and clergy rose up and took over power from the Greeks, restoring the Patriarchate to the indigenous Christian people.
The Catholics
Catholics are not directly involved in this drama. However, Catholics are certainly not sorry to see Ireneos deposed. Since his election, he led a policy of hostility, aggression and even violence against the Catholic Church, culminating in the (videotaped) assault on the Catholics at the Holy Sepulchre, which he personally led on 27 September last year. On that occasion too Ireneos led his monks in a violent assault on the Jerusalem police who were trying to restrain them, and several policemen needed medical attention. It is therefore ironic that the police have now let themselves become instruments in an Ottoman-style attempt to restore Ireneos to office by force of arms. One can only guess that the police are not happy with the orders they have received from the politicians, and it is impossible even to guess at the motives of the politicians for giving these orders, or how they could think to reconcile this armed intervention in the most intimate decisions of a Christian community with Israel's self-understanding as a "Jewish and democratic State."
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