Orthodox Church leader pushes health care, nonviolence in DC meetings

ICC Note:

Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew speaks against Turkey’s clampdown on Christian minorities.

By Michelle Boorstein

11/5/2009 Turkey (TheWashingtonPost) – Is Orthodox Christianity progressive?

To see the spiritual leader of the world’s 250 million Orthodox Christians making his rounds in Washington this week – meeting with President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Senate leader Reid and speaking at the Brookings Institution today – you could make that case. In his talk yesterday at Georgetown University (sponsored by the left-leaning Center for American Progress), the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew spoke about the spiritual imperative for nonviolence, universal health care and reducing consumption to help the environment.

In office 18 years, Bartholomew is also here to push for U.S. support for religious pluralism in Turkey, where the ecumenical patriarch lives. Turkish officials have limited the practice and outreach of religious minorities including the Orthodox, even shutting the faith’s best-known seminary in the 1970s. Meanwhile, the Orthodox community is famously complex and splintered into different ethnic and national churches, with many refusing to see Bartholomew as their representative. Orthodoxy calls the ecumenical patriarch “the first among equals,” but he doesn’t have the singular infallibility of Catholicism’s pope.