The Ecumenical Patriarchate's Politics

I have read fascinating studies by the Cypriot political scientist Paschalis Kitromilides on questions of nationalism and other problems, and so I look forward to reading his Religion and Politics in the Orthodox World: The Ecumenical Patriarchate in the Modern Age (Routledge, 2018), 160 pp. This book is very timely with the renewed attention focused on the Ecumenical Patriarchate and its role in liberating Ukrainian Orthodox Christians from Russian imperial and other shackles.

This book explores how the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the leading centre of spiritual authority in the Orthodox Church, based in Istanbul, coped with political developments from Ottoman times until the present. The book outlines how under the Ottomans, despite difficult circumstances, the Patriarchate managed to draw on its huge symbolic and moral power and organization to uphold the unity and catholicity of the Orthodox Church, how it struggled to do this during the subsequent age of nationalism when churches within new nation states unilaterally claimed their autonomy reflecting local national demands, and how the church coped in the twentieth century with the rise of nationalist Turkey, the decline of Orthodoxy in Asia Minor and with the Cold War. The book concludes by assessing the current position and future prospects of the Patriarchate in the region and the world.

We are also given a table of contents:

Foreword by the Metropolitan of Pergamum Ioannis Zizioulas

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

I. The Orthodox Church and the Enlightenment. Testimonies from the correspondence of Ignatius of Ungrowallachia with G. P. Vieusseux

II. The Orthodox Church in modern state formation in Southeastern Europe

III. The Ecumenical Patriarchate and the challenge of nationalism in the 19th century

IV. The end of empire, Greece’s Asia Minor catastrophe and the Ecumenical Patriarchate

V. The Ecumenical Patriarchate during the Cold War (1946-1991)

VI. A religious International in Southeastern Europe?

VII. Orthodoxy, Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict

Ecumenical Patriarchs, 1800 –

Bibliography

Index