Ouster of Orthodox patriarch by rebel clergy in Holy Land creates crisis

JERUSALEM (AP) - The fate of beleaguered Greek Orthodox Patriarch Irineos I was shrouded in confusion Saturday, with rebel clergy saying he has been fired but supporters insisting he is still in charge.

Irineos returned to his living quarters in Jerusalem's Old City before dawn Saturday, hours after top clergy voted to dismiss him for his alleged role in a controversial property deal.

They allege he was involved in leasing church property to Jewish settlement groups in east Jerusalem, the sector claimed by the Palestinians as a future capital.

The patriarch can only be ousted by the 17-member synod, the church's highest decision-making body. The patriarch's supporters said only he can convene the synod, and that Friday's vote among top clergy, including members of the synod, with the patriarch absent.

A church spokesman, Archmandrite Atallah Hannah, said an acting patriarch would be elected next week.

However, another clergyman, Archmandrite Milinios Bassal, said only Jordan's attorney general could decide whether Friday's decision was valid, and that until he has done so, the patriarch remains in charge.

The church complies with a 1958 Jordanian law that bans any sale of church land and property. Jordan ruled east Jerusalem and the West Bank until Israel seized the territories in the 1967 Middle East War. Israel has since annexed east Jerusalem.

Jordan renounced its claims to east Jerusalem in 1988, but maintains custody of holy shrines there.

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the Istanbul-based spiritual leader of the world's Orthodox Christians, has sent a three-member team of senior clerics to try negotiate a solution to the crisis, church officials said.

Orthodox churches are autonomous. Bartholomew, however, is considered "first among equals" among Orthodox patriarchs and has previously intervened in past crises involving other Orthodox churches, such as during a schism in the Bulgarian church.

Our priest refers to the Jerusalem clerics as the "Greek Mafia." I think Kolokotronis uses somewhat less tempered language. No-one has a Pollyanna view of the situation and players there.

I confess, however, to having a little more sympathetic view of their situation, primarily because the Jerusalem Patriarchate has traditionally lent its support to the movement to oppose Orthodox involvement in the World Council of Churches and other ecumenical/political nonsense.

Also, Russians have a real soft spot for the Jerusalem folks because of the long and close relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the JP. Much of the money flowing into the JP over the centuries came from Russia, since the bulk of Orthodox pilgrims to the Holy Land have traditionally come from Russia and other Slavic countries.

One of the underlying problems in the JP is that the parishioners and parish clergy are Arabic/Palestinian, while the monastics and bishops are ethnically Greek. There is a disconnect there that is a factor always having to be dealt with. If Eirenaios was accused of being too cuddly with the Palestinians, it's because they are his parishioners, and he's used to being accused of being too distant from them! Then, he sells land to a Jewish group to convince the Israelis that he's not a terrorist, and gets in trouble in the other direction.

The JP gets the squeeze from all directions: from the Jewish majority, from Muslim Arabs, from Arabic Christians, from Orthodox all over the world wanting access to the Holy Sites, from non-Orthodox who resent the fact that the Orthodox own nearly all the important Holy Sites in the Holy Land, from the EP and others who don't like the fact that the JP is critical of their ecumenical shenanigans, etc., etc., etc...

With Russian money and protection largely gone, and with the establishment of the Jewish state in Israel, the JP in this century has had to develop completely new "survival skills" in order to keep its presence and property.

Survival in the Middle East is difficult under the best of situations...

Sending in the EP to fix things is hardly the answer. Jerusalem, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch all have the same problems: enclaves surviving in areas of Muslim dominance. The Patriarch of Jerusalem actually has a fairly large flock of faithful in the geographical area of his jurisdiction, which is more than can be said for the EP in Turkey... The rapidity with which the EP has gotten involved strikes me as being very fishy. But then, that shows my underlying prejudices -- Kolokotronis will have a different perspective, and perhaps a more informed one.

Bottom line, very messy place, very messy situation -- and one that probably none of us really have the capability of understanding the inner workings of. I hope that the Church of Jerusalem works this out on their own, and that they continue to take steps to make the church more representative of their Arabic faithful.

I'm glad to have had the opportunity to be out at a board meeting this evening so my response will be a bit more tempered than it would have been at 5:00 when I read your post, A. First, Irinaios has run what amounts to a criminal operation since he was enthroned in 2001. To be fair, he has only continued in the corrupt path trod by his predecessors, though he has raised the thievery at the place to new heights. His criminality has infected and seriously hurt the Church at Jerusalem, and his criminal depravity has reached into Cyprus and Greece and even, for a while, California. The ties of the Patriarchate to Palestinian terrorist groups, the PLFLP, listed by our government as a terrorist organization, in particular and its unlamented Marxist leader Georges Habash (himself a recipient of the largess of the MP in years past)are well known. Any idea that his sale or lease of Patriarchate properties to Israelis was to get on the good side of the Israelis is silly. If it was anything beyond simple, personal avarice, it was as a pay off for final Israeli recognition of his "election" as Patriarch. That election, by the way, was marked by a level of bribery, extortion and blackmail unseen in the post Turkokratia era.

News reports today from Athens indicate that several of his minions were arrested sneaking out of Patriarchial offices with suitcases full of cash and quite a number of "incriminating" documents. The JP claimed the money was for "repairs to the Patriarch's kitchen!" Other reports indicate that the EP was called in to the situation by the Patriarch of Alexandria. It appears that the EP has accepted the decision of the Jerusalem Synod that Irinaios has been deposed but the EP has requested that he come to the Phanar for a discussion of the situation and cautioned against Irinaios taking any action which might further inflame the situation. I am told that Irinaios, rather ungraciously, has accepted the invitation.

It is unfortunate that partisans of the MP find the involvement of the EP suspicious when he is exercising his perogatives as the primus inter pares among the Orthodox hierarchs in accordance with the canons. Moscow, thus far, has been very quiet about this, as well it should be given the support the Moscow Patriarchate is reputed to have given Irinaios and the PLFLP over the years. There are theories about why there has been this close association with the Jerusalem Patriarchate going back to the mid 1920s. But then again, at least for Greeks, the Moscow Patriarchate and its associates have long been identified with the Russian government and in particular we are well aware of the involvement of Russian Patriarchate trained "Orthodox priests" sent down into Greece during the Greek civil war after WWII to serve with the communist guerillas...the same guerillas who hung men and women from every tree in the square in my family's village, smashed the brains out of babies by swinging them against rocks and who tied the grandparents of one of my best friends to chairs and then burned their house down around them.

Anyway, there is nothing complex or difficult about this situation. Irinaios is a venal criminal, with ties to terrorists as were a number of his predecessors. The involvement of the EP is just to try to calm the situation and arrange for a resolution one way or the other if possible. In the end it will be up to the Synod, the people of the Patriarchate and the Israeli and Jordanian governments and not the EP as to what will happen there.

Well, please accept my sincerest apologies for speaking out of ignorance of the situation. I knew that you would disagree with my superficial assessment, and with more knowledge than I possess, but I must confess to having no idea that things were that bad. I should have assumed that my priest's "Mafia" comment was more serious than I took it to be.

My familiarity with the Russian Church's association with the Church in Jerusalem is purely pre-revolutionary. Even the greatest of Slavophiles in the diaspora (or perhaps more correctly, especially the greatest) certainly would not want to associate hiself with anything done by the MP during its period of Communist captivity, in Greece, Jerusalem, or anywhere else.

Leaving aside the acts of murder and persecution that went on within Russia itself, members of the ROCOR will not soon forget the infiltration and acts of destabilization of both the OCA and the ROCOR by the MP during that era. They certainly will not soon forget the specter of their nuns (one of whom was George Stephanopoulos' sister) being beaten and dragged from a West Bank holy site by Palestinian hoodlums while representatives of the MP stood looking on in their black robes, waiting to take possession of the premises. It is an indication of how deeply healing and reunification is desired that these things are being set aside, looking instead to the future.

There was a time when the Russian Church looked out for the interests of Orthodox Christians everywhere, regardless of nationality. Churches from the Greek Orthodox cathedral in London, to multiple Arabic parishes now in the Antiochian archdiocese, to one of the first Orthodox churches I was ever in -- a little country Carpatho-Russian parish in backwoods coal-mining country -- were built with personal funds from Russian czars and from the Russian church in pre-revolutionary times.

But those days were a long time ago. One can only hope that the MP's silence on this matter stems from a desire to comport itself more in keeping with those better days, rather than with the days from 1920 to 1990.

I know nothing about Irenaios himself, but I had hoped that this changing of the guard would bring about something better in Jerusalem than has obviously existed there. But if the organization is as criminal to the core as you say (rather than simply being incompetently managed and compromised by long periods of maladaptive "survival skills," as I had thought) that may will probably not happen.

As to the EP's involvement and prerogatives, you would know the applicable canons better than I.

Anyway, if I had hoped to spur some discussion with my off-the-cuff observations, I guess I got it...

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